Digital marketing is big; In the present world, it plays a vital role to help expand your business. Say if you’re in the healthcare industry and want to transform your business from traditional marketing to digital marketing, its best you know all about digital marketing.
Digital marketing offers loads of advantages, such as finding new markets and trading globally with little investment, lowered costs than traditional marketing methods, and obtaining detailed information about customer behavior.
Likewise, it allows you to personalize your marketing strategy and greet your customers with targeted offers; with the help of social media, you can build customer loyalty and earn a reputation of being easy to engage with.
Also, you can gain social currency using engaging content marketing tactics. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing can be immediate and seamless, resulting in improved conversion rates. As a competitive healthcare business owner, you will want to adopt these practices to expand your business.
To help you out, we’ve discussed the various types of digital marketing. The lines may blur between multiple options, but this post gives you a clear idea of the kind of menu to choose from. So let’s get started.
What is digital marketing
The term was first popularized in the 2000s and took the world by storm. Digital marketing is any form of marketing of products or services using the electronic medium–that includes mobile phones, the internet, or any other digital medium.
Businesses use digital channels such as social media, search engines, email, and their websites to connect with prospective customers.
Digital marketing is essential for your business or brand awareness. Nowadays, every brand has a website, or at least they have a digital strategy or social media presence. Consumers expect digital and content marketing as a way to learn about brands.
Different types of online marketing
Best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their business goals. Depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, they support massive campaigns through free and paid channels at their disposal.
#1. Content marketing
Creating and promoting content assets to generate brand awareness, lead generation, traffic growth, and customers is known as content marketing. The critical parts of the content marketing strategy include blog posts, ebooks, white papers, and infographics.
Blog posts: Publishing articles about your company shows your industry expertise and generates organic leads as well. This practice increases your website visitors and changes them into customers for your sales team.
Ebooks and white papers: These types of long-form content helps you to educate your visitors and obtains their contact information for the content in return. It helps to generate leads for your company and moves them through their buyers’ journey.
Infographics: Its the visual form of content that helps your visitors to visualize content.
Content marketing is not a buzzword but a necessity in the digital marketing landscape. Content marketing increases content on your site, luring customers to stick around. It helps them build trust and to familiarize themselves with your brand.
It also increases your domain authority, improves search engine visibility, provides more referrals and social media traffic. Likewise, you enjoy increased conversion potential, improved brand reputation, decreased marketing costs, and compounding value.
#2. Search engine optimization
SEO stands for search engine optimization. It helps to increase both the quality and quantity of web traffic. Likewise, it gives exposure to your brand through organic search engine results.
Search engine optimization is all about what people are searching online, the words they’re using, the answers they seek, and the type of content they’re eager to know. Once you know the answers to these questions, you can connect with the people searching online for the solutions you offer.
Knowing the intent of your audience is just one side of the coin. Delivering quality content so that the search engine crawlers find and understand it to deliver your content to the masses is the other side of the coin.
SEO is essential because search engines provide the majority of online traffic. Organic search results appear more credible to searchers; they cover more digital real estate and get many more clicks than paid advertisements.
Search engine optimization is the only digital marketing channel when properly set up can pay rich dividends over time. Providing high-quality content with the right keywords helps your traffic to snowball over time, whereas paid advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.
#3. Email marketing
In the most basic sense, email marketing is using emails to promote your products and services. This form of marketing develops a healthy relationship with your customer or clients. It helps you to target particular groups of customers.
For example, a restaurant might send personalized emails to customers celebrating birthdays offering a 50 percent discount. This practice helps the business to develop a relationship with the customer, resulting in customer loyalty and increased sales.
The main advantages of email marketing are its cost and flexibility. Compared to other forms of marketing, emailing is relatively inexpensive to advertise your business, products, or services. Setting up and tracking an email marketing campaign is extremely easy; It’s most suitable for small businesses.
You can also set up a newsletter option for your website and send newsletters to your subscribers. Regularly sending newsletters helps to effectively communicate any updates about your business, special offers, and any upcoming events. You can also set up automated promotional emails to customers who haven’t bought your products recently.
#4. Social media marketing
This type of marketing promotes your brand on social media channels, increasing brand awareness, generating leads for your business, and driving traffic. Channels you can use in social media marketing are as follows.
- Snapchat
Content writing plays a vital role while promoting your business on social media. Social media sites act as word of mouth. These sites rely on virtual communities. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter can help you provide information about the likes and dislikes of the customers. So you can easily zoom in your target audience.
The five core pillars of social media marketing include
- Strategy
- Planning and publishing
- Listening and engagement
- Analytics and reporting
- Advertising.
Before you dive and publish something, check out your goals, the type of social media platforms you have to focus on, and the type of content you want to share.
About three billion people use social media. Publishing great content helps you to maximize your reach on social media.
#5. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is an established form of online marketing- a hybrid of old and new marketing practices. It takes a leaf out of celebrity endorsements and combines it with content-driven marketing campaigns. The collaboration is between the brands and the influencers.
So who is an influencer? An influencer is a person who can affect the purchase of others because of her knowledge, position, authority, and relationship with her audience. She has a following in a distinct niche where she actively engages with people.
Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an influencer to market its products and services. Influencers have a large following on the web and social media.
Say an influencer may be a famous fashion photographer on Instagram or a blogger of health and wellness having a large Facebook following. These people have a reputation for being experts in their fields. They answer people’s questions, share the best pictures and entertaining online videos, and carry on most informative online discussions.
Having a plan, a budget as well as spending time on research will help you to benefit from influencer marketing. Next, decide on your approach to finding freelancers. You can find them organically, subscribe to a platform, or work with them through an agency.
Influencer marketing is not about the quickest result; instead, its a slow, steady approach similar to content marketing and social media marketing. It’s about showing your authority, credibility, and thought leadership within your industry.
#6. Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is a type of digital marketing that aims to target tablets, smartphones, or other mobile devices through email, website, SMS, MMS, apps, and social media.
Everything that’s done on a desktop computer is now available on mobile as well. From visiting sites to reading emails, everything can be done through the small mobile screen.
Being mobile-friendly is a must these days. Google’s mobile-friendly ranking factor as well as the increase in mobile traffic emphasize that your site must adapt to mobile marketing to stay competitive.
To effectively use mobile marketing, you must understand your mobile audience and design content, keeping them in mind. Likewise, you must make strategic use of MMS/SMS marketing and apps. Buyer personas are an essential tool to help in that understanding.
After having a clear idea about your audience proceed to set goals and establish KPIs (key performance indicators). Make sure you deliver mobile-friendly content with a clear call to action and monitor mobile metrics.
#7. Display advertising
It refers to advertising a service or a product through images and videos on the publisher websites such as Facebook and Google display network. The ads are placed related to third party sites in the form of images, banners, and text ads. Basically display advertising is categorized into three categories.
Site placement advertising: Here, a marketer chooses a website that they would like to place their advertisements on.
Contextual advertising: Display advertising networks place advertisements on relevant sites in the contextual form of advertising.
Remarketing: Display ads appear in front of users who visited your website but have left without completing the purchase.
Display ads present you with an opportunity to showcase your products on a wide variety of ad formats. When you display your ads on platforms like Google Display Network, the ads can reach potential customers on millions of websites around the globe.
Display advertising is an excellent channel to build brand awareness, get clicks, conversions, and sales from users who may not have heard about your business but have found you through display ads––because you’re offering the solution they are searching for.
#8. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting other people’s products or services and earning a commission. The pattern proceeds like this––you find a product you like, promote it, and make a profit for each sale you bring in. Affiliate marketing is beneficial both to the brands and affiliates. It works best when different parties get involved.
- Seller and product creators
- The affiliate or advertiser
- Consumer
The seller or product creator is a merchant with a product to market. The product can be household goods or services. The affiliate publisher promotes the product persuading consumers that the product is valuable or beneficial to them. If the customer buys the product, the affiliate receives a portion of the revenue.
Likewise, the affiliate may get paid in different ways it may be pay per sale, pay per lead and pay per click.
The benefits of affiliate marketing for businesses include targeted traffic, pay per performance and sales, low risk, and limited start-up costs. Likewise, it boosts brand awareness growth, increased SEO, access to foreign markets, develop valuable partnerships, a good return on investment, and a large pool of affiliate marketers.
Take away message
In conclusion, digitalizing your business helps you to reap fruitful results. If you try to follow all the steps at once, you might feel overwhelmed. Take one action at a time and see your healthcare business reach greater heights.