Marketing might have once been thought of as a monolith, a “thing” you couldn’t diversify or separate from its roots – newspapers, print ads, and other methods of print advertising, but it has grown and diversified since then. It has fragmented into many small pieces now, which makes it difficult to define.
If you ask people to talk about marketing, they might talk about TV ads, radio ads, social media marketing, or one of the other types of marketing commonly performed today. Nearly every letter of the alphabet can begin a phrase that has “marketing” at the end.
It helps to know your terminology. The most up-to-date terms for marketing include online, social media, inbound or outbound, and brand marketing. If you know any of these types of marketing, you know a small portion of marketing – but there are still dozens of other marketing tactics you might not know about. Here are some common types of marketing today.
Affiliate marketing
Many major brands today rely on affiliate marketing, which allows them to get traffic and customers without expending their own time and efforts. An affiliate promotes their products or services, and whenever someone purchases through the affiliate’s link, the affiliate gets paid. The company benefits from far greater exposure and the affiliate gets immediate income without worrying about the support and development issues that an online store or product developer would have to take care of.
Blackhat marketing
This type of SEO marketing is practiced by certain companies in order to fool the search engines. The aim is to trick search engines into giving them better rankings for certain keywords even if they would not naturally earn these rankings through the quality or quantity of their content. Search engines will eventually discover these tactics and heavily penalize or ban these websites.
Content marketing
Marketing can include article marketing, video marketing, and other types of marketing all focused around content. Content marketing is a useful catch-all term to describe these strategies. In this type of marketing, you produce as much useful, relevant content as possible in various forms so that people will share it with friends, like it, and become engaged with your company or brand. A reputable SEO company can take care of the creation or promotion of your content.
Drip marketing
This form of email marketing is set up through an autoresponder, an email service that sends certain emails to subscribers on specific days. It might deliver a course one day at a time, or a series of alternating content-heavy articles and pitches for paid products. Drip marketing is a hands-off technique when it is set up, but there has to be a signup form online and you need to get traffic to it.
Event marketing
If you’re running an event, you’re practicing event marketing. Some people have moved this online and might hold online conferences, while others still arrange “real life” festivals and seminars. Trade shows are a type of event common in the business world, and seminars can be group-participation events or speaker-led events.
You can continue working your way through the alphabet one letter at a time and come up with types of marketing that follow each letter! If you’re not careful, this can lead to overwhelm, so be sure you have an overall marketing strategy and unifying policies before starting to market your company, product, or service.
