Have you ever wondered how many types of marketing exist? Or what exactly is the essence of marketing for your business?
In this article, we will be sharing with you the types of marketing that exist with examples as well as how they relate to your business growth. We’re sure you would love that, so let’s get started.
Before we do that, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students how to get leads and sales from marketing and also every other aspect of digital marketing. You should register for this course.
Marketing as an important aspect of business cannot be ignored if you ever want to own a business either product or service owned business. If you don’t market your business, you are the only person who would know about the existence of the product or service you offer.
For yourself as an individual, you also have to market yourself because if you don’t nobody will know who you are or what you can do. Imagine attending an event, and you are asked to introduce yourself and what you do, and you do that successfully, you just market yourself as an individual brand.
For example; Hi, My name is Tobi Asehinde, I am a digital marketing expert and I also own a digital marketing institute called Digital Marketing Skills Institute.
You just used a type of marketing to sell yourself and what you do. One thing about marketing is that it is not restricted to business owners only, or we can say that everyone is a business owner, just that the products and services we offer differ and ranges from our abilities and skills.
Having laid the foundation of marketing with a brief description and introduction, let’s go ahead to define marketing itself.
What is Marketing?
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.
Your customer’s needs and behaviors should be your priority if you want to engage in marketing to achieve your goals.
Marketing relies on four pillars, which is popularly called the four p’s of marketing. They are Product, Price, Place, Promotion
Product is the item or items that the business intends to offer to customers. This product can be in form of a product or a service that has to be rendered. This product should seek to fulfill an absence in the market or fulfill consumer’s demand.
Price is the cost at which the company is willing to sell a product or a service. In the process of establishing a price, companies must consider the cost per unit, cost for marketing, and distribution cost as well, to get their desired profit and to avoid running at a loss.
They should also consider the price of competing products in the market and be sure that their proposed price is sufficient to serve as a reasonable alternative for consumers.
The place has to do with the distribution of the product. Does the company want to sell its product through a physical store, online, or using both distribution channels?
The promotion has to do with the integrated marketing communications campaign and they include a variety of activities such as advertising, selling, sales promotions, public relations, direct marketing, and every other form of campaign that exists. it also depends on the lifecycle of products and the stages, this is what determines the kind of promotion that would be done for that product.
Importance of Marketing
- Marketing facilitates the transfer, exchange, and movement of goods and services.
- Marketing is an effective way to engage your customers and potential customers as well.
- It helps to build and maintain the company/brand’s reputation.
- Marketing aids a good relationship between the business and its customers.
- Marketing helps to improve the standard of living. With a steady supply and availability of products and services for survival, marketing helps to improve the standard of living of members of the community.
- Marketing creates employment. It has to do with a complete system that needs the services of different persons with different skills to be successful, and these different skills require different persons to have the required skill set and of course, creates more jobs.
- Marketing plays a very strategic role in the development of the economy.
- Marketing creates revenue options for the company/brand.
A good question that you might want to ask is can marketing influence a customer’s decision? Yes, it can.
Prior to marketing, a prospective customer is not aware of your existence, but with marketing, the customer knows you exist, what you sell, or the services you render, and how to locate you. And of course, they would want to patronize you regardless of the type of marketing you utilize for your business.
Marketing can be applied to both individual and corporate brands, not restricted to making profits, but also to improve visibility and create awareness of a product or service.
Types of Marketing
1. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a type of marketing that deals with promoting a business on digital platforms using digital methods and digital gadgets like desktop computers, smartphones, and others.
This type of marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use electronic devices and the internet. The digital channels that can be used to achieve this are search engines, social media platforms, emails, landing pages. they are used to connect with current and prospective customers.
Digital marketing positions you to be seen by your prospects, they can learn more about you, and even ask questions to know more about you, your products, and services.
As a brand/ corporate organization, you can create content to keep your audience updated with industry news, the problem they may be facing, social media to share this content, and also engage with them as friends and followers.
So, also search engine optimization(SEO) to optimize your content, so when someone searches for information relating to the content you created, it shows up in the result.
As well as, paid advertising to drive paid traffic to your website or landing page so your audience can see what you have to offer, and email marketing to follow up with your audience and be sure they keep getting the solutions they need.
An example of using content to promote a business on social media as a channel in digital marketing. Source: Facebook
An example showing the use of a digital marketing channel to promote a business. Source: Edmunds
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the use of various forms of content to market and promote a product or service for a target audience. This content is created, published, and distributed for the benefit of the target audience.
Content on its own goes beyond writing, it also involves creating designs, pictures, videos blog posts, audio, newsletters, and magazines to promote a business.
As much as content marketing functions very well in digital marketing, it also applies to traditional marketing in the case of print magazines and flyers and other related items.
Content is the air that marketing breathes in, without content, there is no marketing. and so to get the best out of digital marketing you have to devote enough to content marketing either as a personal brand or corporate organization.
It attracts attention and generates leads, expands the customer base, generates and increases online sales, increases brand awareness and credibility, and also allows you to engage a community of users and prospective users.
This aspect of digital marketing is core and as such there would be a need to get a specialist in this particular field to handle the contents especially for corporate organizations.
The goal of content marketing is to help companies to build sustainable brand loyalty and provide valuable information to consumers and prospective consumers alike, as well as establish a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future.
This form of marketing does not involve direct sales.
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An example of using video to market content for a corporate organization.
An example of content marketing through magazines
You can read more about content marketing here, Content Marketing explained – A Step by Step Guide
3. Email Marketing
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Email Marketing is another crucial type of marketing. You don’t want to leave your customers and prospective customers in the dark about your product, updates, and giving them answers to their silent questions. This is one good tool for achieving this.
This is a strategy that allows you to send emails to prospects and existing customers informing them about a product and keeping them in the know of what is going on in the organization.
Email marketing presents more opportunities for your business and drives a better return on investment. With email marketing, your business can create deeper relationships with a wider audience at a fraction of the cost of traditional media.
An example of email marketing for a corporate organization.
Another example of email marketing for a business
There are several platforms and tools that you can use for email marketing, tools like
Drip and many others.
Meanwhile, in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students how to use email marketing to promote their business as well as other aspects of digital marketing.
4. Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is the type of marketing that is not online and doesn’t go through any digital channels. It is safe to say that traditional marketing is the opposite of digital marketing, as you can see in the definition. this kind of marketing has to do with printing, SMS, print, and outdoor advertising like billboards and flyers. Magazines and tv broadcasts as well.
This aspect of marketing relies on offline strategies as earlier pointed in this article, they also include direct sales, brochures, letters, tradeshows, newspapers, coupon books, radio. The goal of traditional marketing is to create brand awareness.
Unlike digital marketing that allows you to create awareness, engage your audience, and also generate leads that would be converted to make profits.
An example of a channel in traditional marketing
5. Affiliate Marketing
According to Wikipedia, affiliate marketing is a type of marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts.
You would have probably used websites that are monetized with affiliate marketing most of the time without knowing. And the reason is that it is one of the popular ways for bloggers and webmasters to earn an income from their digital assets. Currently, this industry is worth and estimated $12 billion and more.
It is a perfect way to earn money online without the need to develop your own products.
Many SEO specialists don’t surprise you when you find out they run affiliate websites as a side-hustle, because they most times leverage their skills to generate traffic and earn commissions.
It also accounts for 15% of all digital media revenue, to show you how relevant it is gradually becoming in the digital marketing industry.
To kick off your affiliate marketing journey, acquire your website or blog first. Then, actively seek out businesses offering affiliate marketing programs and register with them.
For example:
Source: Jumia
Another example of a company that has provisions for affiliate marketing.
Source: Konga
Other businesses with affiliate programs are
Affiliate programs are not limited to this, do research and select the one that suits you and your business.
You can read more about how to get started with affiliate marketing here, Affiliate Marketing
6. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is the type of marketing that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t always want, inbound marketing forms connections they are looking for and solves problems they already have.
Inbound marketing is the life of every online business and with each strategy when properly incorporated with advertising strategies, gets to increase engagement and attract new and potential customers.
Inbound marketing is a simple strategy of attracting, retaining, and making your customers advocate for your business through quality content and services.
However, it is important for startups and any business to understand the benefits and advantages that inbound marketing provides for their business in order to understand the marketing value of their business.
Attracting strangers via blogs, social media, and search engines transforms them into active visitors. Upon landing on your page, they take decisive actions, converting from leads to convinced customers. A satisfied customer seamlessly transitions into a promoter, completing the organic cycle of attraction, engagement, and advocacy.
As you can see every point in marketing is important, from attracting strangers to becoming promoters, you must ensure that all the processes have a common goal which is to promote, grow and of course, bring in sales for the company.
One of the ways through which you can generate leads for your company/business is through creating engaging content using content marketing, landing pages, email marketing, social media marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Marketing?
Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses. It is that action and step put in place to ensure that the brand exists in the mind of its supposed audience.
Marketing can come in different forms and shapes. But they all have a common goal and agenda, to promote a business or brand to generate profit.
Basically, marketing involves every action taken to draw in customers as well as maintaining their relationships with them.
What are the types of marketing?
- Inbound marketing
- Digital Marketing
- Traditional Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search engine Marketing
- Video Marketing
Conclusion
As outlined, there’s no denying that marketing remains essential for survival, whether as a business or an individual.
All you have to do is explore the available options for brand awareness and sales generation. Marketing is vital for digital marketing’s existence; without marketing, we can’t have digital marketing. Additionally, more businesses and individual brands are turning to digital marketing to promote their business and create brand awareness.
This is why in our 90% practical digital marketing course, we teach our students all they need to know in digital marketing either to promote their individual brands or to promote other brands and get paid for them. You don’t want to miss this opportunity.