Like many of the people who work in the industry, digital marketing was born in the 1990s. Back then, email was the age of most college graduates, AT&T launched the first banner ad, and the CRM industry was just starting to thrive.
Needless to say, marketing has evolved at breakneck speed since then, sprouting many more types of marketing. Some are definitely more effective and relevant than others, so read on to learn about the top types of marketing around today.
The Ultimate List of Types of Marketing
1. Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing refers to brand promotion on any kind of channel that has been around since before the advent of the internet. Because information wasn’t as easily accessible and readily available, the majority of traditional marketing relied on outbound tactics such as print, television ads, and billboards.
2. Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing refers to intrusive promotion such as print ads, TV ads, cold calling, and email blasts. This marketing method is called “outbound” since the brand is pushing their message out to all consumers to spread awareness — whether they are in need of it or not.
3. Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is focused on attracting customers rather than interrupting them. The majority of inbound marketing tactics fall under digital marketing as consumers are empowered to do research online as they progress through their own buyer’s journey (more on that later).
The focus for inbound is on creating valuable experiences that have a positive impact on people and your business to pull prospects and customers to your website with relevant and helpful content. Once they arrive, you engage with them using conversational tools like email and chat and by promising continued value. Finally, you delight them by continuing to act as an empathetic advisor and expert.
4. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is the opposite of traditional marketing, leveraging technology that didn’t exist traditionally to reach audiences in new ways. This type of marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. We’ve broken some of these down in more detail below.
5. Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing, or SEM, includes all activities in the effort of ensuring your business's products or services are visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). When a user types in a certain keyword, SEM enables your business to appear as a top result for that search query. The two types of SEM include search engine optimization (SEO) for organic search results and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising for sponsored SERPs.
To get started with SEO, you must familiarize yourself with search engine ranking factors and produce content for search engines to index.
To get started with pay-per-click SEM, you must work with the search engine you’re looking to purchase placements with. Google Ads is a popular choice. There are also ads management tools to make creating and managing PPC campaigns a breeze.
6. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a key instrument in inbound and digital marketing because content is what allows audiences as well as search engines, such as Google, to find the information they need on the web. By definition, it involves creating, publishing, and distributing content to your target audience. The most common components of a content marketing program are social media networks, blogs, visual content, and premium content assets, like tools, ebooks, or webinars.
With content marketing, the goal is to help your audience along their buyer’s journey. First, identify common FAQs and concerns your buyers have before they are ready to make a purchase. Then, create an editorial calendar to help you create and manage your content. It also helps to have a content management system to make publishing easy.
7. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is creating content to promote your brand and products on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Remember your audience as you create content. No one logs on to social media looking for something to purchase, so think through what types of content that is useful, informative, entertaining, and/or compelling. Your unique content should be tailored to the specific platform you share it on to help you boost your post’s reach.
In order to make publishing content across platforms easy, there are a number of social media tools out there such as that simplify the process.
8. Video Marketing
Video marketing is a type of content marketing that involves using video as a medium. The idea is to create videos and upload them to your website, YouTube, and social media to boost brand awareness, generate conversions, and close deals. Some video marketing apps even allow you to analyze, nurture, and score leads based on their activity.
9. Voice Marketing
Voice marketing is leveraging smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home to educate people and answer questions about their topics of interest. Optimizing your website for voice search is very similar to optimizing for organic search, but beyond that, you can also get inventive by creating a Google action or Alexa skill.
10. Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending educational or entertaining content and promotional messages to people who willingly subscribe to your receive messages from you. The primary goal is to deepen your relationship with the customer or prospect by sending marketing messages personalized to them. Pushing that idea further, you can also use email marketing to nurture leads with content that moves them along the buyer’s journey.
Depending on your location, you must stay compliant with GDPR, the CAN-SPAM Act, and other regulations governing email. At their core, they boil down to responsible commercial email sending: Only send to people who are expecting messages from you (i.e. they’ve opted in), make it easy for them to opt out, and be transparent about who you are when you do make contact.
With that in mind, the first thing you’ll need to do is strategize how you’ll build your email list — the database of contacts you can send email to. The most common mechanism is through lead capture forms on your website. Then, you’ll need email marketing software and a CRM to send, track, and monitor the effectiveness of your emails. To push your email strategy further and maximize productivity, you may also want to look into email automation software that sends emails based on triggering criteria.
To learn the ins and outs of email marketing, you can take the free email marketing course from HubSpot academy.
11. Conversational Marketing
Conversational marketing is the ability to have 1:1 personal conversations across multiple channels, meeting customers how, when, and where they want. It is more than just live chat, extending to phone calls, texts, Facebook Messenger, email, Slack, and more.
When you’re getting started, you’ll first identify which channels your audience is on. The challenge, though, is being able to manage multiple channels without slow response times, internal miscommunication, or productivity loss. That’s why it’s important to use conversational marketing tools, such as a unified inbox, to streamline your efforts.
12. Buzz Marketing
Buzz marketing is a viral marketing strategy that leverages refreshingly creative content, interactive events, and community influencers to generate word-of-mouth marketing and anticipation for the product or service the brand is about to launch.
Buzz marketing works best when you reach out to influencers early and have a plan in place to generate suspense and perhaps even mystery. To track your buzz marketing efforts, it’s best to use social listening software to keep a pulse on how your audience is responding.
13. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is designed to tap into an existing community of engaged followers on social media. Influencers are considered experts in their niches. These individuals have a large influence over an audience you might be trying to reach and can be helpful marketing to those buyers.
To get started with influencer marketing, you must first create your influencer marketing strategy and define what type of influencer you’re targeting (their niche). Then, you’ll want to create a list of criteria that would make an influencer in that niche a good fit with you, considering things such as the size of their audience, how active that audience is, and the vibe on their profile.
From there, you can find influencers and reach out to them by:
- Manually searching on social media
- Using an influencer marketing platform
- Hiring an agency to do the influencer research and outreach for you
From there, you’ll want to understand that the influencer is the one who knows their audience the best, so maintain a good relationship with that individual and allow them some creative freedom with how they handle your promotion.
14. Acquisition Marketing
While all types of marketing is geared toward acquiring customers, the majority of types have broader and softer goals such as improving brand awareness or driving traffic. In contrast, acquisition marketing is laser-focused on acquiring customers.
Acquisition marketing is an umbrella type of marketing that employs the tactics and strategies of other types of marketing but focuses on how to turn those marketing benefits into revenue. Ultimately, the focus is on lead generation from the results you get driving website traffic from inbound marketing, including content, social media, and search engine marketing.
Once you have website traffic, you must turn that traffic into leads and, eventually, sales. That’s where acquisition marketing comes in. Acquisition marketing may involve a number of tactics to turn a website into a lead generation engine, including offering freemium products, launching education hubs, tightening the copywriting on the site, conversion rate optimization, and lead optimization. It may even include a lead optimization and nurturing strategy to facilitate the hand-off between marketing and sales.
15. Contextual Marketing
Contextual marketing is targeting online users with different ads on websites and social media networks based on their online browsing behavior. The number one way to make contextual marketing efforts powerful is through personalization. A CRM combined with powerful marketing tools such as smart CTAs can make a website seem more like a “choose your own adventure” story, allowing the user to find the right information and take the right actions more effectively.
Contextual marketing takes strategy and planning, so start off on the right foot by accessing HubSpot’s free contextual marketing course.
16. Personalized Marketing
The goal here is to be thought-provoking and generate discussion so that your brand is remembered and associated with positive sentiment.
In order to begin brand marketing, you need to deeply understand your buyer persona and what resonates with them. You must also consider your position in the market and what makes you unique from competitors. This can help shape your values and what you stand for, giving you fodder for storytelling campaigns.
17. Brand Marketing
Brand marketing is shaping your brand’s public perception and forging an emotional connection with your target audience through storytelling, creativity, humor, and inspiration.
The goal here is to be thought-provoking and generate discussion so that your brand is remembered and associated with positive sentiment.
In order to begin brand marketing, you need to deeply understand your buyer persona and what resonates with them. You must also consider your position in the market and what makes you unique from competitors. This can help shape your values and what you stand for, giving you fodder for storytelling campaigns.
18. Stealth Marketing
Stealth marketing is when a brand hires actors or celebrities or uses pseudonyms to promote their product or service without consumers realizing they’re being marketed to. Some examples of stealth marketing are hiring actors to subtly promote products to the public, sockpuppeting, paying influencers to post about a product or service without disclosing that it’s actually an ad, creating fake viral videos, and product placement in movies.
19. Guerrilla Marketing
Guerrilla marketing is placing bold, clever brand activations in high-traffic physical locations to reach audiences in a creative and cost-effective way, grow brand awareness, and spread the word about your brand. Examples of guerilla marketing include altering outdoor urban environments, targeting indoor locations such as train stops, and promoting during a live event without permission from the sponsors.
20. Native Marketing
Native marketing is when brands pay reputable publishers to collaborate in the creative process of crafting a sponsored article or video that covers one of the publisher’s main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on their website. They also pay these publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website. In sum, when brands pay for a publisher’s native advertising services, they can leverage their editorial expertise and reach to help their brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership.
In order to benefit from native marketing, you’ll need to either reach out to media publications yourself or go through a native advert network that helps find and facilitate ad placement.
21. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when an online retailer rewards a website with a commission for each customer they refer through their promotion of one of the online retailers’ products. The website, often called an affiliate, will only get paid when their promotion generates a sale.
If you already have marketing assets that are performing, such as a website that generates traffic or an engaged network on social media or elsewhere, affiliate marketing is a great way to further leverage those assets. Choose a product or brand that closely aligns with what you sell (but does not compete with you) and promote it to your audience.
22. Partner Marketing
Partner marketing is attracting new partners to sell your product or service to another pool of customers. For example, a HubSpot, we have an agency partner program where inbound marketing agencies sell our product to their clients, and we give our partners a cut of the revenue.
23. Product Marketing
Product marketing is bringing a product to market and driving demand for it. This includes deciding the product’s positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand its benefits and features. This can be done through many of the marketing methods discussed in this article but with a focus on the product rather than an organization as a whole.
24. Account-based Marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a hyper-focused marketing strategy where teams treat an individual prospect or customer like its very own market. Marketing teams create content, host events, and launch entire campaigns dedicated to the people associated with that account, rather than the industry as a whole.
The advantage of this is having personalized campaigns for your ideal client. Here’s how you can start:
- Identify key accounts.
- Create messaging based on issues that matter to those accounts.
- Learn how to put that messaging in action with HubSpot’s introductory ABM lesson.
- Find ABM software that can enable your efforts.
25. Customer Marketing
In contrast to acquisition marketing where the focus is on acquiring new customers, customer marketing is focusing on retaining your existing customers, delighting them with your product or service and customer service, and turning them into advocates for your brand who can spread the word about your brand. This is a great strategy because the cost of acquisition is much higher than what it takes to retain or upsell existing customers.
Customer marketing relies on constant improvement of the customer experience — or the impression you leave with a customer after you’ve provided service. Simple ways to improve the customer experience — and, as a result, tap into customer marketing — is by eliminating friction in the customer service process, providing ways for them to self-service such as through online knowledge bases, and using customer service software to manage and improve customer communication.
26. Word of Mouth Marketing
Word of mouth marketing is customers’ recommendations of a brand, which is the most trusted form of marketing today. To create as much word of mouth marketing as possible, you need to stay laser-focused on developing the best product or service possible and providing top-notch customer service. In other words, you need to serve your customers' needs before your own. Only then will your customers turn into a loyal, passionate tribe that will recommend your brand to their friends and family.
27. Relationship Marketing
Relationship marketing is a type of customer marketing that focuses on cultivating deeper, more meaningful relationships with customers to ensure long-term brand loyalty. Relationship marketing is not focused on short-term wins or sales transactions. Instead, it’s focused on creating brand evangelists that become promoters for the long-haul.
The key to doing this is by focusing on delighting your customers who are already satisfied with your brand. Start by using customer feedback software to run a Net Promoter Score (NPS) campaign to help you find out who those customers are. Then, come up with ways to turn those happy customers into raving fans. From there, you can request that they leave a testimonial, participate in a case study, or help you achieve your customer delight goals in some other way.
28. User-generated Marketing
User-generated marketing is when businesses ask the public for ideas, information, and opinions on social media or run contests to help them craft better marketing material, like a logo, jingle, or commercial.
29. Campus Marketing
Campus marketing is hiring college students to become campus ambassadors for your brand. They usually market your products or services to other students by setting up booths around campus or hosting giveaways.
30. Proximity Marketing
Proximity marketing is when brands use Beacons, which are Bluetooth devices that send alerts to people’s smartphones based on their proximity to one of their stores, to promote discounts to any customer who walks by one of their stores and has their app. Beacons can also pinpoint people’s locations in a store and send them deals on the products and brands that are in the same section as them.
31. Event Marketing
Event marketing is planning, organizing, and executing an event for the purpose of promoting a brand, product, or service. Events can take place in-person or online, and companies can either host an event, attend as an exhibitor, or participate as a sponsor. Many organizations leverage their unique experience in the industry to provide present helpful informational sessions in exchange for the cost of admission and the brand positioning that results after being seen by attendees as an authority on the topic. Alternatively, or in conjunction with that strategy, there may be a pitch at the end of the event to prompt interested attendees to make a purchase.
32. Experiential Marketing
Experiential marketing encompasses in-person events, experiences, and interactions that forge lasting emotional connections between a brand and its target audience. Experiential marketing takes event marketing just one step further with the goal of making the experience magical for attendees, providing something they can take with them after the event is over — other than just information, of course.
At HubSpot, we do our best to make our INBOUND conference an immersive experience that extends beyond breakout sessions by including networking opportunities, entertainment, parties and happy hours, food truck lunches, and other immersive experiences. Instead of a conference, INBOUND becomes a celebration.
33. Interactive Marketing
Interactive marketing is an innovative type of marketing where your audience can interact with engaging visuals or videos within your content. This new form of marketing unleashes your creativity and, in turn, allows you to tell more gripping stories, crowning it as one of the best ways to capture your audience’s attention. Examples of interactive marketing include immersive video and interactive infographics.
34. Global Marketing
Global marketing is focusing on the needs of potential buyers in other countries. Typically, a global marketing strategy requires a business to do new market research, identify countries where the business's product might be successful, and then localize the brand to reflect the needs of those communities.
35. Multicultural Marketing
Multicultural marketing is devising and executing a marketing campaign that targets people of different ethnicities and cultures within a brand’s overarching audience. Not only does it help you relate to and resonate with minority groups, but it also recognizes their ethnicities and cultures and helps majority groups realize that most countries are melting pots and not dominated by one main ethnicity or culture.
36. Informative Marketing
Informative marketing is a kind of marketing that refers primarily to the type of message your marketing gets across, focusing more on the facts and less on emotions. This marketing tactic highlights how your product’s features and benefits solve your customers’ problems and can even compare your product to your competitors' product. Although this type of marketing relies on facts and figures to trigger a desired action, it’s usually framed in a compelling way.
37. Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing blends neuroscience and marketing to help brands gauge the emotional resonance of their current and future marketing campaigns. To do this, companies like Immersion Neuroscience and Spark Neuro have developed technology that can gauge certain neurochemical and physiological responses, which both signal emotional engagement while consuming marketing content.
38. Persuasive Marketing
Persuasive marketing focuses more on the emotions and less on the facts. It aims to make an audience feel something, associate those emotions with a brand, and trigger a desired action.
39. Cause Marketing
Cause marketing is a type of corporate social responsibility that aims to simultaneously improve society and boost a brand’s awareness by promoting and supporting a charitable cause.
Sheryl Green, author of Do Good to Do Better, a book on cause marketing, describes this scenario: "There's nothing fun about selling widgets ... [so] Susan is about to discover the power of Cause Marketing. She pledges 1% of her gross sales to support her local food bank. She spends her Saturday mornings at soup kitchens serving the homeless. She has donation boxes set up in her employee break rooms and gives comp time to her employees who want to volunteer. And, she has switched her commercials from a description of the widget making process to a story about how her employees give back to the community and how they’ve served over 6000 meals in the last year. Susan is no longer selling widgets… now she’s selling warm fuzzies."
All of this is because Susan, the fictitious owner of the widget company, chose to marry her business with her desire to support the community.
Cause marketing begins by answering three questions:
- What causes do I care most about?
- How can I leverage my company's position to support those causes?
- How can I tell my prospects and customers about my efforts so that they can get involved?
That last question benefits both your business and the cause/charity you're supporting.
40. Controversial Marketing
Controversial marketing doesn’t aim to polarize an audience. It’s an attention-grabbing technique for stating an opinion, and brands use it to spark productive conversations about certain moral values. In recent years, any stance taken on sensitive social issues can be considered controversial marketing. While you may turn off potential customers who disagree with you, your audience who agrees with you will be more committed to your brand and more likely to promote your message as it aligns with their world view.
41. Field Marketing
Field marketing is creating sales enablement content like case studies, product overviews, competitor comparisons, and more to help sales close their prospects into customers during the last stage of the buyer’s journey.
There’s no right or wrong way to do marketing — as long as it’s effective for connecting with your desired audience. Many companies use one, a few, or multiple types of marketing to promote their message across campaigns and other efforts.
Ultimately, you’ll want to choose what works best for your buyers, niche, budget, and resources. It’s up to you to be on top of current trends and leverage that knowledge as you create your marketing plan.
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