The 4 Types Of Marketing

Content marketing is a broad strategy that encompasses many others but, in essence, it's a strategy that focuses purely on building strong relationships with your target market. You push valuable, relevant content into their faces that aim to educate and, eventually, sell.

If you’re a coach, for example, then ideally you’re going to generate value for your prospective customers to see all the time. In their mind, this establishes you as the authority on whatever niche you’re specializing in, making them that much more inclined to trust you and buy into what you’re selling.

Because, unlike one-off advertising strategies, content marketing must be consistent in a way that makes customers feel like you care. The world is endlessly huge and noisy and people just want to feel like they matter. That’s the key to your success here.

By now you should have a pretty good idea of what content marketing entails, but if you still need a few more hints, I’m sharing some popular types of content marketing below:

Blog Articles: This is any kind of article, news piece, or guide that’s published in the blog section of a website. You want to make this a goldmine for value and updates. TechCrunch is a blog that does this pretty well, providing technology and startup news about stuff like Silicon Valley updates to venture capital funding.

Videos and vlogs: Vlogs are blogs, except they’re filmed. People who create vlogs are called vloggers, and their purpose is to create entertaining, yet informative videos that will often include a product or service from the company funding the vlog. Once again the goal is to provide value but in a slightly flashier way, ideally with clean editing and a good script.

There are also a variety of different kinds of vlogs one can choose to make. A company like Trivago benefits more from travel vlogs, for example, while make-up and fashion brands often encourage the use of daily and a-day-in-the-life vlogs to show off their products in a natural setting that isn’t openly sales-y.

Webinars: An online seminar that takes place in a virtual space, allowing participants from anywhere in the world to come together. Webinars make for a good opportunity to reveal particularly explosive value, such as the secret to a business's success, insider tips, and other high-value content that you’re willing to expose to your audience.

White papers: This is another great way to exhibit authority over a chosen niche. Basically, white papers are long-form content intended to educate the target audience. It delves deeper into industry trends, issues, and policies to explain its causes, implications, and resulting benefits.

Research and statistical sources are needed here, and they make for great tools in a sales funnel. I know this best with my NO BS Marketing Newsletter.

Existing subscribers would know that I’ve filled it to the brim with everything I’ve learned in the marketing industry, from marketing strategies to timeless business principles, and even my very own secrets to success.

But just putting content out there won’t give your customers a reason to immediately trust you, especially if you try to just spill value all over the place with no real coherency.

Firstly, you need to figure out exactly who you’re creating that content for. What kind of people do you want to drive towards your website?

Then, you need to start thinking of the how. Where will you publish this content? Where will it be most visible to your target audience? What type of content will you create? And how will you create that kind of content?

From there you’ll get an idea of the kind of people you need, and the services you’ll use to make everything happen.

In today’s digital marketing scene, SEM or Search Engine Marketing has become a crucial part of getting your business out there.

Every day we use search engines as naturally as we breathe, going on Google to answer even the simplest of curiosities. That’s why businesses need to know how to position their web pages, to make sure that they stay even slightly above their competitors.

Creating a website should be the very first thing you accomplish if you want your business to get attention online.

Then, you might start digging into strategies like SEO or SEM, and – you don’t have to Google the answer for this one, because I can tell you right now that SEO and SEM are NOT the same.

Search Engine Marketing involves the use of paid ads to increase a webpage’s visibility on SERPs. So, when we talk about SEM, we’re generally referring to advertisements and SERP optimization strategies that are paid, rather than organic like with SEO.

A lot of marketers work with Google Ads, for example, to create paid ads that boost their web pages to the top of SERPs.

Those products that you often see at the top of the page that are related to your search term? Those are the paid ads. T

The organic results from SEO can be found below, which are the web pages that match your query.

SEM is all about placing ads at the top of a SERP, and there are a lot of different parts that make up this strategy.

To ensure that your SEM strategy is the best and most optimized it can be, businesses must have a good understanding of keyword research, pay-per-click marketing, ad structure, ad auction, quality score for ads, ad account structure, and SEM platforms. I’ll go over each one briefly below:

Keyword research: Relevant to SEM and SEO, this is the process of discovering terms online that users search for that you can relate to your product or business. It isn’t usually just one word, but a short phrase that users typically use.

Things like “healthy recipes” or “good steak restaurant” are terms you can match with campaigns and ads. This gives your website a better shot at appearing on results pages.

PPC marketing: PPC or pay-per-click marketing covers a variety of different advertising such as banner ads and SEM. It’s a little more involved than the name implies, working more similarly to Google Ads by subjecting ads to an auction, and they’re vetted before finally being displayed on a SERP. This is so that more advertisers have a chance to get their products in front of their target markets.

Ad structure: The rules regarding ad structure differ slightly depending on the search engine ad platform you’re using, but generally speaking, ads are made up of bold headlines and a simple description underneath. These two parts need to defer to the character limit while also giving enough context about the webpage, so the user knows exactly what it is and why they need to click. Utilizing CTAs is ideal.

Ad auction and set up: Ad auctions are an automated process that happens every time a user searches a query on a search engine. The search engine goes through each available ad and decides which ones are the most suited for the user’s needs.

Factors that go into that decision include ad relevance, maximum bid, and an ad’s quality score, which measures how relevant and clear your ad content is. All these factors come into play as a search engine determines the chance of your ads showing up on SERPs.

Quality score for ads: This essentially measures how “on target” your ad is with a rank given out of 10. The higher you score the better, of course.

Ad account structure: Opening an account on a platform like Google Ads requires a lot of time, this is to make sure your campaigns are organized and well-structured. You can create campaigns centered around a particular theme or target market, or write individualized ads per ad group.

SEM platforms: I’ve already mentioned Google Ads, so there’s that. Other platforms you can utilize for SEM are Microsoft Advertising, formerly known as Bing Ads, and Verizon Media Native. Both platforms make for great alternatives or secondary platforms alongside Google.

Have you ever gotten a call from a politician? Or from a telecommunications company encouraging you to try their new WiFi service? That’s called telemarketing.

Telemarketing is, quite simply, the selling of products or services over the phone. Some businesses refer to it as “inside sales” or “telesales”.

It’s garnered a dirty reputation over the years because of certain people trying to scam the vulnerable, and so-called “robo-callers” who play recorded messages in a continuous loop. Despite this reputation, however, telemarketing can still serve as an effective marketing tool for small businesses, so long as it’s used properly.

Take note that this strategy is most effective when there’s an established connection between the business and the person being called, like if the recipient is already a customer of the business or a prospect who is seeking more information.

Some best practices to guide you through telemarketing include prospect research, knowledge of what you’re selling, empathy and listening skills (the call shouldn’t just be about the sale – (remember that), and a campaign, for which the call can contribute towards a larger marketing effort.

All in all, you’ll see the most success with telemarketing when you use it to nurture leads, rather than generating them.

If you know me, you know I love direct marketing.

And if you REALLY know me, then you’d know I have an entire masterclass for it called Unlocking The Secrets To Direct Mail. You can get access to that right now with our Diamond Membership if you’re interested in pursuing this strategy – which you should be.

This strategy is one of the most powerful ways to get your business out there, simply because it involves direct communication with the target audience, usually through physical mail and newsletters.

Direct marketing is considered traditional marketing, yes.

Anything labeled under words like “traditional” may give the impression that it's a thing of the past, but I assure you that direct marketing hasn’t faded into obscurity just yet. In fact, it's as strong of a strategy as any today, and not nearly as inaccessible as you might think.

It's usually a real shock to discover just how many different mailing lists are available and how sophisticated you can get in selecting a mailing list.

So I want to emphasize right off the bat that 99% of all small business and small company owners have very minimal knowledge of this subject.

They know very little about the availability of mailing lists, particularly those tied to national databases. Taking the time to acquire and creatively use this knowledge can be a huge competitive advantage.

One example is the S.R.D.S. directory: Standard Rate and Data Service. This used to be a physical directory, but today it’s 100% digital and online.

Now this is a directory of just about every mailing list and mailing list supplier in existence. The physical version used to consist of over 1600 oversized pages crammed with tiny eight and six-point type listings and descriptions of one list after another.

There are three basic kinds of lists:

Subscriber lists: People who subscribe to a particular magazine newsletter or other publication. So a list of the Better Homes and Gardens magazine subscribers for the city of Chicago is easy to get and readily available.

Purchaser lists: The buyers of just about anything and everything are available. Here are a few examples; Omaha steaks customers, Maple Grove maple syrup buyers, purchasers of tickets to the Boston Ballet, Brooks Brothers mail-order customers, mail-order buyers of Georgio perfumes, general nutrition corporation, vitamin customers, and many different sorts are available.

In most purchaser lists, you may be able to specify by the amount of their average purchase by repeat purchase, behavior by use of credit cards, the recency of their ordering, and of course, geographic area.

Compiled list: These are different. They generally come from different sources, merged rather than one whole list. However, a notable exception to that is the business category list compiled from the Yellow Pages.

A good example of a compiled list is the chief executive officers of companies with at least 50 employees. That list is put together from information in various directories and from telephone surveys.

You can rent these lists in their entirety, broken down into specialized sorts or merge-purged.

Each list will offer different specialized sort capabilities. You can sort by geographic area in just about any list, at least by state, sometimes by county, city, or individual zip codes.

This allows the small local business to access the national list. This also allows you to test a promotion in just one area, zero in on an area for a grand opening of a new outlet, to hit a target market by area for any number of possible reasons.

Now that we’re familiar with these 4 types of marketing, I’m sure you’re wondering if you could just use one strategy and stick to it.

The answer to that is, of course, a resounding NO.

All the types we’ve discussed were developed to differentiate you from your competitors. How are you going to stand out from the crowd if you do what everyone else is doing? And how are you going to meet your customer’s unique needs with a mold you’re copying from someone else?

The point of understanding these types is that you can look at them and determine which ready-made solution will work best for your business, and how you’re going to give it your unique flare.

If you’d like to know more about some other types of marketing, or if you just want a deeper dive into the types I’ve already discussed then I recommend that you grab one of the limited slots for our exclusive Diamond Membership., where I host monthly masterclasses, LIVE Q&As, and much more!