5 Types of Internet Marketing

What Is Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing (also known as online marketing, digital marketing, emarketing, or web marketing,) is an all-inclusive term used to describe marketing activities conducted online. For this reason, internet marketing encompasses a wide range of strategies and tactics, such as social media marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click, and search engine optimisation.

Each of the below types of internet marketing encompasses many different strategies and tactics. Plus, these types of internet marketing complement each other and are often used together.

Let’s explore the different types of internet marketing to understand how they work individually and together.

1. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the process of acquiring attention and sales through the use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Now, social media marketing can be split into two camps: organic (free) or paid.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Organic social media marketing focuses on building a community and deepening relationships with consumers in an effort to induce interest and customer loyalty.

There are countless ways to do this – let’s take a look at a few.

First, you can position your brand as an authority in your niche. An easy way to do this is to engage other people and contribute valuable insights to conversations.

Another way to foster loyalty is to consistently prove how much you value your customers and community.

Another key aspect of social media marketing is harnessing the power of customer relations.

Immediately replying to customer queries on social media showcases your brand’s authenticity, and will inspire other people to trust your products or services.

What’s more, social media marketing is closely linked to content marketing (which we’ll cover next).

This is because social media platforms are the perfect place to promote valuable content to your community and niche

Okay but what about ads on social media?

There are tons of ways to use paid social media marketing to promote your business, and each platform has its own suite of paid promotional options.

Take Facebook.

You can pay to promote your existing organic posts or create a dedicated Facebook ad tailored to your marketing objectives.

Most paid social media marketing is also referred to as “pay-per-click” (which we’ll cover in more detail below).

2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation – also known as SEO – is the process of optimizing websites and digital content to improve search engine rankings, which in turn, maximises the number of visitors to a particular webpage.

In other words, say you wanted your office furniture website to appear at the top of Google’s search results whenever someone searches for “office furniture in London.” Well, the process you would use to make that happen is SEO.

It’s worth noting that today when we talk about SEO we’re almost exclusively referring to Google.

Why?

Because Google is undoubtedly the most popular search engine in the world – eating up a huge 79.77% of market share.

So how does SEO work?

Search engines use something called “crawler bots” to crawl the internet and build an index of the content available online.

Then, whenever someone searches a keyword, the search engine will try to provide the most useful and relevant results.

Now there are two sides to SEO: On-page and off-page.

What Is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is when you optimise your website or content to rank higher in search engines for targeted keywords or phrases.

Examples of on-page SEO include:

  • Increasing your website speed
  • Having a responsive, mobile-optimised web design
  • Including your targeted keywords
  • Structuring content with title tags
  • Optimising for Google’s featured snippets
  • Using structured data markup
  • Including internal links to other pages on your website
  • Adding outbound links to other relevant websites

For this reason, SEO is closely related to content marketing – we’ll explore this more below.

What Is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO is when you optimise your website or content to appear higher in the search results through methods outside of your website or content.

These include external signals like your social media presence and brand mentions.

However, the largest and most influential part of off-page SEO is the generation of backlinks. This is when other websites link to your website or content.

The reasoning behind backlinks is simple.

If lots of websites link to your website, then Google will assume you have valuable and relevant content.

A great way to generate backlinks from authoritative websites is to produce high-quality content that other people will want to share.

Alternatively, you can create dedicated content for another website – this is called “guest posting.”

3. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of consistently creating, distributing, and promoting relevant online materials in a way that’s strategically designed to attract, engage, and convert your target market into customers.

There are countless forms of content that businesses use to do this, such as:

  • Blog posts
  • Videos (that are often shared to social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube)
  • Industry reports and studies
  • Infographics summarizing reports and studies
  • Ebooks
  • Podcasts
  • Case studies
  • Emails
  • Webinars

This article that you’re reading is content marketing!

Content marketing works closely with many other types of internet marketing – especially social media marketing and SEO.

As we saw above, social media is one of the main channels used to distribute and promote content.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how content marketing relates to SEO.

Search engine optimised content is one of the best ways to get your brand higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

4. Influencer Marketing

First thing’s first: What exactly is an influencer?

An influencer is someone with a relatively large online following, including:

  • Mainstream celebrities like Emma Watson.
  • Niche celebrities such as world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.
  • Industry experts and authorities, such as digital marketing expert Neil Patel.
  • Micro-influencers (those with less than 100,000 followers) like environmentalist Elizabeth Couse.

Okay, so what’s influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is the process of working with influencers to promote a product or service to their online following.

Before internet marketing, influencer marketing was only available to large brands who could afford to work with big-name celebrities.

But now, everyone can engage in influencer marketing.

Want to know the best part?

Micro-influencers actually perform better than big-name celebrities.

A survey conducted by Collective Bias found that just three percent of consumers are influenced by celebrity endorsements in their purchase decisions, while 30 percent of consumers are likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity blogger.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the process of using email to send direct marketing messages to people in an effort to gain new customers and retain existing ones.

Although email marketing might not seem like the most glamorous form of internet marketing, don’t underestimate its raw power.

Why?

Email marketing has a median return on investment of 122 percent – over four times higher than other types of internet marketing like social media and paid search.

Okay, so how does email marketing work?

Well, before you can begin email marketing, you’ve got to get your hands on some email addresses!

For this reason, email marketing nearly always works in partnership with other types of internet marketing like social media marketing and content marketing. In fact, just look to the right-hand side of this page, you’ll see a box inviting you to subscribe to our newsletter.

Email marketing campaigns will often start with something called a “lead magnet” – which is just a fancy way of saying “bait.”

The bait is usually a discount coupon or a particularly desirable piece of content, such as an ebook.

Now, this is when the fun starts.

After capturing email addresses, you can begin to nurture your email subscribers with useful content, giveaways, discounts, early access to new products, and more.

You can also boost sales using email segmentation.

This is when you create separate groups of subscribers (called “segments”) based on their personal preferences and what stage each subscriber is at in the buyer’s journey.

Then, you can create automated email campaigns for each segment, that:

  • Welcome new subscribers
  • Follow up abandoned carts
  • Follow up with new customers to land repeat sales
  • Ask happy customers for a review
  • Re-engage inactive subscribers
  • Gather valuable feedback from existing customers
  • And more!