18 Main Types of Marketing
Archit Jain
Sr. Digital Marketing and Client Communication Manager @InTimeTec || APAC || The United States || Europe || ANZ || Arabian Peninsula
In the world of business, there are many, many types of marketing.
To simplify matters, here are 18 types that have been developed, tried, and tested by generations of marketers from various industries.
It’s also likely each one has a dedicated annual conference somewhere in the?world.
You can find examples of all 18 types around you. They are constantly copied and “remixed” to win the customers’ hearts.
Somewhere in this list could even lie the marketing success of the next world-changing company.
Each?of them is different, but most can be used in parallel to form a bulletproof growth engine.
In this article, I will?cover:
1. Digital marketing
Digital marketing is an overarching term for any kind of promotional activity that leverages the internet as the messaging channel.
Accordingly, even two different marketing tactics, like?SEO?and?PPC, are considered digital marketing.
This term is often used to differentiate a category of tactics from offline marketing.
2. Offline marketing
In contrast to digital marketing, offline marketing (often referred to as traditional marketing) is an overarching term for any kind of marketing done without the use of the internet.
If an advertisement is published in a paper magazine instead of an online magazine, that’s offline marketing.
Similarly, if you deliver a personalized message through direct mail instead of an email, that’s also offline marketing.
Although words like “offline” and “traditional” may give the impression that this type of marketing is a thing of the past, advertisements in printed magazines or between TV shows haven’t disappeared just?yet.
According to Statista, TV ads still have the strongest reach among all types of?ads.
3. Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that aims to pull customers in with relevant and useful content.
To better understand this term, let’s compare it to outbound marketing.
While outbound marketing tries to reach the customer with a message that “interrupts” (e.g., TV ads, PPC, billboards), inbound marketing?hopes to create a situation where a potential customer discovers a company while looking for a solution.
For example, a customer searches for something on Google and stumbles upon a relevant article on a company’s website.
4. Outbound marketing
Outbound marketing is an “interruptive” form of marketing where a company pushes a message about a product out to a prospect through cold calls, cold emails, direct mail, most forms of advertising, etc.
Outbound marketing tries to raise awareness of a product or inspire actions (e.g., buying, subscribing, visiting a shop) among the target audience regardless of their interest.
5. Content marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers.
Content marketing is usually practiced as a form of inbound marketing, where the content offers a solution to a problem that a prospect is researching.
Prospects discover promoted products by learning about their applications.
Content marketing is often used to?generate leads, where the most premium content is gated behind a form requesting personal information like name, phone number, or email.
Later on, that information is used for other marketing tactics (including outbound).
Example
Some popular types of content marketing are:
6. Search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is a term used to describe promotion messaging published through SERPs. SEM divides the messaging into two categories: paid results and organic results.
Organic results are pages that a search engine like Google finds, crawls, and indexes on its SERPs.
The position on organic results can’t be bought, only influenced through content marketing and?SEO.
Paid results are a form of pay-per-click advertising. Businesses pay search engine companies to take part in a bid competing for the best ad placement.
7. Growth marketing
Growth marketing is the process of increasing a company’s revenue by applying an experiment-driven and integrated approach to all stages of attracting customers.
Growth marketing is another term that is often used in contrast to “traditional marketing.”
This is because when growth marketing entered the stage in the early 2000s, it was quickly adopted by startups that needed a different approach that helped them:
A. Compete with established companies.
B. Get investors’ attention by proving scalable growth tactics.
8. B2B marketing
B2B marketing, or business-to-business marketing, refers to the marketing of products or services by businesses to other businesses.
This term is often used by marketers to name and differentiate types of marketing strategies and tactics that are especially effective in B2B relations (e.g.,?account-based marketing), as opposed to business-to-consumer (B2C) relations.
9. B2C marketing
B2C marketing, or business-to-consumer marketing, refers to the marketing of products or services by businesses to consumers.
This term is often used by marketers to name and differentiate types of marketing strategies and tactics that are especially effective in B2C relations (e.g.,?influencer marketing), as opposed to B2B relations.
10. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a type of promotion where a company pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated by?it.
You can spot affiliate links mostly on blogs. Those are the links that contain tracking parameters like “tag,” “hop,” or “customized.”
That means the owner of the website receives a commission every time someone clicks that link or buys something via that link. This way, the paying company rewards affiliates for influencing their bottom line.
11. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to market a company’s products or services.
The goal of social media is to grow an audience and engage with them. This leads to increased brand awareness, website traffic, and, eventually, sales.
Social media marketing involves a mix of tactics, including publishing content, responding to comments, and running social media advertisements.
12. Brand marketing
Brand marketing is a term to describe actions that promote a product or service in a way that highlights the brand and shapes its?image.
But what is a?brand?
In the modern field of marketing, it’s quite hard to give a definition that’s exhaustive and satisfactory. After all, brand marketing is practiced in so many styles.
Let me give you some examples of strong brands. Do take notice of what you associate with?them.
So what did you get? Did those names spark some kind of image in your mind or an association with a person?
Maybe it evoked a certain feeling and memory or even made you thirsty. That’s what brands essentially are: cognitive and emotional triggers.
So it’s less important what brands are. Rather, it’s more important what they do. And that is the aim of brand marketing: to strengthen the effect that brands have on consumers and make?them:
Consumers are not the only possible targets of brand marketing. Companies may also use this type of marketing to increase their stock market valuation or to attract talent to their company (employer branding).
13. Direct marketing
Direct marketing is a strategy where the company directly communicates with the target audience instead of using mass?media.
Direct marketing is usually chosen for its lower cost (compared to mass media), the ability to personalize the message, and the possibility of the audience responding to the message (e.g., through an included form).
14. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is the practice of working with influential people to promote brands, products, or services.
An influencer in this regard can be anyone with a significant network, or “following,” of people and/or authority in a particular field.
Influence mechanisms leveraged in this type of marketing can take many forms: inspiration, trust, belief, and imitation.
Influencer marketing is effective because following others’ examples or advice helps people to make choices.
Moreover, since influence is a phenomenon of human relations, influencer marketing works both in B2B and B2C situations.
15. Email marketing
Email marketing is any kind of marketing messaging done through the channel of?email.
That said, email marketing is not just sending emails. It involves:
This type of marketing serves four main purposes:
16. Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM)
Word-of-mouth marketing is the process of influencing and encouraging natural discussions about a product, service, or company.
In everyday use, it can describe two types of situations:
The essence of WOMM is to give people a reason to talk. The reason why this strategy works is that people often trust what others have to?say.
That phenomenon has even been studied:
A?Nielsen study?from 2015 revealed that 83% of respondents from 60 countries trusted recommendations from friends and family.
But when a recommendation came from an opinion posted online, the trust ratio was down to?66%.
The aforementioned “reason to talk” doesn’t have to be a recommendation of a company’s services.
It can be anything that gives company publicity, creates “buzz,” and increases its brand awareness. For this reason, WOMM is often called “buzz marketing.”
Word-of-mouth marketing can take many forms. It can start as a social media campaign, a PR campaign, or a referral campaign with incentives for spreading the company’s message.
17. Event marketing
Event marketing is a marketing tactic where branded events are used as a way to communicate with the target audience and promote products or services.
The aim of event marketing is to create a memorable experience by engaging event participants, encouraging them to directly interact with a?brand.
Interactions may take different forms: trying out a product, watching a product demonstration, watching a concert, attending launches, networking, taking part in a seminar or conference, etc.
18. Guerrilla?marketing
Guerrilla marketing is a promotion tactic that involves using unexpected and unconventional interactions to evoke strong emotions and provoke word of?mouth.
Traits of guerrilla marketing:
Final thoughts
With all of those 18 types of marketing, it makes one wonder: Where’s Occam’s razor when you need it? Could you just use one type of marketing and stop worrying?
Well, all of the types we’ve discussed were developed for a reason. Some are used to differentiate from competitors and others to accommodate customers’ lifestyles.
The point is you can look at those types of marketing as ready-made solutions for achieving your?goal.
Knowing these tried and tested types makes work a little easier. You just need to choose wisely.