Digital Marketing Examples

digital marketing examples

Did you know that for every $1 spent on Google ads, you could earn twice as much? That is how good digital marketing is.

With the amazing response that it promises, digital marketing has taken over the business world.

I’ve put together a list of some of the best digital marketing examples for you to take inspiration from, but first, you need to understand the different types of digital marketing: 

Types of digital marketing

  1. Social media

There are currently 2.65 billion users active on social media platforms and that number is rapidly increasing. It’s a flourishing industry that your business should take advantage of.

With social media, you can create free accounts and market your brand at minimal costs. However, if you need to boost promotions, you can always opt for paid content as well.

Examples:

Let’s take the example of a brand with a well rounded, overall social media strategy: Huda Beauty.

The brand has an active social media presence across all platforms and markets its content for free!

The CEO, Huda Kattan, uses Snapchat to personally interact with all of her fans and followers.

By sharing daily skincare routines and reviews of beauty products, not only does she provide users with great content to remain engaged with but she also keeps it interesting by sharing her own daily adventures.

The beauty brand uses Instagram as a more formal channel that focuses on the brands and their products.

With reposts of other makeup artists using the brand’s products, Huda Beauty is cleverly marketing its products without having to produce any content itself!

Here’s one of the many makeup tutorials of Huda Beauty’s newest product, the Mercury Retrograde Palette:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B4cvEcmlQyE/

Similarly, Airbnb has a great social media strategy. It uses paid promotion i.e. target remarketing to convert customers.

I myself have seen Airbnb’s ads on Instagram and Facebook right after viewing rentals on its website, and I have to say, it definitely worked on me as a consumer!

  • Content Marketing

You’re going to need an amazing content marketing strategy if you want to perfect your SEO and get your website to rank higher in search results because without that, you’ll have no online visibility!

To market your content, you can do two things: create a blog and publish SEO content with relevant keywords or post user-generated content.

Examples:

American Express is smartly promoting content through its Open Forum website.

Similar to Huda Beauty, the financial services corporation posts guest content instead of its own.

Since Open Forum is a collaborative website, American Express invites guest authors from a variety of industries to share their business knowledge and wisdom.

The result? A content-rich website that ranks high on all search engines:

Not only is the website producing great content, but American Express is generating this content cost-free!

  • Affiliate Marketing

According to Neil Patel, affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s (or company’s) products.

You find a product you like, promote it to others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.

The essence of affiliates will always exist, new niches will appear. There are challenges in regulations (regulators) and techimpact (big tech), but in essence the affiliate model will survive.” said Daisycon CEO, Marko Dobroschelski

Examples:

All the global e-commerce sites including AliExpress, eBay and Amazon practice affiliate marketing.

eBay stocks it’s products at the Glory Cycles site:

Since it’s launch in 2001, Glory Cycles has been quite successful due to good management, but more importantly, it’s affiliation with eBay has helped boost sales even further.

Similarly, Amazon has partnered with an interesting site of review articles, Every Day Carry

On Every Day Carry’s website, you can find swiss knives, watches, flashlights and other products which redirect to Amazon’s website if you want to purchase them, thus making Every Day Carry a promotional platform for Amazon’s products.

The same is the case with Gear Patrol, another affiliate of Amazon that sells a wider variety of products as compared to Every Day Carry.

In both instances, the affiliate as well as Amazon benefit from their relationship with each other as the affiliates enjoy Amazon’s brand name whereas the e-commerce giant gets multiple platforms to market its products on.

  • Search Engine Optimisation

Like I mentioned before, SEO will help you rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Here’s what you need to do to achieve SEO:

  • Create custom content with relevant keywords
  • Maximise your website’s loading speed (preferably under 3 seconds)
  • Optimise your site to be mobile-friendly
  • Create backlinks through authoritative websites
  • Create a good user experience for your website visitors through a good web design

Examples:

Macy’s has done an amazing job in getting its SEO right.

The fashion brand uses canonical URL tags, which means that the content on its website can be reached in a number of ways but without duplicated URLs.

Let’s take one of its products as an example:

If a user is searching for a Christmas tree, they’ll be able to find it in 3 different ways:

You’ll notice all 3 URLs are similar and any large website like Macy’s would face the problem of duplicate URLs unless they take action.

Thus, Macy’s created a specified rel=”canonical” for each of these URLs.

As a result, all SEO value is funnelled to a single URL version.

  • Web design

You’ll notice many of these digital marketing examples are interlinked. Good web design and content marketing will lead to higher SEO.

But let’s delve deeper into how web design can be incorporated into your digital marketing strategy.

You know you need a new web design if your website is hard to navigate and users are having difficulty getting to the pages they want to (Check out WebFx for great design services).

Your website should be simple, aesthetic and have a good internal link structure.

Examples

The following are some of the best, award-winning websites that have great web design:

  • Rainforest Guardians
Award: Best Activism Website, 2016 Webby Awards

This web design uses the colour green which is visually appealing and sets it apart from other websites.

When advertising, the right use of colours can elicit emotion from your customers.

  • Protest Sportswear
Award: Site of the Year (2016), Awwwards

The Sportswear website focuses more on the final looks rather than the product which makes it unique and helps customers picture themselves in the product that they want to buy.

●      Inside Abbey Road

Award: Best Music Website, 2016 Webby Awards

This is an example of one of the most trending web designs currently. It’s simple, it’s easy to understand and the mellow colours portray calmness.

Google has done an amazing job with this website by making it highly interactive which draws visitors to it.

  • Email marketing

You’re likely to earn $38 for every single dollar that you invest in email marketing, so make sure it’s a part of your marketing strategy.

Not only is email a great channel for promoting your content personally to each customer, but it also generates leads and updates customers with important notifications, discounts and other general information about the business.

Examples:

Uber has a great email marketing campaign for the following reasons: it’s simple, straight to the point and has a great call to action (CTR). This works perfectly for most subscribers because who has the time to read long newsletters anymore?

Subscribers also receive amazing discounts through Uber’s email campaign, which motivates them to constantly check for new emails:

  • Online PR

Public relations, i.e. a company’s relationship with its customers can be strengthened through influencer marketing.

The age group between 15-25 is highly influenced by famous personalities, so you can use that to your advantage by getting them to promote your brand.

Examples:

Everyone’s favourite ice cream brand Häagen-Dazs carried out promotions at Duane Reade and Walgreens Stores.

Häagen-Dazs partnered with New York City local influencers who targeted the millennial lifestyle.

The influencers created content around the theme “Häagen-Dazs Open Container” – #HDOpenContainer, which was a play on words connected with current events in New York at the time.

It positioned Häagen-Dazs as a product that is essential for summers.

Here’s an in-depth video of how the influencers marketed the brand and the overwhelming response that they received despite targetting a single city:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT_n7Faqq_Y
  • Pay Per Click

So I’ve discussed organic forms of marketing so far, but if you feel that you need to boost your revenues or sales fast, PPC is the way to go.

The process of PPC includes selecting the keywords and phrases that you want to trigger your ads and set a maximum bid.

Then, if your bid is among the highest, your ad will appear at the top of the SERPs – above organic listings.

I’ll give an example to explain the PPC concept. Suppose you sell clothing accessories. You’ll use accessories, clothing and other relevant keywords as will your competitors.

When consumers search for these keywords, the ads with the maximum amount of these keywords will rank the highest.

Examples:

Here’s a unique example of how you can use PPC ads; the freelance copywriter and director Alec Brownstein used PPC ads to market his own self!

He conducted the Google Job Experiment in which he set up paid search campaigns using the names of New York’s top creative directors as keywords.

When the creative directors Googled themselves, they found his paid search ads asking for a job.

In fact, he misspelt Googling to ‘Gooogling’ on purpose since trademark keywords cannot be bid on.

The result? Brownstein got 4 out of 5 interviews from New York’s top executives, received job offers from 2 of them and now works at the Y&R agency.

https://youtu.be/7FRwCs99DWg

Conclusion

These digital marketing examples set a precedent for companies to follow. If you want to be successful and become a market leader, not only do you need to incorporate these examples into your digital marketing strategy, but you also need to put a unique spin on them to make sure they stand out from competitor promotions.

The best thing about digital marketing is that it is cost-friendly and effective, which has leveled the playing field i.e. small companies now have a platform to compete with larger businesses who had an edge over new entrants in the market before.

Thus, digital marketing will provide you with an opportunity to help grow and expand your business, so use it creatively!

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