A digital marketing strategy represents a plan outlining how businesses can reach their marketing goals using the online channels that are available to them. The plans can range from social media campaigns to growth marketing strategies that use social media and email to increase customer loyalty (Chaffey and Smith, 2017). Therefore, there are various types of digital marketing strategies that organizations use (10 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy, 2021). In this paper, four strategies will be discussed, namely, pay-per-click advertising, content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing, all of which have strong and weak points but have been consistently used by organizations to boost the quality of customer relations.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a form of online marketing in which companies pay a fee each time customers click their ads online (Khraim and Alkarablieh, 2015). In its essence, it represents the way of buying website visits instead of earning them organically â every time the ad is clicked, and visitors are sent to the website, companies have to pay search engines small fees. Google Ads is the most widespread PPC system of advertising globally as the platform encourages brands to locate their ads within the search engine (Johnson, 2021). PPC is advantageous to use for such reasons as the immediate visibility of paid ads, which are targeted and trackable, as well as the possibility of tight budget control (Stankevich, 2017). However, PPC does not last long because they become repetitive, they entail bidding wars due to tight competition, and some consumers prefer to ignore them because they can be annoying to see (Taken Smith, 2011).
Content marketing is a strategy that emphasizes the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content for attracting and retaining an audience of customers. The advantages of using the method lie in the possibility of building brand awareness and trust, reaching the audience of customers who usually avoid ads, increasing traffic and conversions, as well as supporting other tactics used by marketers (Develop a digital marketing plan, 2020). The disadvantages of the strategy include finding content ideas, the time-consuming nature of content marketing, as well as the need to wait some time for the benefits to occur.
When implementing email marketing, companies include customers in mail lists to inform them about the arrival of new products, sales, and discounts, and keep them engaged and aware of the brand. The advantages of email marketing include its affordability, the possibility to increase sales by engaging former customers, and the tracking of campaign effectiveness (Smith and Zook, 2020). However, marketers may struggle with deliverability issues and spam, which entails sending emails to customers without their permission. If there are too many emails, customers may develop a negative perception of the brand and even report messages to their email provider.
Social media marketing (SMM) is the final strategy to be discussed, and it involves creating and sharing content on social media for achieving marketing brand goals (Dwivedi et al., 2021). It is beneficial to use because it offers opportunities to increase brand awareness and customer satisfaction, it is cost-effective and increases inbound traffic (Kingsnorth, 2019). However, by engaging in SMM, brands get more exposed to their competitors, who get the opportunity to study their strategy. In addition, SMM requires qualified personnel and can be slow in returns on investments. Among the mentioned strategies, SMM prevails over others because it puts a brand on an increased level of brand recognition, especially if the content produced is high-quality.
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