3 Types Of Digital Marketing Outreach: A Refresher

As the old adage goes, one must get from point A to point B. The same rings true in marketing. eCommerce marketers have no choice but to create a path towards making sales, and generating revenue.

This means that the marketer has to utilize the outreach channels at their disposal, but first, they need to become intimately aware of what types of marketing channels are available. But even more important, a digital marketer must understand how each of these marketing channels work, so they can determine if a specific marketing channel is right for their needs, and their marketing budget.

Below are three examples of digital marketing channels for outreach:

Social media marketing

Social media marketing has dominated the second decade of the millennium, and with good reason. Social media platforms have demonstrated that they have the unprecedented ability to connect the world. But marketers can go as macro or as micro with their message as they wish.

That’s another advantage of social media marketing: the ability to market in a laser-focused fashion. In the past, marketers were forced to use the cast a wide net approach to marketing. This provided double frustrations, because not only did the marketer worry about anyone paying attention to their marketing message at all, but they also had to worry about the right types of marketing targets paying attention.

An Entrepreneur Magazine author wrote this a couple of years ago, and it still holds true:

Social data offers marketers some of the best digital signals to follow for two reasons: 1) A lot of permission-based public data is made available to marketers through social platforms, and 2) Social data is full of simple and meaningful insights that can help you message to people at all stages of the customer lifecycle.

And Marketing Land predicted a 3-year wave of social media dominance back in 2015, writing:

Social media advertising helps businesses find new potential clients by using users’ own shared information to identify interest. Rather than reactively targeting users who search a certain term, social media advertising proactively targets relevant users before they even begin their search.

Social networks are a good option for advertisers because of the advanced targeting options, reliable conversion tracking, and prevalence on mobile devices…Because social networks gather such a larger amount of user information, social media advertising is able to target your audience in a wider variety of ways than other online platforms.

Stretching beyond general demographic and geographic data, social media advertising has opened the door to deeper interest, behavioral and connection-based targeting methods. These advanced targeting options increase your ad’s relevance to your users and provide a level of personalization that is not achievable on other advertising channels.

Search Engine Marketing

Simply put, search engine marketing is a macro function of optimizing websites so that they can appear as close to the top of a search engine query as possible.

What marketers need to understand is that there’s a difference between SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing), because the two are used interchangeably.

But Reliablesoft.net clears that up a bit in an article:

The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim in increasing visibility in search engines.

SEO is about optimizing your website to get better rankings in the search results while SEM goes beyond SEO. It involves other methods that can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising.

So understanding SEM as a macro function will help a great deal in deciding on what specific SEM function is best for one’s marketing campaign, regarding the amount of work required, and the investment cost of the marketing function.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, and yet, it’s still used as a core form of digital marketing…because it works!

At its core, it involves sending permission-based marketing and educational media to a marketing target’s email inbox. This really gives marketers an opportunity to shine by promoting their brand while developing loyalty, and trust.

In fact, Digital Donut says that email marketing is still very relevant, as long as its implemented correctly:

Despite what you might have heard, it’s still important to have an email list…Utilize omnichannel technology – Make sure your signup forms and any emails you send will be viewable from mobile devices as well as PC monitors. This can be done with test automation tools, which allow you to do a variety of tests across multiple channels at the same time.

One of the main differences between email marketing from 10 years ago and email marketing today is that most internet users check read their emails on small mobile screens instead of computers. If you want it to work now, you must make the emails easy to view and read on all screen sizes.

If your business could use a bit of help in determining which of these platforms is right for you, you should grab this special report from our partners at ROI Revolution on Setting Ecommerce Marketing Goals. The report goes into detail on how to determine the right goals for your business and the key factors and KPIs to focus on to grow your revenue.

Tagged Email, marketing, Paid Search, PPC, SEM, social media