Different Types of Marketing to Know About
Marketing and selling are intertwined, and people often confuse selling for marketing and vice versa. There are many types of marketing. Marketing is more than just billboards and the advertisements that interrupt your prime-time news on TV – it’s strategies that business owners use to communicate to their customers to promote their brand, and increase brand loyalty, customer retention, and revenue generation.
What exactly is marketing?
Before highlighting the different types of marketing, let’s first describe what marketing is.
According to the American marketing association, “Marketing is the set of activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating communication delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, partners, and society.” The general marketing strategies that exist include B2B, B2C, and B2G marketing.
Business to Business Marketing
Business to business marketing is a type of marketing where a business sells products, services, or solutions to another business. For example, a telecommunication company markets its internet for business or cloud solutions targeting other companies—for example, account-based marketing strategies, event marketing at trade shows, and inbound marketing strategies.
Business to Consumer Marketing
This involves positioning businesses’ products, solutions, or services directly to the consumer market.
Business to Government Marketing
This is a type of marketing where businesses target governmental and sometimes large non-governmental organizations to market their products.
Types of Marketing
To ease our comprehension of the different types of marketing, let’s classify marketing into two major categories; Digital and Traditional marketing.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing involves the use of online platforms to reach the target market. It includes:
● Email marketing
● Social media marketing
● Mobile marketing
● SEO Marketing
● Affiliate-marketing
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a digital type of marketing where e-commerce and other business owners utilize social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to market their products. Social media marketing can be organic content, paid ads, and user-generated content.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a common and cost-effective form of marketing where business owners get to send targeted emails to their qualified leads. It’s used in both Business to Business and Business to Consumer marketing strategies. It has proven to be one of the most effective marketing types businesses use to smash their targets. The fact that emails can be personalized to the intended customer contributes to its success rate.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is where the brand owner pays the owner of another website to advertise their product. Pay Per Click marketing is one type of affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is often used in combination with influencer marketing strategies to target a specific demographic of clients.
SEO Marketing
Search engine optimization type of marketing is the type of marketing where the business owners enrich their web pages with keyword-relevant content to enable their web pages to rank highly on search engines such as Google and Bing. This enables potential customers to interact with their content more frequently.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is the type of marketing that involves using push messages and app notifications to reach customers via mobile apps and messaging services. For effective mobile marketing, a marketer will need to generate leads based on customer numbers, which is more challenging to get from customers than emails. Mobile marketing is also a very effective form of marketing because a customer who shares his mobile number could be classified as a customer who fits at the bottom of the sales funnel.
Traditional Marketing
Include marketing types that have been used conventionally for many years, even before the advent of the internet.
Word of Mouth Marketing
This is also referred to as customer referral, where existing customers refer brands to other people. This type of marketing relies on superior services and products offered by the business, which excite the existing customers, making them automatically refer the brands to other people. Some incentives offered to these customers can also influence them to market your products.
Telemarketing
Telemarketing involves cold-calling potential customers to enlighten them about your product. Customer numbers could easily initially be obtained from phone directories. Besides cold calling, you can also call existing customers to provide information on new products and offers.
Other types of traditional marketing include partner marketing, outbound marketing, and public relations marketing, where a newsworthy item is used to generate a buzz around a particular product.
