Search engine marketing (SEM)

SEM, also known as PPC advertising, involves the purchase of ad space in prominent, visible positions atop search results pages and websites. Search ads have been shown to have a positive impact on brand recognition, awareness, and conversions.

33% of searchers who click on paid ads do so because they directly respond to their particular search query.

Social media marketing

70% of marketers list increasing brand awareness as their number one goal for marketing on social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are listed as the top platforms currently used by social media marketing teams.

Content marketing

56% of marketers believe personalized content – brand-centered blogs, articles, social updates, videos, landing pages – improves brand recall and engagement.

According to Mentionlytics, an active and consistent content strategy that incorporates elements of interactive content creation, social posting, and guest blogging can improve brand awareness and loyalty by 88%.

Developments and strategies

As digital marketing is dependent on technology which is ever-evolving and fast-changing, the same features should be expected from digital marketing developments and strategies. This portion is an attempt to qualify or segregate the notable highlights existing and being used as of press time.

Segmentation: More focus has been placed on segmentation within digital marketing, in order to target specific markets in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer sectors.

Influencer marketing: Important nodes are identified within related communities, known as influencers. This is becoming an important concept in digital targeting. Influencers allow brands to take advantage of social media and the large audiences available on many of these platforms. It is possible to reach influencers via paid advertising, such as Facebook Advertising or Google Adwords campaigns, or through sophisticated sCRM (social customer relationship management) software, such as SAP C4C, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage CRM, and Salesforce CRM. Many universities now focus, at Masters's level, on engagement strategies for influencers.

To summarize, Pull digital marketing is characterized by consumers actively seeking marketing content while Push digital marketing occurs when marketers send messages without that content being actively sought by the recipients.

Online behavioral advertising is the practice of collecting information about a user's online activity over time, "on a particular device and across different, unrelated websites, in order to deliver advertisements tailored to that user's interests and preferences. Such Advertisements are customized as per the user behavior and pattern.

Collaborative Environment: A collaborative environment can be set up between the organization, the technology service provider, and the digital agencies to optimize effort, resource sharing, reusability, and communications. Additionally, organizations are inviting their customers to help them better understand how to service them. This source of data is called User Generated Content. Much of this is acquired via company websites where the organization invites people to share ideas that are then evaluated by other users of the site.

The most popular ideas are evaluated and implemented in some form. Using this method of acquiring data and developing new products can foster the organization's relationship with its customer as well as spawn ideas that would otherwise be overlooked. UGC is low-cost advertising as it is directly from the consumers and can save advertising costs for the organization.

Data-driven advertising: Users generate a lot of data in every step they take on the path of customer journey and Brands can now use that data to activate their known audience with data-driven programmatic media buying. Without exposing customers' privacy, users' data can be collected from digital channels (e.g.: when the customer visits a website, reads an e-mail, or launches and interact with a brand's mobile app), brands can also collect data from real-world customer interactions, such as brick and mortar stores visits and from CRM and sales engines datasets.

Also known as people-based marketing or addressable media, data-driven advertising is empowering brands to find their loyal customers in their audience and deliver in real time a much more personal communication, highly relevant to each customers' moment and actions.
An important consideration today while deciding on a strategy is that digital tools have democratized the promotional landscape.

Remarketing: Remarketing plays a major role in digital marketing. This tactic allows marketers to publish targeted ads in front of an interest category or a defined audience, generally called searchers in web speak, they have either searched for particular products or services or visited a website for some purpose.

Game advertising: Game ads are advertisements that exist within computer or video games. One of the most common examples of in-game advertising is billboards appearing in sports games. In-game ads also might appear as brand-name products like guns, cars, or clothing that exist as gaming status symbols.

Benefits of social media marketing

• Allows companies to promote themselves to large, diverse audiences that could not be reached through traditional marketing such as phone and email-based advertising.
• Marketing on most social media platforms comes at little to no cost- making it accessible to virtually any size business.
• Accommodates personalized and direct marketing that targets specific demographics and markets.
• Companies can engage with customers directly, allowing them to obtain feedback and resolve issues almost immediately.
• The ideal environment for a company to conduct market research.
• Can be used as a means of obtaining information about competitors and boost competitive advantage.
• Social platforms can be used to promote brand events, deals, and news.
• Platforms can also be used to offer incentives in the form of loyalty points and discounts.