TYPES OF ONLINE MARKETING

Listen to this blog post:

Are you ready to start marketing and promoting your business, products, and services online? Not sure how or what to do?

To get a "leg up" on your competition you need to know all the options available to you for marketing your business online.

You need to know the different online lead generation strategies and how each one helps attract visitors and which are best for you to get leads online.

Well, we've outlined the different ways that you can promote your business with different types of online marketing.

Here are the different types of online marketing:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
Public Relations (PR)
Social Media Marketing
Content Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Influencer Marketing
Email Marketing
Viral Marketing
Mobile Advertising
Marketing Automation
Inbound Marketing

Here's what you'll learn:

What they are
How each type helps
If there's a cost to it
When to expect results

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Optimizing your site to rank higher and be easily found in search engines

How Does SEO Help?

Search engine optimization often referred to as SEO indirectly helps businesses increase traffic to their websites.

By ranking higher in search results, you increase the possibility of searchers clicking on your links.

What Does SEO Cost?

If you do it yourself, SEO is free. It may cost you tons of time to get it right, but you can do it.

If you hire someone to do it, it can cost hundreds to thousands of dollars.

If you hire someone who knows what they're doing, the investments will be worth it. SEO can have a huge ROI, particularly in the long term.

We'd advise that you look to pay between $500/mo and $3,000/mo for quality ongoing service and depending on your company size and the results you want.

For on-page SEO, which is a one time service, you should look to pay a minimum of $1000; however, it can cost much more depending on the size of your website.

When Should I Expect Results From SEO?

Search engine optimization does take time. For new sites, it can take two to three months to see the first results (good or bad) from your efforts.

For more established sites, it can take up to a month, but some results can show up within a matter of hours. Adverse outcomes can show up almost in real-time.

What Is Pay Per Click Advertising?

PPC is when you sponsor links that are typically seen in search results and on some social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. As it sounds, you pay everytime someone clicks on your ad.

How Does Pay Per Click (PPC) Help?

Pay Per Click advertising is a way to increase traffic to a website almost immediately. Additionally, it's a cost you can control and manage.

PPC is exceptionally transparent in that you know how many people click on your ads and where they go from the ads. It's highly trackable from the start.

How Much Does PPC Cost?

The great thing about PPC is that you can nearly spend as much or as little as you like. You can run your ads for hours or years.

If you work with an agency, then they may require a minimum monthly spend on top of their fee to manage and optimize your ads.

Some companies charge a percentage of your monthly ad spend, while others charge a flat rate for each month. These parameters can make pricing vary quite a bit.

Expect to pay anywhere between $200 and $3000 a month outside of, but based on your ad spend. The more significant your ad spend typically, the larger the management fee.

If you want to avoid the management fees, you can try to run the ads yourself.

When Should I Expect Results From PPC?

You should expect to see results right away once you've submitted your ads.

Google and Facebook have an approval process for running ads on their platforms. Once your ad is approved, you can see traffic to your site almost immediately.

The ad approval process is typically complete within an hours or so.

What Is Public Relations?

Public relations is managing the exposure of a company in the news and public opinion.

How Does Public Relations Help?

Public relations helps a company or organization keep their reputation positive in the news, public opinion, or in alignment with their brand.

How Much Does Public Relations Cost?

On the lower end, smaller agencies and individuals may charge between $2000 and $5000 per month.

It's not uncommon to pay retainers between $5,000 and $10,000 month while well-known agencies may charge upwards of $20,000 per month.

When Should I Expect Results From Public Relations?

Public relations can have some immediate impact, but you should expect results in the mid to long term in most cases.

PR takes strategy, and typically that strategy rolls out over time. You should give your PR five to seven months before getting concerned about the outcomes.

Six months is a reasonable timeframe to evaluate what your efforts have produced.

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is when you use social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram, to drive traffic or leads to a website, or promote a product or service to increase sales.

How Does Social Media Marketing Help?

Social media marketing is a great way to reach and engage your customers directly. It's also a great place to test new products and services.

You can reach your audience right where they are and get a good idea of their behavior. If you do a good job, your audience will begin to follow you.

If you're not doing so great or just getting started, you can monitor a competitors page to learn what works and what doesn't.

How Much Does Social Media Marketing Cost?

If you manage your social media, it's free. Some platforms will allow you to run ads or promote specific content. That, of course, will come with a fee.

If you hire someone to manage your social accounts, it can range anywhere from $1000 to $3000 per month to find excellent service.

Typically the more frequently you want them to engage your audience on your behalf the more it will cost.

When Should I Expect Results From Social Media Marketing?

Social media can be tricky. The results can vary based on which platform, your audience, and your products and services.

For some, you can see results immediately while for others it may take building a healthy relationship with your audience.

Retail sales typically move much faster on social media than say a consultative or high-end service.

Keep in mind that the more someone has to consider or learn about a product or service the longer it will take to convert them.

What Is Content Marketing?

Creating valuable content online and sharing it to increase traffic and leads.

Some content types include blogs, landing pages, whitepapers, eBooks, checklist, infographics, charts and graphs, statistics, photos, video, slideshows, webinars, presentations, templates, and several other valuable resources.

How Does Content Marketing Help?

When done well, carefully planned quality content attracts and engages a targeted audience and turns them into site visitors with a goal of inspiring profitable action from those visitors.

How Much Does Content Marketing Cost?

Do to the various forms of content and how each can vary in length content marketing has a wide range of costs.

Fees can range between $500 and $50,000 per content piece.

When Should I Expect Results From Content Marketing?

Most agencies will shy away from this question. First, it depends on your goals and the desired result. Second, content marketing provides several measurable outcomes.

Content marketing answers consumers common questions
Content marketing educates the buyer
Content marketing attracts targeted visitors
Content marketing can help convert visitors into leads
Content marketing can nurture leads into customers

You can expect content marketing to have an immediate impact on your website traffic.

Depending on how aggressive your strategy, you can increase your visitors by hundred and thousands of new site visitors

Your content is also immediately more helpful to site visitors looking for answers.

You should start to see more of the "right fit" leads within the first few months, typically between three and six months.

The faster you want results, the more aggressive, and helpful, your content strategy should be.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Paying commissions to external websites for driving traffic or sales from tracked referrals

There are two sides to affiliate marketing. You can be the company paying the affiliates for traffic, leads, and sales; or you can be an affiliate being paid to help generate traffic leads and sales.

There are plenty of blog posts about being an affiliate and how to set that up. We will discuss cover it from the perspective that you are looking to generate more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Help?

Affiliate marketing is another form of paid marketing.

It's a great way to get exposure to your business through other sites that may attract more visitors than your website or through a multitude of websites that may have less traffic than yours but help increase your traffic when all added together.

Maybe your site has 1,000 sessions per month (on its own), and you have 100 affiliate sites that each provide 25 additional user sessions per month from their website to yours.

Combined these sites generate 2,500 additional sessions on your website giving you a total of 3,500 sessions per month.

The bonus is that your affiliate sites are typically targeting the same or similar customers, so you attract more of your best-fit clients.

Typically a company only pays its affiliates, when they send traffic or help create a lead or sales.

Affiliate marketing is particularly great when you know the affiliates

How Much Does Affiliate Marketing Cost?

It depends on the model you choose for your affiliate program. Some companies pay 50% of the profit from each sale while others pay $0.01 for each session generated.

One of the significant advantages of affiliate marketing and setting up your affiliate program is that you decide how much you will pay out for a lead, sell, or traffic.

Once you've got it in place, you can judge your pay structure by how many other sites sign up for your program.

When Should I Expect Results From Affiliate Marketing?

You can start receiving traffic leads and sales from affiliate marketing on the first day you have an affiliate add your business to their site.

Of course, this is relative to the traffic the affiliate receives and if the visitors to their site have an interest in your product or service.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Similar to endorsements or spokespeople; this uses a person who has a following and influence with your target audience enough to drive traffic and sales.

How Does Influencer Marketing Help?

Individuals who have a large, loyal following and can influence them towards or away from a product or service this can be a tremendous asset for your business.

If executed well, you can instantly gain favor, and great loyalty, from the influencer's audience.

In some cases, this can help you break into new markets and serve an entirely different audience then your business has traditionally.

For example, you may traditionally serve baby boomers, but are looking to attract more millennials.

Partnering with or winning the favor of an influencer that has a large audience of millennials may be a great way to start attracting them more.

How Much Does Influencer Marketing Cost?

The cost varies depending on how well the influencer is known, how large of a following they have, what form of media they are posting (picture vs. video), and the platform they are on.

On the lower end, this can cost $10 per thousand follers post, $100 per 1,000 views, or $250 for a video post.

On the higher end, you can pay $100 per thousand views or $750 per 1,000 engagements (shares, likes, comments, etc.)

Buffer has a great post that outlines cost in more detail based on the platform and the followers of the influencer.

When Should I Expect Results From Influencer Marketing?

While you may not readily tie influencer marketing to revenue, you will see an increase in engagements and possibly sales within minutes and continuing over the next few days to weeks depending on the number of followers and the popularity of the influencer.

What Is Email Marketing?

Sending helpful or promotional information to email addresses you've collected from site visitors

How Does Email Marketing Help?

While many have slowly moved away from email marketing, it is still one of the most effective forms of marketing.

One of the primary benefits of email marketing is that, unlike all your contacts on social media, you own the list you build.

While you can connect with millions of people on social media, all of your contacts, fans, and followers belong to the platforms where you connected.

If Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn or any other platform decided that you had to pay to engage, access more of their network, log on to their platform or send messages, there's not much you could do about it.

It sounds like that's what has started to happen over the past few years.

With email marketing, you own the list that you build, and with so many people checking email on their smartphones, you have direct access to your audience.

Email marketing is particularly useful since most people check their phones as soon as they wake up before they go to bed and over 20 times per day in between.

How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?

The cost of software can range from free to $400 per month, while the cost to execute and manage email campaigns can range from $200 to $1,000 per month.

Some of the factors that can affect the cost are; the length of the email (word count), the uniqueness of the design and layout, and the size of the email list.

When Should I Expect Results From Email Marketing?

The results of email marketing will vary vastly depending on the content of the email.

If you are promoting a sale or a limited time offer, you would be more likely to see immediate results.

For more expensive services like remodeling your kitchen, it may take several months to see results.

If you have a product or service that buyers need time to learn, understand, and consider your solution it can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to over a year before they decide to buy.

It's good to consider how much of an investment a buyer need to make when setting your expectations for results.

The more they need to spend and the less urgent their need; the more likely it will take longer for them to buy.

The better you understand this will help you determine how long you need to nurture your email subscribers.

What Is Viral Marketing?

When content or promotions are shared organically by viewers passing the information to other sites and users on an exponential scale

How Does Viral Marketing Help?

Viral marketings most significant value is that it gets in front of a broader audience extremely fast, typically thousands to millions of people for a single post.

Like the origin of its name, it spreads quickly like a virus, or viral outbreak, organically from person to person. Only, it spreads based on viewers like or dislike of the subject matter and desire to share it with others.

How Much Does Viral MarketingCost?

In many cases, a post going viral is organic or free. The cost, if any, is in the creation of the content. Any graphics or video production involved.

Agencies that specialize in viral marketing can charge between $5,000 and $100,000 depending on their record of success and ability to prove ROI.

When Should I Expect Results From Viral Marketing?

The subject matter of the content heavily influences viral marketing outcomes.

In some cases, a post may go viral over the span of several months, while others may go viral in a matter of hours.

Taylor Swift's "Look what you made me do" YouTube video had over 43 million views in 24 hours [Statista]

What Is Mobile Advertising?

Advertising that focuses on strategies that reach a specific audience on their smartphones. It can include email, SMS, MMS, social media and mobile applications.

How Does Mobile Advertising Help?

Mobile advertising reaches targeted audiences on their smartphones. You can reach the right people at the right time in the right way.

Mobile Advertising or mobile marketing can be invaluable for retail businesses and restaurants.

Mobile marketing can trigger based on your audiences proximity to your business location.

A great use case for this is sending out coupons, or lunch specials shortly before and during lunch hours to smartphone users within a five-mile radius of your restaurant.

How Much Does Mobile Advertising Cost?

Mobile advertising can vary widely based on the network you choose to advertise. Some campaigns can cost $0.01 per thousand views while others more than $10.00 per thousand views.

When Should I Expect Results From Mobile Advertising?

In many cases, mobile advertising is like any other pay per click or per impression campaign. You can see results on the same day and almost immediately.

What is Marketing Automation?

Automation is the use of software, technologies, and strategies to automate repetitive marketing tasks.

How Does Marketing Automation Help?

Automation can help businesses reduce the cost per acquisition of a lead or customer, by automatically executing repetitive tasks based on various triggers by a prospect or website visitor.

If you automate your marketing, your organization can send emails to subscribers based on a specific webpage, a combination of web pages the subscriber visits, forms they've filled out, and emails they have viewed.

Automation allows companies to send users more of the content they are interested in based on the user's actions.

Automating your marketing is a great way to nurture visitors and leads into buying customers.

How much Does Marketing Automation Cost?

Automation software ranges between $1,000 per year and upwards of $48,000 per year.

The software features and the maximum number of contacts you can have typically determine the cost.

Their pricing can change as they add or remove features, so here's a list of platforms so you can compare pricing and features.

Setting up your automation, sometimes referred to as workflows, can take time and outside help from an agency.

Some agencies will create workflows within a retainer while others may do them on a project basis.

The cost of setting automation will vary based on its complexity, but you can expect to pay between $1,000 and $20,000 per workflow.

When Should I Expect Results From Marketing Automation?

Automation can make an impact the very day it's implemented.

Once you set up a workflow, all it takes is someone triggering the start of the workflow or adding existing contacts to the new workflow.

Automation should be tracked and measured for results regularly and improved over time so that you get the best result month after month.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Marketing that generates leads, and increases customer acquisition through a combination and the alignment of content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and branding while adding value at every stage of the buyer's journey.

How Does Inbound Marketing Help?

Inbound marketing is a specific methodology developed by HubSpot, to systematically attract strangers and convert them into website visitors, convert website visitors into leads, close leads into customers, and make customers into raving fan and promoters of your business.

Inbound marketing helps target and attract more of your ideal customers when they are looking for a solution that you provide.

Inbound uses several marketing strategies within its methodology including; blogging, content strategy, social media, content marketing, automation, email marketing, along with a CRM.

Inbound marketing is also closed-loop marketing, so it's nearly effortless to measure ROI.

How Much Does Inbound Marketing Cost?

Software to manage inbound marketing can cost anywhere from $100 per month to more than $3,000 per month.

If you hire an external agency to manage and execute your inbound marketing strategy, it can range anywhere from $1,000 per month to more than $20,000 per month.

Of course, each agency determines their rates by experience, track record and ability to show results.

When Should I Expect Results From Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing can take two to three months to ramp up. While you can generate leads very quickly, even in the first month or two, looking for results after six months is very reasonable.

Inbound marketing results tend to improve over time.

Conclusion

If you want to reach today's buyers, you must market online.

That means choosing the best strategy for you to reach your ideal clients within your budget and need.

It means taking real action. Don't start trying to do everything at once. Come up with a strategy, track and measure your results and work through optimizing your campaigns.

If you want your marketing to work, you can't just set it and forget it. You need to target the right people, check in regularly to ensure things are going well, and make any necessary adjustments to improve.

If you're not sure how to target the right people, you should start by making personas for your organization. This will help you better understand your ideal customer and reach them in the most optimal way.

Click here to learn more about personas

Once you've optimized a strategy, start the next one, and after you have a few up and running continue to use the ones that work best and stop the ones that don't work.

No matter which method you gravitate towards or prefer, make sure that you track it and attempt to optimize it as much as possible.

With the right combination of strategies, you can create a predictable source of leads and sales for your business for years to come.

Have you had success with any of these strategies? Share your stories or ask questions!