Affiliate marketing utilizes the ever-growing popularity of industry experts and social media influencers. In working with these third-party influencers, your organization will collaborate to promote your products or services for compensation. In collaboration, influencers will engage their audience with posts, blogs or videos to bring in more business for your organization and create new leads.
Within the last few years, affiliate or influencer marketing has grown immensely with new media like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and blogs being a mainstream form of entertainment and news. Affiliate marketing has become one of the more popular forms of digital marketing.
Content marketing is a great avenue for people who enjoy writing and/or video and audio production. But as with digital marketing in general, it also calls for strong strategic and analytic skills.
There are tons of website-building platforms and blogging sites you can use to get into content marketing. For free and low-cost options, you can consider:
- WordPress
- Medium
- Wix
Email marketing software can offer many different analytical measures, but two that marketers are always striving to improve are the open rate — the percentage of recipients who opened the email — and the click-through rate — the number of recipients who opened the email and clicked on a link in the email.
According to leading email marketing software company Constant Contact, there are many things marketers can do to make their emails more appealing to users and more likely to be opened.
These include:
- Create a Sense of Urgency – Writing email copy that lets your recipients know that time is running out to get a special deal or that there are only a limited number of offers available can increase the number of people clicking through to your website.
- Personalize Your Email – Setting your emails and subject lines up to incorporate the recipient’s name is a proven way to increase open and click-through rates. (A sample subject line: “Katie, a special offer just for you.”)
- Let Recipients Set Their Preferences – Allowing users to specify how often they want to hear from you can help keep some of your email subscribers subscribed to your list and clicking on your emails.
One of the major advantages of digital marketing is that it is highly trackable and measurable.
Today, analytics allow marketers to track user behavior at a highly detailed level:
- How many times they click on a link
- How much time they spend on a web page
- How often they open emails and much more
There are many tools available for measuring the success of digital marketing campaigns, and many marketers will use some combination of these tools, depending on their needs and their audience.
One of the most used tools for marketing analytics is Google Analytics, which can be customized in nearly endless ways to measure:
- How your site is performing
- Which keywords are bringing users to your site
- How users are navigating through your website and much more
This digital marketing type is focused on reaching your target audience on their smartphone or tablet. Mobile marketing reaches people through text messages, social media, websites, email and mobile applications.
around 40 minutes a day on social media apps, with Facebook and Instagram holding the largest audience.
By 2024, the average time spent on the phone daily in the U.S. is expected to reach 4 hours and 39 minutes, reports Statista.
E-commerce has grown immensely in the last few years, becoming an important part of the global retail world. In 2024, retail e-commerce sales were estimated to surpass $6.3 trillion worldwide, Statista reported.
Pay-per-click refers to paid advertisements and promoted search engine results. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, meaning that once you are no longer paying, the ad no longer exists. Like SEO, PPC is a way to increase search traffic to a business online.
Pay-per-click can refer to the advertisements you see at the top and sides of a search results page, browsing the web, watching YouTube videos and using mobile apps.
One of the other things that differentiate pay-per-click from SEO is that you only pay for the results. In a typical PPC model like a Google AdWords campaign, you will pay only when someone clicks on your ad and lands on your website.
The goal of SEO is to get a business to rank higher in Google search results, ultimately increasing search engine traffic to the business’s website.
The most important things for SEO strategists and marketers, in general, to understand about how SEO works today, according to Moz:
- Content indexing – It is important to allow search engines to clearly “read” what your site content is, by doing things like adding alt text for images and text transcripts for video and audio content.
- Good link structure – It is important that search engines can “crawl” your site structure to easily find all the content on your site. There are many things that an SEO specialist can do to properly format links, URLs and sitemaps to make them most accessible to site crawlers.
- Keywords and keyword targeting – Properly deploying your keywords (i.e. the search terms you want your site to be found for) in your content and headers is one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO.
Social media marketing goes far beyond simply creating posts for social channels and responding to comments.
To be effective, efforts must be coordinated and consistent rather than an afterthought. To help keep posts consistent, there are many online tools available to automate and schedule social media posts, although marketers only should use automation as a tool, not a “set it and forget it” solution. Users will figure it out quickly if there is no real person behind the posts.