Evaluating the Top Digital Types of Marketing and Their Effectiveness

You want to engage with your customers for a number of reasons. 

It’s important that your target audience knows what your business stands for and also what sets you apart. Your business also wants to convey how appreciative you are of your customers and to remind them that their support matters. You also want to reach out to potential customers to make them loyal customers. Then, of course, you want your marketing ideas and efforts to strengthen the longevity of your business as a whole with brand recognition. 

The top digital types of marketing are well known to your marketing team, but before pushing it through to a marketing plan template, you may want to evaluate how effective each type is. We’ve compiled a Marketing 101 guide along with a list of the top digital types of marketing and how they tend to hold up when it comes to engagement and performance metrics. These include content marketing, paid advertising, relationship marketing, SMS marketing, organic social, and Messenger Marketing. We’ve assigned each strategy a “grade. 

Share how you would rank each strategy in the comments and where you fall as a marketing specialist!

Content Marketing

Grade: A+ 

This type of marketing is extremely effective and equally as time-consuming with thorough marketing research. When your team takes the content marketing route you are building your strategy by predicting a customer’s needs, wants, and actions. This marketing technique takes time and an incredible amount of effort, so it’s important to construct a marketing calendar to ensure consistency throughout all content and campaigns You’re not blatantly advertising to a potential customer with marketing content, but hoping to become a blip on their subconscious. 

So, what are some of the benefits of using content marketing?

The Specific Benefits

• Its effectiveness is found in the amount of engagement that content marketing provides. Customers aren’t being bombarded with your product, but are receiving helpful information about your product over time. 

[Rather than saying, “Buy these dishtowels!”, content marketing feeds the customer bits of useful information so that they can draw their own conclusion. “Did you know that using a dish towel rather than paper towels saves [x amount] of trees every month?”]

• Long Term Payoff. Because content marketing is complex and requires consistency just like a sharp SEO strategy, it will also take time to see the payoff of your efforts. A potential customer may follow you on Instagram for six months before making a purchase, but the key is that you gained a customer that will likely be a loyal one. Just keep going when you feel that your content marketing strategy is a bust. It will pay off in the end!

Stats & Such

How are businesses and business gurus rating content marketing?

• Annual growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%).
• 61% of consumers say that they are more likely to buy from a company that provides custom content.

Paid Advertising

Grade: B-

Paid advertising can be a facet of your marketing strategy, but it shouldn’t be the focal point. Advertising can get prohibitively expensive even for the most lucrative businesses. Advertising may not provide the return that you believe it will so it’s important to go into it with realistic expectations. Paid advertising needs to be strategized differently than content marketing. It’s best to choose one small demographic of your overall target audience to advertise to than to do a generalized approach in paid ads. Choose a “niche” for ads. 

The Specific Benefits

• Paid advertising can boost your brand awareness, followers, and sales. You will want to explore all advertising options to see what works best for your business’s budget and overall marketing strategy. 
• With that brand recognition can come requests for partnerships with other businesses. Hello, networking! 

Stats & Such

• Brand awareness can be increased by up to 80% through Google paid ads.
• Facebook accounts for 80.4% of U.S. social referral shares to eCommerce sites.

Relationship Marketing

Grade: B

If you can master relationships with customers in an eCommerce business then you have a solid foundation for all other marketing strategies. Relationship marketing is centered around building deeper and meaningful relationships with a potential customer. This interactive marketing strategy can make for long term customers that are loyal to your brand.

Relationship marketing is effective, but it can come across as disingenuous if it’s not carefully strategized and executed well. We give this marketing strategy an overall B because it’s wonderfully effective, but does take time to master.  

The Specific Benefits

• Relationship Marketing creates loyal customers by prioritizing customers and their needs.
• Relationship Marketing allows your business insight into the needs of customers early-on by frequently polling and surveying their experience. This enables the business to troubleshoot and remedy issues before they become out of hand.

Stats & Such 

• A fully engaged customer exhibits 51% higher revenue and sales than actively disengaged customers.
• Relationship Marketing returns loyal customers and the numbers show that loyal customers are 7x as likely to try a new offering!

SMS Marketing

Grade: B

There are pretty polarizing reviews when it comes to SMS Marketing. If you aren’t familiar with SMS Marketing then it’s a simple marketing strategy to understand. A business will use text messaging to market to existing and potential customers. Recipients always give consent by sharing their phone number with the company. SMS Marketing is mainly used to send out text alerts on sales, new products, or time-sensitive information.

This form of marketing, as you can imagine, can make it difficult for the marketing team to project what its success rate will be. Not all customers will opt-in for text messages. Those that do may not stick around very long depending on your marketing strategy. 

The good news?

Nearly everyone has a cell phone that is capable of receiving text messages. People tend to check their phones at a notification sound instinctually. While it may be a tough one for reporting, there are ways to track its effectiveness. In your ManyChat dashboard, you have access to the SMS feature and a whole library of resources to help you execute SMS effectively.

The Specific Benefits

• You can use SMS Marketing to gain insight into customer satisfaction by texting out links to surveys.
• SMS Marketing allows your business to incentivize customers by offering coupons via text messaging.

Stats & Such

• 83% of millennials open SMS messages within 90 seconds of receiving them.
• 75% of millennials prefer SMS communications for deliveries, promotions, and surveys.
• With SMS, this digital marketing strategy produces engagement rates six to eight times higher than retailers normally achieve via email marketing.

Organic Social 

Grade: A

“Organic Social as a strategy is any post that doesn’t have any money behind promoting it. Whether it is a Facebook post, shared video, or anything that goes to your follower’s news feed to drum up social growth through engagement. A high amount of companies will post blogs, articles, and helpful guide videos from their business LinkedIn page as well to engage prospective clients or help complementary industries. The benefit of having an organic social growth strategy is to build relationships, brand loyalists, and give back while expecting nothing in return.”

Is Organic Social an effective marketing strategy? Will it yield a return on your effort?

Yes! 

Organic Social marketing is still extremely relevant and effective despite the ever-evolving nature of social media.

Remember that Messenger Marketing can help you monetize your social media pages. Capture subscribers and nurture them into paying customers using ManyChat’s many overlays and flow templates.

The Specific Benefits

• Organic Social is of zero cost to your business! For further free advertising, your business can partner with influencers to use and advertise your product. 
• Organic Social allows your business to put its personality out there on the line and appeal to your customers’ needs for authenticity.
• Implement customer service on your social pages to give customers speedy feedback.

Stats & Such

• Social media statistics from 2019 show that there are 3.5 billion social media users worldwide, and this number is only growing. That equates to about 45% of the current population.
• Social media statistics uncover that an average of 3 hours is spent per day per person on social networks and messaging.
• 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family.

Key Takeaways

Which strategy will your marketing manager and team prioritize? Ideally, your business will thrive by implementing a few of the marketing strategies we went over. How would you grade the digital marketing strategies you have tried? We know that nailing the right strategy down can be difficult. If you’re a startup and are just now creating a marketing campaign then we recommend choosing two types of marketing strategies to work with.

Choose a strategy that is low cost and flexible for your desired brand marketing. Paid advertising may not be the choice for you if you’re in the beginning stages. Be realistic about where your team is in regards to budget, time, and team size. Then, choose a strategy and run with it. Procrastination in the spirit of perfection won’t get you very far.

Take your marketing to the next level today with ManyChat. It’s free to get started.