9 Vital Disciplines Essential For Marketing Your Business Online

Modern online marketing is a huge field covering many different disciplines. The days when a solitary genius could be an expert across the board are over. But that doesn’t mean online marketers should pick a single technique and stick rigidly to it.

A well-rounded campaign needs to include as many channels as possible, and a basic knowledge of the many possibilities is a huge advantage for an ambitious marketer. Here are nine areas that online marketers should have a grounding in, to help them run a fully integrated campaign.

1) Paid Advertising

Whether you use Facebook, Google, or another platform, paid advertising is a mainstay of online marketing. It’s quick to set up, and delivers speedy results which are relatively easy to measure.

There’s plenty of traffic available, but this means competition is fierce. It can, therefore, be difficult to balance exposure and cost to create a respectable profit margin.

2) Social Media Marketing

Social media is now the largest driver of traffic on the web, but there’s more to exploiting it than paid advertising. Social media marketing involves building a loyal following through non-paid activities. These can include developing original content or curating the best available posts from other related accounts.

Either way, the aim is to build a reputation and repeat readers which you can then leverage toward your commercial objectives.

3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The idea of artificially gaming your way to high search engine rankings and traffic isn’t realistic anymore. But organic traffic still offers excellent opportunities for profit and branding.

Just as importantly, nearly every other form of online marketing activity can have secondary benefits for search rankings. A reasonable level of SEO knowledge is essential to make the most of the opportunities this offers.

4) Local SEO

But SEO doesn’t need to be targeted at national or international audiences. Establishing your company as a significant player in your local area can boost business considerably, and local SEO is a cost-effective way of doing this.

5) Content Marketing

Previously seen as a subset of SEO, content marketing has vastly matured and now meshes with many disciplines. Whatever your initial traffic source, creating and deploying quality content can build a loyal and engaged user base to leverage over time.

6) Video Marketing

And one increasingly important form of content is video. An estimated 75% of the entire web’s bandwidth is taken up with moving images, and all marketers should recognize the possibilities that fact offers.

And it doesn’t need a Hollywood budget to get started. Ordinary consumer tech means the financial barriers to entry are almost nonexistent.

7) Email Marketing

Email marketing has existed nearly as long as the internet, and while it may not have the glamour and glitz of social media, it remains a reliable workhorse. Devote enough resources to building a stable, well-targeted list, and you can drive profitable traffic almost on demand.

8) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing lets you harness an army of promoters to work on a performance-related basis. Effective management of an affiliate program takes skill and resources, but if you have a good product and attractive terms, you can draw on some of the best independent marketers in the business.

And the beauty is, affiliates can spread your reach into techniques and verticals you’d never think of exploiting yourself.

9) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is in some ways a specialist area of the affiliate technique. It relies on finding an online figure with a following that matches your customer profile and working with them to drive traffic to your offers.

The influencer is sometimes rewarded on a commission basis, but more often with a flat fee. Look for small-scale influencers with modest but highly targeted follower counts, and this technique can offer amazing results for very little outlay.

The opportunities offered by online digital marketing are vast, and it’s impossible to keep on top of every field. However, this is one area where a little knowledge isn’t necessarily a dangerous thing. If you recognize the value of the different disciplines, you can hire experts to create an integrated campaign returning impressive results.