3 Types of Marketing You Might Not Know About

Marketing is constantly evolving, so much so it can be hard to keep up. While print, billboard, and television advertising used to be the primary forms of reaching consumers, the landscape has dramatically shifted in recent years. Today data-driven digital marketing has taken the lead. The pressure is on marketers to evolve, leveraging tactics that perform well and lead to the best return on investment.

While marketers are likely familiar with social media, email marketing, and SEO strategies, other ways to reach your audience are available. Plus, using a mix of approaches across different channels and platforms often leads to better results. Below are three types of marketing you might not know about and why you may want to implement them for your company.

1. Performance Marketing

As the name suggests, performance marketing looks at what is performing well and emphasizes these tactics. It’s a results-driven approach, meaning it requires looking at the data and analyzing it. With this strategy, brands only pay when specific actions or results are achieved. The most obvious result is a sale, however, leads and clicks on a particular ad are also valuable outcomes.

For this type of digital advertising, marketers will put ads on a given channel such as Facebook or Google Search and pay based on how the content performs. Depending on the campaign and the selected channel, there are a few ways in which the company can pay out for the ad. This includes cost-per-click, cost-per-impression, cost-per-leads, and cost-per-acquisition.

Because monitoring and evaluating performance can be tricky, many companies opt to contract a performance marketing agency. These agencies know the ins and outs of performance marketing and many are trained in specific industries. They can assist with your overall digital strategy as well as your media buying and campaign strategy. With a customized approach, you should see overall better performance and a greater ROI.

2. Predictive Modeling

Going with your gut isn’t necessarily the best approach, especially regarding your marketing strategy. A failed campaign is a loss of time but also a loss of resources and money. Thanks to new technologies, gaining insights into future user behavior is more accessible than ever. With predictive modeling, marketers can look at historical data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning to identify patterns, which can predict future outcomes. Most notably, they can often determine when a buyer is likely to make a purchase.

Having these insights can help identify predictive audiences — groups of customers targeted based on anticipated behavior. For instance, if you know which buyers are likely to make a purchase within the next week, you can categorize them as a predictive audience. By creating these subsets, marketers can more effectively target and guide them through the sales funnel using tailored tactics.

Predictive modeling can be used in sales by anticipating customer needs and providing products or services to meet their demands. However, it can also be used for product innovation and development. A brand that recognizes the types of requests buyers are making over time can stand out from the competition. Predictive modeling can also be used to forecast inventory and manage resources. For example, the airline industry relies on predictive modeling marketing to set ticket prices based on when travelers are most likely to buy a ticket.

3. Affiliate Marketing

You’ve likely come across affiliate marketing in your own search or purchase decision-making, but maybe you didn’t realize you were even being sold to. With affiliate marketing, a company pays an external site to promote its products or services. This site earns a commission based on the total sales. When a browser clicks and purchases from the affiliate link, it is attributed to that external site.

The main goals of this strategy are sales and increasing brand authority. When a reputable site references a company and includes an affiliate link to a specific product, the brand’s authority is boosted. Readers of the publication will regard them with a higher value because they place value on the publisher. Sales can be tracked quite easily too, so brands can see which publishers or sites received the most revenue based on the specific affiliate link.

Affiliate marketing is often confused with influencer marketing, however, they are quite different. Influencers also rely on third parties to help generate sales, but they are typically paid on a flat fee. They want to drive sales, but their partnership with the brand doesn’t necessarily rely on how many sales. This is because the main objective of working with an influencer is typically brand awareness rather than conversions.

How to Know What Type of Approach to Use

With so many different marketing strategies, you may be overwhelmed by which to use and when. First, consider your target audience and their needs. Focus on the channels they are most likely to use and find ways to reach them in innovative ways. Don’t be afraid to try out a few different approaches. Testing different strategies lets you see which are worth continuing and which should be either optimized or removed altogether. Having this knowledge will improve future campaign performance, inevitably generating more leads and sales over time.