Did you know that an entrepreneur from the late 1700s, Josiah Wedgwood, is widely known as the pioneer of modern marketing? For his pottery company, he used direct mail, free delivery, buy one get one free offer, etc.
In the last few centuries, however, the definition of ‘modern’ has evolved dramatically. Things that were unique and innovative in the last decade are already passé. What was modern yesterday will likely be traditional or even outdated tomorrow.
That’s why it’s important to understand the types of marketing at your disposal. Today, let’s explore the spectrum.
10 Different Types of Marketing to Promote Your Brand
Summarize this article for me pleaseTraditional Marketing
Traditional marketing refers to strategies, practices, and techniques that have long been used by organizations as part of their promotional activities. Typically, traditional is used as the opposite of digital, which is deemed modern.
Some of the most common traditional marketing strategies are:
- Print advertising: Placing promotions and advertisements in newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.
- Television advertising: Video advertisements and edutainment programs on TV
- Outdoor advertising: Billboards, posters, banners, etc.
- Events: Partnerships, sponsorships, and display advertising at industry events
- Direct marketing: Promotional emails, catalogs, telephone calls, etc.
Summarize this article for me pleaseDigital Marketing
Digital marketing refers to tactics that use Internet-based online channels, such as search engines, social media, mobile devices, etc. Digital marketing has opened up a range of opportunities for brands.
🎯 Reach: Over 90% of Americans own a smartphone, with 15% of US adults using the Internet exclusively from that device. On a typical day, customers spend 6.5 hours online. If a brand needs to reach enough people, online is the place to be.
🎯 Low barriers to entry: Anyone can launch a digital marketing campaign with as little as $100. This levels the playing field for individual entrepreneurs and small businesses.
🎯 Efficiency: Online marketing creates large amounts of data that brands can use to create, monitor, and optimize their campaigns. This makes marketing more cost-efficient, producing a higher return on investment.
🎯 Customization: Unlike print, television, or billboards, online ads can be customized to the viewer’s interest.
🎯 Targeting: With digital marketing, you can segment audiences more granularly. Retargeting can be contextual and timely, therefore making it an effective marketing strategy.
🎯 Adaptability: If a campaign isn’t working, change parameters instantly. It’s bleeding money; pause it with a click of a button. A real-world event makes it irrelevant; stop the campaign.
🎯 Compounding effect: Social media marketing campaigns create a flywheel, expanding reach and building on word of mouth. This creates as much credibility as visibility.
So, it’s no wonder that since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, digital marketing has grown exponentially. And is rapidly evolving, too.
Brands are finding exceptionally new ways to grab the attention of potential customers. Moment marketing, proximity marketing, and live video shopping are just a handful of emerging trends. Let’s look at more of them in detail.
Summarize this article for me pleaseTypes of Digital Marketing
Based on the channel you’re using, the tactic you’re trying, and the message you’re sharing, there are dozens of types of digital marketing. Let’s discuss the most effective, popular, or interesting ones here.
1. Content marketing
Content marketing refers to the creation, publishing, and distribution of content across owned, paid, and earned channels. It is the foundation of all digital marketing. It is also the currency in inbound marketing activities. So, you must make it count.
Content marketing activities
As part of your content marketing efforts, you would:
- Publish content on social media to build brand awareness
- Host resources on your website as gated content for people to download by giving you their email ID (captured as a lead)
- Conduct webinars to educate your audiences and engage them through the sales funnel
Content marketing example
Every year, Spotify Wrapped creates extraordinary content from the data they have about a customer’s listening habits. It summarizes the customer’s top artists, albums, songs, and podcasts to give them a glimpse of the year past. This tickles a sense of nostalgia as well as being compelling enough for them to want to share.
Content marketing best practices
Make it interesting: The Internet is overflowing with content. To stand out, you need to make your content interesting. Niche down on your customer’s interests and offer them something meaningful.
Personalize it: Generic content is a dime a dozen. Customize your content to meet the customer’s needs, interests, and preferences, at the right time.
Compound knowledge: Educate the customer through various forms and kinds of content on your topic of expertise. Use repetition and reiteration carefully.
Offer value: Don’t sell straight away. Offer value first. Educate the reader. Give them tools, etc. before you pitch your product.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of creating and optimizing content to rank higher in search engine result pages (SERPs).
SEO activities
A typical SEO practice involves:
- Research: Understanding keywords that your customers are searching for, their patterns, and needs
- Content strategy: Building a calendar of topics and ideas to publish consistently over the long term
- Content optimization: Creating content that meets SEO best practices around keyword usage, structure, internal linking, etc.
- Link building: Trading links with reputable websites to build credibility
- Technical SEO: Setting up the website to make it attractive and easy to index for crawler bots
SEO examples
Every organization does SEO to varying levels of success. There are various examples across the spectrum. In the world of marketing, HubSpot is known to be one of the best.
In shopping, Amazon tops most listings. For most educational content, Wikipedia ranks ahead. And for all brand-related search terms, the corresponding brand website outranks everyone else.
SEO best practices
- Conduct thorough keyword research and narrow your landscape down to those most relevant to your brand
- Create content for the reader and optimize it for crawlers, not the other way around
- Be consistent—even your top ranking articles might go down the SERP if you aren’t consistent
- Focus on structure, information hierarchy, headings, links, etc. as well
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is when you pay to place ads at the top of the SERP. It is a key outbound marketing tactic.
SEM activities
Also known as pay-per-click (PPC), SEM is the process of bidding for relevant keywords so brands can meet the customer at the exact moment they are looking for something.
The biggest reason SEM works is because brands make a direct correlation between marketing activity and sales.
For instance, if you pay 1$ per click and 1 in 100 converts to a paying customer, your cost of acquisition is $100. If you’re selling a $1000 product, this is great ROI.
However, with increasing competition and low barriers to entry, the cost of SEM is going up. Without qualified SEM specialists, you might end up paying more money than you intended with little reward.
SEM example
PPC is particularly effective for e-commerce or SaaS tools. For instance, if a customer Googles “iPad Mini,” they will find advertisements from various sellers, who compete to appear at the top of the page.
Listed as ‘sponsored’ results, SEM allows brands to inorganically appear at the top of the SERP. On the other hand, SaaS tools use SEM to their advantage by signing up customers for free trials or demos at the right time.
SEM best practices
- Combine SEO and SEM efforts for better performance
- Optimize landing pages to maximize conversions
- Add negative keywords to avoid wastage
- Use attractive CTAs
- Regularly optimize, cull non-performing campaigns, and double down on the performant ones
4. Social media marketing
At its core, social media marketing includes all activities that brands undertake on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, etc. Typically, this includes the following.
Social media marketing activities
- Organic content: Posting regular content on the platform, often repurposing them from other formats
- Advertising: Targeting specific audiences based on preferences and usage habits on the platform with dynamic and customized advertisements
- Live events: Online live events, such as product launches, webinars, and celebrity Ask Me Anything (AMAs)
- Quizzes and contests: Promotional contests, giveaways, and prizes
- Influencer marketing: More on that later
Social media marketing example
In recent years, the language education app Duolingo has been fantastic in its social media campaigns. Doubling down on the community and gamification aspects of the brand, Duolingo posts hilarious content regularly on social media. They’ve created an online identity that is endearing, memorable, and effective.
Social media marketing best practices
Differentiate: Social media is the place where people often mindlessly scroll. Create content that stands out to grab the attention of the user.
Shorten: Make your content bite-sized so people can consume it and move on.
Repurpose: When customers first see your (bite-sized) content, they are likely to pay little attention. Repurpose and reiterate your message so they can take action in time.
Engage: Involve your customers actively. Don’t just post content for them to see. Invite them to like, share, comment, etc. for deeper engagement.
5. Email marketing
Email marketing is the digital version of direct mailing. Simply put, it is the process of using the email channel as part of the promotional strategy. However, innovative marketers have created a dynamic and exciting email marketing practice.
Email marketing activities
Newsletters: Regular educational content meant to attract and engage the reader in their topic of interest. Any number of Substacks is a testament to the success of this tactic.
Email campaigns: A series of emails designed to meet a specific goal. For instance, organizations send onboarding email campaigns when a customer signs up for a product.
Promotional emails: Emails with details of sales, promotions, last-minute deals, etc. aimed at getting the customer to take immediate action.
Email marketing examples
The most important email is the one you send while a customer is breaking up with you. This example from Grammarly is emotional yet not pushy. It is reassuring about the user’s access while subtly inviting them to subscribe again.
Email marketing best practices
- Hone your subject lines: Innovate, experiment, and focus on subject lines to improve open rates
- Include multiple links: Create opportunities for the reader to learn more or take action from the email
- Make it responsive: Enable people to read your emails on their mobile without squinting
- Make it opt-in: Make the unsubscribe link prominently visible—you don’t want to hang on to an uninterested user anyway
6. Influencer marketing
An important part of social media marketing is collaborations with influencers. Brands choose popular social media influencers in their industry to help them promote their products.
Influencer marketing activities
- Promotions: Influencers turning brand ambassadors for the brand
- Reviews: Influencers posting reviews of products they have received for free from the brand
- Collaborations: Brands creating products with insight and feedback from influencers
- Sponsorships: Brands sponsoring specific kinds of videos/content from influencers
- Demos: Makeup brands do this a lot, inviting influencers to try the product and demonstrate how to use it
Influencer marketing examples
Dove regularly uses influencer marketing to spread their message on body confidence and inclusivity. Across various campaigns, they engage over 1,000 influencers to create a sustained and powerful impact.
Influencer marketing best practices
Choose carefully: Thoroughly research all the influencers you wish to work with for alignment of brand values.
Be strategic: Don’t just invite influencers to post about your project. Enable them to become strategic partners through continued collaboration.
Enable: Give influencers all the resources, such as content assets, messaging, scripts, product samples, etc.
Measure: The reach of influencer marketing can be attractive. But closely measure returns to your topline.
7. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you use a third party or an intermediary to promote your products in return for a commission. For instance, several influencers double up as affiliates, especially for digital products and e-commerce websites.
Affiliate marketing activities
- Sign up the right kind of affiliate partners with the relevant target audience
- Design the commission mechanism
- Enable them with the resources they need
- Create affiliate links for your partners to use
- Set up automation and processes to track affiliate activity at scale
Affiliate marketing examples
Amazon.com has one of the world’s largest affiliate programs. Influencers, individuals, small businesses, and YouTubers alike earn commissions from Amazon for recommending products.
Affiliate marketing best practices
Build relationships: Affiliates are a kind of brand ambassadors as well. They recommend your products to an audience who trusts them. Build relationships with your affiliates.
Create multi-tiered programs: Affiliates recommend products for commissions. So, incentivize those who recommend more. Offer higher commissions for those who produce better results.
Diversify: While it’s good to focus on your niche, also diversify your affiliate partnerships. Build a suite of partners who cover the entire gamut of your customer base.
8. Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing is using the cellphone device as a channel for promotional messaging. With smartphones, the opportunities are endless.
Mobile marketing activities
- SMS: The most basic and popular form of mobile marketing—so old it’s almost deemed traditional
- App notifications: Modern marketing professionals use app notifications in creative ways to attract and engage users
- Mobile advertising: Paid text or image ads on mobile devices, app stores, etc.
- Proximity marketing: Messages when a user passes a certain location, such as a mall or a store
Mobile marketing examples
Headspace sends some of the most thoughtful and timely notifications. They are designed to integrate mindfulness into everyday activities.
Mobile marketing best practices
- Only send messages to customers who have actively opted in
- Control the number of messages you send—you don’t want to be annoying
- Keep messages short, pithy, and attractive
- Provide value; be informational, educational, humorous, or even just a reminder
- Make it easy to unsubscribe
9. Moment marketing
As the name suggests, moment marketing is the carpe diem approach to marketing. Brands across the globe use holidays, events, or even social media incidents to create a marketing message.
Starbucks’ holiday cup design is one of the most popular examples of moment marketing. Several brands run campaigns for the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. However, moment marketing is a lot more spontaneous than that.
In 2013, when there was a power outage at the Super Bowl, the American cookie brand Oreo capitalized on the idea. The social media post went viral and generated millions of chuckles worldwide.
Moment marketing best practices
- Choose the right moment (don’t jump at everything)
- Keep the message on-brand (resist the temptation to be clever without considering the brand voice)
- Be positive (don’t be critical of another brand)
- Make it visual for greater impact (put your pithy punchline on a nice background)
10. Guerilla marketing
Popularized by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same name, guerilla marketing is using unconventional methods to promote a brand. Good guerilla marketing is shocking, disruptive, and scrappy.
Samsung periodically runs campaigns against Apple and its products. This time, they chose to go the quirky route. Samsung gave residents of the Netherlands town, ‘Appel’ free Galaxy phones and claimed that the Appel community had switched to Samsung.
This campaign, if nothing else, made people turn around and take notice, creating buzz among Apple and Samsung loyalists alike.
Guerilla marketing best practices
- Be original: Guerilla marketing that is repetitive and unoriginal can be an annoyance to the consumer and have counterproductive effects
- Be critical: Share your guerilla marketing idea with as many diverse groups of people as possible and get feedback
- Be omnichannel: Post your guerilla marketing activity online to compound reach
While the above are ten of the most common types of marketing, they are not the only ones. Here are some marketing types that can fit into any of the above categories or stand out on their own.
Video marketing: Using video as the primary format and publishing on YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram Reels, etc. to market products.
Conversational marketing: Setting up live chat or chatbots as the point of interaction with the user to recommend the right products, make suggestions, answer questions, etc.
Event marketing: Being present in industry events or conducting conferences on your own to engage potential customers. This is a popular method in the B2B industry.
Account-based marketing: This is another B2B marketing technique that involves identifying individual prospects and targeting activities toward them. For example, if a new fintech company identifies Citibank as their target, they would run campaigns to attract various stakeholders from the bank.
Stealth marketing: Product placements and other inconspicuous marketing techniques.
As you can see, the world is your oyster. There are dozens of marketing techniques you can use to promote your brand online. Effective marketing strategies, however, combine these techniques to create greater impact. Here’s how.
Summarize this article for me pleaseCombining Marketing Strategies
The modern business landscape is complex. Customers today prefer self-service. They do their own market research and follow brands on multiple channels before they initiate contact.
Gen Z customers are Internet natives. They are highly influenced by digital tools. They seek to create an individual identity for themselves. They take their causes seriously and expect brands to have a conscience.
Attracting, engaging, and selling to these customers needs more than one type of marketing. Enter: Integrated marketing plan.
What is an integrated marketing plan?
An integrated marketing plan combines the best of various marketing channels, techniques, and messages to maximize goal accomplishment.
How to create an integrated marketing plan?
If you’re looking to create an integrated marketing plan, here is the framework powered by a comprehensive project management tool like ClickUp for marketing teams.
1. Define your goals
Be clear about what you want to achieve from your integrated marketing. Is it awareness, lead generation, sales, or something else? Set up your marketing OKRs to be visible and trackable in a place like ClickUp Goals.
Set numerical, monetary, true/false, and task Targets. Organize them in folders to see progress rollups. Share it with the team securely with the right access control. Break down the marketing goals into tasks for each team member to complete throughout the year.
2. Choose your channels
There are several social media platforms, with new ones popping up every few weeks. Not all of them are right for you.
If you’re selling a B2B product, you might find more interest on LinkedIn than on TikTok. If yours is a beauty product, channels like Instagram or YouTube might be more relevant. So, choose the right combination of channels that will suit your business needs.
Then, break down your business goals into channel-specific objectives. For instance, you might use influencer marketing to create brand awareness about a new product launch, while posting social media ads to boost sales.
3. Plan your activities
Once you’ve set what you need to achieve, it’s time to plan the how. Here, a project management tool is essential. If you’re new to this, review a handful of marketing plan examples beforehand to get some inspiration.
Set up project hierarchy: Organize your work with ClickUp Tasks into projects, tasks, sub-tasks, checklists, etc.
Brainstorm ideas: Bring your team together to brainstorm integrated marketing campaign ideas. For example, your social media, influencer marketing, and video marketing teams can collaborate to design campaigns that share/repurpose content.
Use ClickUp Whiteboards to map your ideas, connect them, and get approvals. When approved, directly create tasks from the whiteboard and get started.
Schedule your work: Assign start dates and end dates to all your tasks to create a marketing roadmap. Make sure your integrated campaigns work in parallel to maximize impact. For instance, if you’re conducting guerilla marketing on ground, make sure your online team is clued in as well.
The best way to do this is to use ClickUp’s Calendar view or Gantt view to visualize overlapping activities. If you’re sharing creative resources like a copywriter or a designer, mark those as dependencies. Link various tasks so you can be notified when there is a movement on something.
⚡️Template Archive: You can also use any of these marketing calendar templates to get started.
Automate workflows: By its very nature, an integrated marketing function is complex. Let’s take a simple example. At a very basic level, if you’re posting two updates a day on three social media channels, you’d need 42 versions of copy, 42 images (at least resized), a dozen links depending on how much you reuse, and approvals.
To say nothing of the unlimited follow-ups the social media manager needs to do for any of these activities. Eliminate these inefficiencies with effective automation.
- Set up ClickUp Forms that capture creative briefs and automatically create tasks based on them
- Automatically assign the task back to the social media manager when the design is ready
- Create a repository of links, product descriptions, footer templates, etc. for easy access
- Integrate with popular apps like HubSpot, Figma, Dropbox, Google Analytics, etc. to manage assets and performance from within ClickUp
To make this process smoother, try ClickUp’s Marketing Campaign Management Template. Use it to consolidate all your content assets, manage publishing, and track performance.
What’s more? Brainstorm ideas, write faster, run spellchecks, create templates, and more with ClickUp Brain. You can also ask ClickUp Brain questions about your integrated marketing projects and get answers immediately.
If you’re new to project planning, try the ClickUp Strategic Marketing Plan Template. This beginner-friendly template gives you everything you need, from goal-tracking to task management in one organized view.
4. Measure and improve
To complete your integrated marketing efforts, set up monitoring and performance tracking.
Create KPI-driven reports with ClickUp Dashboards. Go beyond just your project management metrics. Integrate various marketing management tools and create consolidated reports for all your efforts. From the performance of your social media posts and content marketing KPIs to sales conversion rates, have complete context right within ClickUp.
Based on these metrics, conduct regular retrospectives with your teams. Make adjustments and optimize campaigns as needed. Add or remove channels/tactics as appropriate and maximize outcomes.
Does that sound easy? We thought not.
Summarize this article for me pleaseOvercoming Marketing Challenges
No one ever said that marketing was easy. In fact, modern marketing is even harder, given its innumerable moving parts. If you feel stuck, here are some common challenges and ways to overcome them.
Complexity
The biggest marketing challenge today is complexity. A recent study finds that marketers use as many as ten channels to promote their products. Between text, images, video, short video, podcasts, emails, and social media posts, they grapple with various content formats as well.
Managing such complexity at scale requires the best marketing project management software. Choose one that is flexible enough to address your needs. For instance, custom fields in ClickUp help teams track whatever metric they need.
This flexibility helps manage complexity thoughtfully and sustainably.
Bonus Read: How ClickUp marketing team uses ClickUp
Brain freeze
Marketing is an everyday grind. Especially if you’re in social media marketing, you need to create content every single day, while also making it unique, creative, and attention grabbing.
Don’t go at it alone. Use an AI marketing tool like ClickUp Brain to break the ice. Ask it to offer ideas, do research, or just discuss problems with you.
Collaboration
An average marketing team has writers, designers, web developers, SEO specialists, PPC experts, videographers, editors, analysts, marketing ops people, etc. Often, in each activity, three or more people are involved.
Set up a comprehensive collaboration tool for them to work together. Even better if you can bring collaboration into your project management workspace like ClickUp Chat does.
Organize conversations by projects. Tag people, tasks, docs, and chats to keep everything in context. Create tasks right from the chat message and get to work. Make collaboration simpler with ClickUp Chat.
Reporting
Every marketing team uses a number of analytics tools. At the minimum, you’d have website analytics, social media, email metrics, influencer marketing, and campaign management tools. The challenge is that these are all disparate and scattered all over the place.
Consolidate them by linking all your integrated marketing management tools to ClickUp. Create customizable dashboards to see the numbers that matter to you in real time. Set up analytics templates for repeatability and efficiency.
Falling behind
There is something new happening in the world of marketing everyday. The rise of generative AI has changed marketing in profound ways. The imminent death of cookies might just kill retargeting with it.
Nano influencers (those with less than 100,000 followers) are opening up untapped markets. Live video shopping is growing dramatically in Asia, making inroads in the Western markets as well. Immersive experiences and virtual reality might just be the next big thing.
Keeping track of all this can be a challenge for marketers. The good news is that you don’t need to act on everything immediately.
💡Be informed: Read up on what’s happening in this space. Subscribe to industry newsletters or magazines.
💡Be watchful: The first-mover doesn’t always have the advantage. Wait and watch. Imagine if you spent weeks creating a Mastodon strategy when it was booming!
💡Be creative: If you do want to take a bet on a new platform or a trend, be creative. Run a small pilot campaign. Assign your innovation budget to it. Go full force only when you are sure of the outcomes.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBuild a Solid Integrated Marketing Foundation With ClickUp
Marketing is a high-value, high-volume activity. Marketing features among the top five expenses of most organizations today. A good campaign can boost sales, like the Stanley Cup going out of stock after TikTok virality.
A bad campaign can raise a stink. Burger King’s “Women belong in the kitchen” tweet from 2021 is exemplary of a misguided marketing initiative. Though it was a provocative Women’s Day campaign with progressive tweets, it wasn’t received well. The brand had to delete the thread and apologize.
To do their work right consistently, brands need a robust marketing operations software. ClickUp is designed to be exactly that.
With task management, scheduling, creativity, asset management, automation, reporting, and integration features, ClickUp is the most flexible integrated marketing management tool you’ll find.
Run your marketing effectively. Try ClickUp for free today.
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
