With the right digital marketing methods, businesses can achieve major goals ranging from brand awareness to lead generation to sales conversions.
So what are the types of digital marketing your brand should prioritize?
The ideal channels and tactics depend greatly on your business objectives and target audience.
In this article, we’ll first define digital marketing and outline its key purposes. Then explore 13 different forms of online marketing to consider using in 2024.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the practice of promoting and selling brands, products, and services via online channels. It encompasses all internet marketing channels, including:
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Digital advertising
We’ll discuss these areas of digital marketing (and many more) in depth below.
Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
Digital marketing is significant in today’s market because of a highly competitive landscape requiring wide visibility and reach.
Brands must find highly engaged audiences and discover innovative opportunities to stand out—and online marketing allows them to do just that.
Businesses can implement different types of digital marketing to:
- Connect with new prospects and expand the company’s customer base. Digital means help you reach your brand’s ideal customers virtually anywhere in the world.
- Target potential customers throughout the buyer’s journey. You can use online marketing tactics to guide prospects all the way through the journey—from awareness to consideration to the decision stage.
- Run cost-effective marketing campaigns. Compared to traditional marketing channels like print and TV, a digital strategy tends to be more targeted, less expensive, and easier to scale.
- Measure and attribute results efficiently. Digital platforms automatically monitor success outcomes like clicks and conversions. So you’ll know which channels and campaigns work best for your brand.
Further reading: The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing Strategies
13 Digital Marketing Types
The list we’ve put together outlines the main types of digital marketing you can tap into to promote your business online. In ways that drive success and growth.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing involves publishing and distributing all kinds of online content. One of its biggest benefits is that it can reach your ideal audience across many different digital channels.
Types of digital content include:
- Written content such as blog posts
- Visual content like social media posts
- Video content on YouTube and other platforms
Further reading: 17 Types of Content Marketing to Use for Success in 2024
A content strategy typically aims to attract, engage, and convert potential customers. Great content works at every stage of the marketing funnel.
Here are examples of how you can use content marketing effectively at different stages of the customer journey:
- Awareness: Podcasts and videos can introduce your brand to potential buyers
- Consideration: In-depth blog posts provide detailed information and may persuade prospects to consider your product or service
- Conversion: Ebooks give prospects the data and use cases they need to decide to book a demo, get a free trial, or make a purchase
For instance, this Tropic ebook is designed to convert people seeking a software procurement platform:
To develop a successful content marketing strategy, start by identifying topics your target audience cares about.
Use Topic Research to generate relevant ideas you could focus on in your written content.
Find the tool in the “Content Marketing” drop-down menu of the Semrush dashboard. Enter a topic and click “Get content ideas.”
You’ll see several related topics. Click “Show more” at the bottom of any topic card to view related headlines and questions.
Use these topics to spark ideas for content that’s likely to attract, engage, and convert your audience.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is an aspect of content marketing that involves using social platforms to connect with potential customers, improve brand awareness, drive organic traffic, and generate sales and leads.
A social media strategy generally includes these elements:
- Developing social media campaigns to reach specific marketing goals
- Publishing original posts, stories, and short-form videos on branded social profiles
- Replying to comments and messages you receive from social media users
- Proactively engaging with social content posted by customers and relevant influencers
- Searching for and responding to brand mentions across social channels
This X post by Glossier is an example of a campaign targeting a traffic and sales increase for the beauty brand:
Open Semrush’s Social Poster tool from the “Social Media” menu to plan and publish your social media campaigns.
Select any of the social channels that appear in the popup to connect your profile. You’ll need to log into each of your social platform accounts and grant permission for the tool to publish the posts you create.
After connecting a social profile, hit the “New post” button.
Then, create the post—using Semrush’s AI Writing Assistant will generate quality social media posts faster. You can write a caption, paste a link, and upload an image.
Finally, publish the post immediately or schedule it to go live at a specific time.
Video Marketing
Video marketing is a content marketing approach that uses video content to promote brands, products, and services. Your video marketing strategy can include YouTube, social media networks, and streaming platforms.
Some of the most popular types of video marketing include:
- Brand videos, which introduce a brand and what makes it unique
- Demo videos to demonstrate a product or service
- Explainer videos for breaking down a complex topic
- How-to videos, showing viewers the steps to accomplish a task
Take this YouTube video series as an example. It features several how-to videos covering various features of the Notion productivity app.
You can create and edit engaging videos using Video Marketing Platform, available in the Semrush App Center.
You can even convert a blog post into a video in the app.
Then, upload your videos to YouTube, social media, or another platform where your target audience spends the most time. So you can reach your prospects easily.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO comprises a set of tactics for making your website more visible in search engines and attracting more organic traffic. It primarily involves two types of activities: on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO refers to actions you take on your website, such as:
- Keyword research: Identify relevant search terms to incorporate into your website content
- Title tags: Provide webpage titles that can appear on search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Internal links: Pass authority to other pages on your site and clarify your site structure to users and search engine crawlers
Use Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool to simplify your keyword research.
Enter a seed keyword—a topic you want to research—and hit “Search.”
Keyword Magic Tool will generate a list of keywords related to your seed term, ordered by volume.
When choosing keywords for your SEO strategy, consider factors like:
- Search volume: The average number of organic searches for a particular keyword over a 12-month period. Higher search volume means more opportunities to attract traffic.
- Keyword difficulty: A percentage score that indicates how difficult it is to appear in the top 10 search results for a particular keyword. Lower KD% keywords may be easier to rank for.
Off-page SEO refers to activities you perform outside of your website, such as:
- Link building, or specific tactics to get other sites to link to you to grow your site’s backlink profile and authority
- Guest posting, which entails publishing valuable, relevant content on other websites to broaden your audience and get mentions and backlink opportunities
- Digital PR to increase brand awareness, build site authority, drive traffic, and earn quality backlinks and mentions
To analyze your website’s backlink portfolio and find more link-building opportunities, use Semrush’s Backlink Analytics tool.
Input your domain’s URL into the tool and click “Analyze.”
You can gauge the health of your site’s backlink portfolio via metrics like total backlinks, referring domains, and Authority Score. In each case, a higher number reflects a stronger portfolio.
To improve your backlink portfolio, start with tactics like fixing broken backlinks.
Go to the “Indexed Pages” tab and check the “Broken Pages” box for a list of pages with backlink issues.
Click on a broken link and select the “Referring Domains” tab. You’ll see a list of URLs that link to that specific broken page.
Contact the website owners to request replacing the broken link with a relevant working URL on your site.
You can also use the workflow above to find broken links pointing to your competitors’ websites. Then, reach out to the site owners to suggest relevant links to your website in their place.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending newsletters, promotional emails, and email sequences to your subscribers’ inboxes. Your marketing emails can target goals like:
- Launching new products and services
- Announcing limited-time sales and discounts
- Helping customers get more value from their purchases
Let’s take this event-related email marketing campaign from Vitamix. It shows customers how to use the brand’s products (blenders) to make a solar eclipse-themed recipe:
Verifying subscribers’ email addresses can improve deliverability, ensuring more of your marketing emails arrive in inboxes. Email verification can also lower costs by preventing you from sending to old or invalid addresses.
Remember: To succeed with email marketing, you need an email list. Add signup forms on your website and mention your email list on social media to attract potential new subscribers.
4. Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing refers to promotional activities that target potential customers on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. Goals for mobile marketing campaigns often focus on engagement or conversions.
Some common mobile marketing tactics include:
- Augmented reality (AR) filters that allow people to test products virtually
- QR codes that people scan with their smartphones to visit mobile websites
- Push notifications that prompt people to engage with your in-app content or features
For example, this Audible push notification encourages users to listen to a podcast episode in the brand’s app:
Monitor the success of your mobile app with Semrush’s Mobile App Insights.
See how your app ranks in its category, its visibility score, downloads by keyword, audience geography, and more.
Then, use these insights to optimize your app description and improve download performance.
5. Local Marketing
Local online marketing involves promoting brick-and-mortar businesses or local services in a certain geographic area. A local marketing strategy often includes:
- Establishing a Google Business Profile (GBP) and listing your business on Google Maps
- Adding your locations to online local directories
- Setting up social media pages for each of the business’s locations
- Running geotargeted ads to reach prospects in your service area
- Using local SEO to improve your brand’s visibility in searches for locations you serve
The businesses pictured below all have Google Maps listings and GBPs. Featuring the name, location, address, and phone number along with open hours, ratings, and other information.
Improve your local SEO marketing efforts and oversee your online business presence with Semrush’s Listing Management.
Enter your business name and click to select it in the search results (if you’re using this tool for the first time). Or click the “+ Add location” button (if you’ve used Listing Management before).
You’ll get an overall assessment of your business’s online presence, average star rating, total reviews, and listings to fix.
Listing Management provides a complete list of your business listings in local directories.
You can improve your local marketing performance by addressing errors and creating entries in directories where you don’t feature.
6. Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is a method for reaching new prospects and expanding your customer base. Unlike many of the organic (unpaid) digital marketing strategies above, advertising is a paid tactic.
With digital ads, you place paid content in front of specific customer segments. You can target prospects by location, demographics, interests, behaviors (like visiting your website), and other factors.
Digital advertising can include channels like:
- Search ads (including PPC)
- Display ads
- Sponsored content
- Video ads
- Social media ads
Let’s consider this Instagram ad. It’s a video ad that shows how businesses can use Semrush to reveal competitors’ marketing strategies. Prospects can tap the “Learn more” banner to view the ad’s landing page and sign up for a free Semrush account.
Semrush’s Advertising Research helps you analyze the competitive landscape. You learn how much competitors spend on PPC and which keywords they’re targeting—so you can improve your own campaigns.
Start by entering a competitor’s domain. Hit the “Search” button.
You’ll see the site’s total number of paid keywords, the total amount of paid traffic, and the monthly cost of this paid traffic.
Advertising Research also shows trends in these areas. To help you understand if your competitor is gaining or losing paid traffic and keywords.
Use the “Paid Search Positions” chart to learn which keywords your competing site is targeting with PPC campaigns. The chart also estimates search volume, traffic, and average position for each paid keyword.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is a type of digital advertising that includes search ads. PPC ads can run on many different platforms, including:
- Search engines like Google and Bing
- Forums including Reddit
- Marketplaces such as Amazon
Take the search ad below. It’s a keyword-based ad triggered by the user’s search query. The advertiser (in this case, Semrush) pays when someone clicks on the ad to visit the landing page.
Use Ads Launch Assistant from the Semrush App Center to find the most effective keywords to target. And build PPC ads automatically.
To start, enter a campaign name and select a campaign type. Click “Continue.”
If you’ve used this tool before, click the “Add campaign +” button at the top of your dashboard.
Choose basic campaign settings, including network, start and end date, audience devices and language, and target location. You can also set an ad schedule and add a tracking template to attribute results accurately.
Click the “Generate new ad group” button.
Give the ad group a name. And input the URL for the landing page. Click “Generate ad group.”
The tool automatically identifies keywords, callouts, and sitelinks for the ad group. Click any of these elements to edit the auto-generated options or add more.
Preview the auto-generated ad(s). And click to edit any ad or add more headlines.
Click “+ Add new headline” to write headlines manually. Or hit the “Generate headlines & descriptions” button to do so automatically.
To add more ads to the ad group, click “+ Create new ad.” Otherwise, finish the ad group setup by confirming your bid strategy and budget.
Click “Start campaign” to launch.
7. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing involves collaborating with creators who have engaged online audiences. While these partnerships are promotional in nature, influencers tend to promote brands in more genuine ways.
One of the biggest benefits of influencer marketing is its perceived authenticity. Because instead of branded content, influencers use personal stories and create lifestyle content.
Brands typically partner with influencers who have authority in relevant niches. For example, a health food brand may work with an influencer who specializes in health, wellness, or fitness.
In the Instagram post below, an influencer introduces the haircare brand Native to her audience:
Find the right influencers to promote your brand using Influencer Analytics from Semrush. The app lets you filter influencers by category, location, subscribers, and many other factors.
From there, you can build a custom list of influencers, view content analytics, or connect with them directly to discuss a partnership.
8. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing technique that involves recruiting people (affiliates) to promote your company’s products or services. Affiliates use content, social media, email, video, and other types of digital marketing to create promotional campaigns on your behalf.
Generally, affiliates receive commissions for any sales that result from their marketing efforts. To attribute sales accurately, companies typically give affiliates unique referral links or discount codes.
Let’s take the Instagram post below. Where an affiliate marketer models Gymshark apparel and mentions an affiliate code for the athletic brand:
A major perk of affiliate marketing is its focus on sales. If your marketing goals focus on conversions, affiliate marketing may be a better choice than influencer marketing.
9. Audio Marketing
Audio marketing relies on marketing assets that potential customers listen to. Podcasts are among the most common types of audio marketing.
For example, the I Will Teach You to Be Rich podcast promotes host Ramit Sethi’s brand, book, and Netflix show.
Audio marketing tends to work well for improving brand awareness and educating customers.
Organize, analyze, and improve your audio marketing assets with Semrush’s Podcast Hosting.
The app provides audience engagement and platform engagement insights for your uploaded audio content.
Use this data to understand how your listeners engage—letting you know what works. For instance, you may find that listeners prefer certain topics or formats. So you’ll know what to create more of.
10. Public Relations (PR)
PR agencies use channels like news outlets, social media, and targeted outreach to generate earned media.
A major benefit of PR is that it can improve your brand’s visibility across digital marketing channels, including social media, search, and content marketing.
While PR professionals can’t control earned media, they can influence it. Common tactics include issuing press releases and making connections with members of the press.
Take a look at this Investopedia article referencing an earnings report by Netflix’s PR team.
A successful PR strategy involves generating more positive brand mentions online. Use the Brand Monitoring app to track mentions of your organization, executives, products, or services across the web and social media platforms.
Brand Monitoring automatically analyzes sentiment and labels your mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. So you can quickly assess how the press, influencers, and customers feel about your brand.
Then, you can identify the PR efforts that drive the most positive sentiment. And find issues that contribute to negative sentiment so you can work to improve your online reputation.
11. SMS Marketing
SMS marketing uses text messages to connect with customers via their smartphones. A typical SMS marketing strategy focuses on promotional messages that:
- Feature new products or services
- Mention limited-time offers or discounts
- Prompt loyal customers to repurchase items
For example, customers who sign up for texts from soda brand Olipop can expect exclusive promotions plus early access to new products.
Combined with mobile marketing and social media marketing, SMS marketing can enable brands to succeed at reaching, engaging, and converting customers on mobile devices.
12. Virtual Reality (VR) Marketing
VR marketing uses immersive virtual environments for promotional purposes. It typically requires people to wear headsets that create interactive, 360-degree environments.
For example, Meta Horizon Worlds is a virtual world that users can access via Meta Quest headsets. Brands can build virtual environments in Horizon Worlds or partner with influencers to promote their products and services.
Fast food restaurant chain Wendy’s opened the Wendyverse in Meta Horizon Worlds, giving visitors an opportunity to engage virtually with the brand.
One of the biggest benefits of VR marketing is its novelty. The VR space is less crowded than most other digital spaces on this list, which may allow early adopters to leverage it for considerable gain.
However, the adoption of VR technology is also lower than most other options on this list. As a result, the potential audience brands can reach with VR marketing is more limited.
13. AI Marketing
AI marketing uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to communicate with customers.
Many AI marketing tools are designed to respond to user input. They use natural language processing (NLP) to understand both the content and the context of human input.
Some of the most common types of AI marketing include:
- Chatbots that answer questions and provide customer service
- Personal assistants (like Google Assistant) that can have two-way conversations
- Personalized marketing content based on users’ preferences and past behaviors
In fact, personalization is one of the biggest perks of AI marketing. With AI marketing tools, brands can create custom experiences that build better relationships with prospects and customers alike.
Further reading: Check out our curated list of the 13 Best AI Assistants for Marketers to enhance your audience-building and engagement efforts.
Maximize Your Digital Potential with Semrush
With an effective digital strategy, you can reach your target audience across channels and guide potential customers through the marketing funnel.
But with so many channels and tactics to manage, all types of digital marketing require a robust toolset to help them function smoothly.
Semrush has 55+ tools that can support your wide-ranging online marketing campaigns. Sign up for a free trial to diversify your marketing efforts and increase your ROI potential.