30 Types of Marketing to Boost Your Business

Marketing is constantly evolving, driven by new technologies and creative tactics. Today, marketing is one of the most important strategic initiatives for businesses. Many people turn to the internet for information on businesses and products as consumers like to be educated about their purchases.

Today, nearly every business and professional marketers use different types of marketing strategy to target customers in new and interesting ways. So before beginning our learning on the marketing types, let us first understand what is marketing.

What is marketing?

Think of marketing as the heartbeat of any business – the engine that drives growth and connects products or services with the people (potential customers) who need them.

At its core, marketing is all about understanding your customers – what they want, what they need and how your offerings can make their lives better. It’s about creating value, building relationships and telling your story in a way that resonates with your audience.

But marketing isn’t just about advertising or sales pitches. It’s a holistic approach that encompasses everything from market research and product development to pricing strategies and branding. It’s about making connections – connecting your brand with the right people, at the right time, in the right way. It’s about sparking interest, driving engagement and turning prospects into loyal customers.

With that in mind, this list highlights all the different marketing types available to you. Here, you’ll read about 40 common types of marketing strategies and how they grow your business.

As you scroll, note any methods you’d like to try. Then, think about the types of marketing you want to prioritize and develop a plan to integrate them into your existing digital marketing strategy.

Types of Marketing

There are many types of marketing that you can leverage to increase your audience reach. Using multiple marketing channels can help you create a well-rounded strategy that will yield the best results.

To help you determine which marketing strategies may work best for your business, here are 34 of the most effective types of marketing:

Digital marketing

Digital marketing is any type of marketing strategy that uses digital technology. Using different types of marketing strategies to promote your business and products digitally will help you reach your audience through the channels that they are already engaging with. Whether you’re deciding to create a website of your own to building a social media following, there’s a marketing method suited to your business and needs.

As you continue reading, you’ll notice that most common types of marketing covered in this article are digital. These include:

Content marketing
Search engine marketing
Search engine marketing
Social media marketing
Affiliate marketing
Email marketing
Mobile marketing
Video marketing
Online advertising

Content Marketing

You have probably noticed the increasing amount of business blogs as you browse the web. In fact, many Google search results actually come from company-run blogs.

But why do so many companies build a blog for their business? For that matter, what does blogging even have to do with small business marketing?

Blogging is crucial for content marketing—one of the most effective strategic marketing approach out there. Arguably the most important inbound type of marketing, content marketing is an essential part of any business’s toolkit.

As a whole, content marketing involves creating and distributing valuable content often through multi-channel marketing approaches. This not only includes writing blog posts, but also posting on social media, writing in-depth e-books, sharing data-rich infographics, creating video content and even starting a podcast. This type of marketing helps you connect with your audience and answer their questions. It can also help to generate leads and close sales.

Whatever content you pick, the goal is to offer quality, reliable content to your target audience that drives engagement, provides knowledge and support, and ultimately stimulates interest in your product or service.

Content should be published regularly with the target audience in mind. Ideally, your brand would become a trusted voice within the industry by publishing useful content. You want your audience to come to you first for information on the latest industry trends.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the strategy of creating high quality content in such a way that search engines like Google will put your page at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engines uses algorithms to decide how relevant your page is to the keywords that the user is searching for. These algorithms update frequently, and SEO strategies must be adjusted just as regularly to remain effective.

When done properly, SEO efforts will rank your page high on the SERP and bring in more organic traffic.

To start doing SEO, you’ll need to learn about the different ingredients that make websites rank in search engines. This includes technical SEO, like the structure and page speed of your website, as well as the implementation of keywords. Content marketing and SEO are deeply intertwined, since the more keyword-rich your blog and website content, the better your chances of ranking higher on the SERP.

Search Engine Marketing/Pay-per-Click

Search engine marketing (SEM), includes all types of marketing that uses search engines like Google as the primary tool for advertisements.

The goal of SEM is to boost your business pages to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs). When a page from your website—let’s say, a blog post or landing page —shows up in search engine results pages (SERPs) in response to a user’s search query, the user is exposed to your business.

The cost of these advertisements typically depends on the number of clicks the link receives, hence “pay-per-click.”

When you pay for these top SERP slots, the “Ad” label will appear next to your URL. Despite consumer knowledge that these are ads, they’ll click on these links and navigate to your website. This can be a very effective digital marketing strategy.

PPC advertisements are the sponsored content you see at the top of search results pages. If you’re interested in paying for sponsored results on Google, try Google Ads. This is one of the most popular, reliable choices for PPC marketers.

Social Media Marketing

Some experts argue that social media marketing is a branch of content marketing, while others maintain it’s a world of its own. Whichever category you place it in, social media marketing is one of the most important types of marketing.

With social media marketing, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn or YouTube are used as a digital marketing channel. Ads can be bought to reach out to a new audience, or you can create a profile for your business on any social media platform and create posts to advertise new products, sales, or freshly published content.

Many companies use a combination of these different platforms as part of their social media marketing strategy. Which social media platform you will use will largely depend on where your target audience is most active and how you want to represent your business. For example, restaurant social media marketing is particularly effective on Instagram because the platform is based on visuals. Posting pictures and videos of tasty-looking food is an extremely effective way for restaurants to market their products.

Email Marketing

Email marketing involves sending emails to prospects and customers with the goal of making sales or driving them further down the marketing funnel. Because it reaches customers directly, it tends to generate high returns. For every dollar spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $36.

81% of small business marketers rely on email marketing approach as their primary acquisition channel, while 80% use it for customer retention.

Depending on your business goals, you can send all sorts of emails to your audience, including new product releases, informational newsletters, sales announcements and abandoned shopping cart reminders. It’s a great way to put personalized marketing to work. Just keep in mind that everyone you email must have subscribed to receive your messages for you to remain legally compliant.

The most important part of this digital marketing channel is that it should provide value to your audience. Provide them exclusives that they would not receive anywhere else, and you can build a mutually beneficial relationship that will increase brand loyalty.

To start getting subscribers, add lead capture forms to your website with fields for visitors’ names and email addresses. When someone visits your website or business, invite them to join an email subscriber list. Make sure your forms are eye-catching and include compelling copy that encourages people to join your mailing list.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing involves using social media platforms like Instagram to partner with influencers—people who already have dedicated, engaged followers. These people are considered experts in their field, and their followers will take their recommendations to heart. That means that when an influencer backs your product, it gains instant credibility in their followers’ eyes. The result? More exposure for your brand and new customers.

For an effective influencer relationship, try to work with an individual who is well-known and respected within your industry. They can create content promoting your business or product and share a link to your website. Every time a sale is completed, or a link is clicked, the influencer will receive a compensation.

Affiliate marketing

In addition to paying influencers for sponsored posts, you can pay them for sharing affiliate content. This process is known affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one of the legitimate ways marketers and bloggers make money blogging. With affiliate marketing, you promote another person’s or company’s product, and every time someone purchases the product via one of your affiliate links, you earn a commission.

Affiliate marketing involves two players: the merchant and the affiliate. The affiliate promotes the merchant’s product to their audience and earns a commission of the sale in exchange.

So, how does affiliate marketing work? As the merchant, you’ll connect with affiliates, either reaching out to them directly or using an affiliate network. Once they agree to partner with you, you will offer them with a unique link to your business or product page.

Then, the affiliate will promote your link, perhaps including it in a blog post or social media platforms. When a customer clicks on the link to make a purchase, the affiliate will earn a percentage from the sale.

Affiliate marketing can bring your business wider exposure. By partnering with affiliates who already have a large audience on their social media networks or blog, you can reach new potential customers.

Because of that, affiliate marketing is an opportunity you can take advantage of, and it’s easy to get started with affiliate marketing.

To learn more about how to make money blogging with affiliate marketing, check out our tutorial guide on how to start affiliate marketing.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a strategic marketing approach that encompasses nearly all marketing types. So, what makes a particular marketing strategy inbound? That is determined less by the specific method and more by the overarching technique.

As an inbound marketer, your job is to help consumers make informed decisions. Instead of running after customers, you will provide helpful resources and tips that ultimately reveal why your product solves their pains. You can offer valuable blog content, make yourself available via email and live chat, and continue to offer support even after making a sale.

One of the most common inbound marketing methods is content marketing, which we’ve read more about above.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing is a marketing type that involves chasing after customers rather than organically attracting them. This type of marketing was especially common before digital marketing became a common practice, as it involves primarily using cold calls, print ads and TV commercials to attract customers.

Still, outbound marketing remains a common digital marketing practice today. For instance, email blasts, or mass email campaigns sent to a vast subscriber list continue to be a popular content marketing strategy.

Outbound marketing often faces criticism because it pushes your message to the general public, including people who may not be interested in your product or service. That said, outbound marketing can be used as a strategic marketing approach if you carefully consider your company’s goals, target audience and KPIs.

Video marketing

As you’ve seen, marketing content assumes a wide range of formats—from blog posts to social media posts to podcasts. Video is another popular content marketing strategy.

In today’s fast-paced scenario, short and quick videos are quicker than texts in attracting potential customers. Be it educational or entertaining, live or pre-recorded video content is a reliable digital marketing tactic.

Today, 80% of customers opt for search engines and videos to learn about products and check reviews. 55% of consumers do it before buying. It is a promising opportunity to reach new customers, and video marketing strategies drive results throughout the marketing funnel.

Incorporating fun and engaging videos into your marketing tactics can be a great way to creatively display your business—and it gives you ample time and space to convey your message.

You can use video marketing not only to promote your product or service, but also to provide potential customers with actionable tips and insights about your industry. Think of it as a watchable blog post that helps people trust and engage with your brand.

There are several places for displaying video content, including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, as well as your website. Try out this video maker to get started.

Outreach marketing

What do affiliate marketing and influencer marketing have in common? They both involve partnering with people outside your company to promote your products and services.

This is the guiding principle of outreach marketing. An effective outreach strategy involves using email outreach to build relationships with people who can influence consumer opinions about your business. These include bloggers, social media influencers, journalists and even other businesses.

The goal of connecting with these people is getting your business mentioned on a well-known website or social media platform. This will strengthen your brand’s authority in your niche while building brand awareness and helping you gain exposure. Outreach marketingis also a great way to network with influential people who may benefit your business down the line.

Many businesses also use outreach marketing to build backlinks (links from external websites) to their own website. Having a high number of backlinks from credible, authoritative sources helps SEO and can ultimately bring more traffic to your site. That said, don’t start link-building without first doing careful research, as search engines like Google can penalize you for malpractice.

Word of Mouth Marketing

Ever heard the phrase that happy customers are your biggest advocates? This is the main idea behind word-of-mouth marketing, which gets satisfied customers to spread the word about your product or service.

This is important for two reasons: First, a successful word-of-mouth marketing strategy means your business has obtained loyal, committed customers. And since these people will recommend your product to their friends, it also means more potential customers. After all, people place more weight on the recommendations of a trusted friend than those of a biased seller.

There’s no tried-and-true approach to guaranteeing an effective word-of-mouth marketing strategy, but the most crucial ingredient is consumer happiness. Provide top-notch customer service and do your best to genuinely address your customers’ needs, from the way you design your products to the values you practice as a brand. Enchant your customers and the recommendations will follow.

Referral Marketing

A referral marketing tactic takes advantage of word of mouth. This practice involves building a referral program, which incentivizes customers to recommend your products to others. Typically, these referral programs offer both the customer and their friend discounts when the customer convinces that friend to purchase.

For instance, the Bluehost Referral Program allows members to earn $50 bonus by referring friends to become new Bluehost users.

Acquisition Marketing

Acquisition marketing, as its name implies, is marketing with the main purpose of acquiring new customers. This contrasts from retention marketing and brand marketing, which you will read more about below.

Examples of acquisition marketing include SEO, landing pages, and social media or Google ads. Anything that aims directly to obtain new customers or capture leads is considered acquisition marketing.

The goal of acquisition marketers is to create contents that compel their target audience to click. Offering freemium products and free trials, optimizing your website’s conversion rate, and including strategic click-through rates (CTAs) in your content are all powerful techniques for acquiring new clients.

Retention Marketing

A strong marketing strategy requires implementing both retention and acquisition tactics within the sales funnel. However, retention marketing practices have distinct goals and KPIs.

While acquisition marketing focuses on acquiring new clients, retention marketing aims to bring back previous clients and hold on to existing ones. The goal of retention marketing is to foster a loyal, dependable customer base who advocates for your brand.

Studies have shown that retention marketing is a powerful practice with a high ROI. Acquiring new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones, and on top of that, increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by up to 95%.

Retention marketing involves providing high-quality customer service and responding to the questions and needs of your customers, whether that’s by engaging with them on social media or using live chat on your website.

Importantly, building strong relationships with customers does not just mean providing them with good service until they make a buy. You must continue to delight clients long after they make their first purchase, such as by providing a loyalty program with special perks, complementary product recommendations or product care tips and guides. Thoughtful acts like these can cultivate a community around your business and build a lifelong relationship with your customers.

Brand Marketing

Unlike retention and acquisition marketing, brand marketing is not focused on making sales. Instead, its primary goal is to shape how the public perceives your brand.

In other words, brand marketing promotes your identity, not your products or services. This involves creating a logo and coming up with a cohesive brand language, colors and website design. It also requires putting together a compelling brand story, as well as a mission statement that highlights your values as a business.

For these efforts to be effective, your brand needs to deeply resonate with your target audiences’ interests, values and needs. Start by researching your target audience, and then shape a brand that speaks to them directly.

Behavioral Marketing

Behavioral marketing uses consumer behavior to decide how to target an audience with relevant content. This involves finely segmenting audiences based on their behavior on the internet.

To get behavioral data, you can analyze the user flow on your website. This offers important insights about a particular user’s interests and readiness to buy. Based on this information, marketers can create specific promotional campaigns tailored to different audiences.

As you might expect, marketing automation plays a vital role here, with certain behaviors triggering specific marketing campaigns. A particular action on your site, for instance, might show that user a relevant Facebook ad or send them an automated email recommending related products.

Public Relations

Public relations (PR) is a type of marketing that involves managing the way the media represents your brand. The process involves using press releases—official statements about a newsworthy item or event—to encourage the media to publish content about your brand.

For instance, you may urge the press to publish stories on your business’s launch, the latest funding round, a recent award, a groundbreaking new product, or a large charitable contribution. The goal is to shape the public’s perception of your business and highlight your brand as an industry leader. This, in turn, helps stimulate demand for your product or service.

While public relations can be combined with other marketing efforts, PR is a full-time job. Many brands have a dedicated PR team to help the company get good press.

Mobile Marketing

A core part of any digital marketing strategy, mobile marketing has rapidly gained traction since the advent of the smartphone. As per Google research, 27% of people worldwide use mobile voice search.

This type of marketing refers to any marketing or advertising activity that uses mobile devices as its main promotional platform.

If you own a smartphone, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with this type of marketing strategy. Push notifications, SMS messages (SMS marketing), in-app marketing, QR codes and ASO marketing are all commonly used methods for promoting a product or business.

This type of marketing takes advantage of the fact that people carry their mobile devices everywhere. It also makes use of people’s tendency to casually browse the web through their mobile phones and uses this data to target potential customers with well-timed messages. For example, a phone’s location services enable brands to target users based on their physical location.

Mobile marketing is mandatory for businesses who desire to be with their customers, side by side. It requires the marketer to adapt everything he/she is doing on the desktop to mobile. You must also be efficient in mobile-specific tasks such as in-app advertising, texting, and social messaging apps. It is significantly crucial for companies that target a younger audience.

Voice Marketing

Voice marketing is a relatively new marketing type that applies SEO practices to voice search. This allows companies to capture searches from people who are speaking, rather than typing. While voice search has been around for several years, it’s become increasingly popular with the popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, as well as smartphone assistants like Siri.

There are several ways voice search differs from typed phrases; for instance, people searching with voice may use longer phrases or even full sentences. If someone browses on their computer and has a hankering for a burger, they may simply type “burger restaurant” into Google. On the other hand, if they’re busy driving, they might ask Siri, “Where can I get a burger?”

Google accommodates this semantic variation by continuously improving the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of its search engine. To stay on top of this ever-evolving world of SEO, familiarize yourself with voice marketing and adapt your website to voice search. One way to do so is to write blog post titles in the form of a question.

Partnership Marketing

Partnership marketing is a marketing type where two or more businesses combine their promotional efforts for mutual benefit. By collaborating, you’ll expand your reach to another business’s audience, while they expand their reach to yours. This can generate brand awareness, get new customers, and help grow relationships with companies that share your values.

To try this marketing approach, start researching brands with similar target audiences. Ideally, they should provide products and services that complement your own to encourage customers to purchase both. And of course, you’ll want to make sure they don’t directly or indirectly compete with your business.

Partnership marketing options include hosting a joint webinar, conducting a research study together, or collaborating on a special product release. For instance, if you run a small business selling hosting services, consider partnering with a website building site and marketing your products together.

User-Generated Marketing

While partnership marketing harnesses the power of other businesses, user-generated marketing taps into your audience. Any marketing strategy that allows consumers to participate in a marketing campaign is considered user-generated marketing.

The most popular user-generated marketing strategy is getting users to use your product and share the experience via social media channels. On Instagram, this typically involves using a branded hashtag to organize all posts in one place or tagging the brand in a TikTok, Story or Reel.

The primary advantage of sharing user-generated content is to drive engagement and spread brand awareness. In addition, content that shows real users enjoying your products helps persuade other consumers to try them out, too.

Seasonal Marketing

Seasonal marketing (holiday marketing), is the promotion of products and services at certain times throughout the year. This might involve having one marketing campaign for Valentine’s Day, a different one for Christmas, and yet another for Pride month.

While every business can benefit from this type of marketing, it is especially essential for seasonal businesses. A jewelry business, for instance, will want to invest heavily in marketing for Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day.

B2C Marketing

B2C stands for business-to-consumer marketing. This marketing type targets an individual consumer’s buying power. Most businesses focus on B2C marketing—especially those selling consumer-packaged goods. That is because B2C marketing offers a broad audience and short sales cycles which allow for quick purchasing decisions. Consumers often make the purchase for themselves, meaning they do not need approval from many stakeholders.

However, consumer needs constantly shift, meaning this fast-paced market can change overnight. B2C businesses, then, must make an effort to stay up-to-date with marketing trends and consumer behavior insights.

Common B2C marketing strategies include influencer marketing, social media contests and customer loyalty programs

B2B Marketing

B2B marketing stands for business-to-business marketing. In this type of marketing, one business sells services to another business. While B2B marketing still targets a singular person, it’s usually based on their role, company, or industry.

B2B sales cycles are long, as companies require more research and stakeholder approval before buying goods or services than consumers do. B2B marketing commonly starts with marketers getting marketing qualified leads into their sales funnel and using sales development to make calls and conduct product demos.

Most B2B marketing is done digitally or through industry-specific conferences. Many B2B marketers use LinkedIn’s job title database to target their audience.

Event Marketing

Businesses can use event marketing to build lasting relationships and create memorable experiences for their target audiences. Events can range from thought leadership-based conferences or online events to product-forward workshops.

Positive event experiences can lead to more new business through meaningful one-on-one customer engagement and education. 74% of consumers say that branded event experiences make them more likely to purchase promoted products. Before launching the event, identify which memory you want attendees to walk away with. The most impactful results are the feelings you leave with people.

Global Marketing

As online businesses attract increasingly global audiences, many turn to localization marketing, optimizing messages and products to fit cultural and geographic specificities.

This marketing type shows you understand the different cultures within your target audience and allows you to tailor your message and product to fit their needs.

One method is to localize wording and images or even create products better suited for certain cultures.

To gain respect for your business and avoid tokenization, an excellent way to approach localization is to partner with members of the community or culture that you want to reach.

Conversational Marketing

This marketing type allows brands to more easily converse with their customers.

Today, consumers expect to find the answers they need instantaneously.

Conversational marketing solutions provide quick customer service methods. In fact, around 73% of customers find live chat the most acceptable form of communication with a brand.

Not only will visitors have their problems or questions resolved, but this inbound marketing method can turn these dialogues into leads that improve your sales funnel and bring back satisfied customers.

Companies can utilize conversational marketing by adding live chat to a website or by opening communication on their social media channel, WhatsApp and other messengers.

Product Marketing

Product marketing ensures product-market fit and helps better understand customer problems. This marketing type uses market research, sales, and customer success data to inform messaging.

It helps you hone in on the perfect customer via segmentation, targeting, and personas. Product marketing can also allow you to understand better what competitors are doing and the alternatives that your audience is considering. With all these insights, your brand can best tweak messaging and the product itself to improve sales.

This marketing type has clear key performance indicators (KPIs) that help measure the effectiveness of efforts across a company’s entire product line. For example, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies commonly set goals around the number of trial and demo signups, lead-to-consumer rate and revenue.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing, also known as key account marketing, has marketing and sales creating personalized messages, campaigns, and buying experiences to target a specific account or company. Businesses often use type of marketing as an acquisition marketing method to generate new leads.

Account-based marketing is popular among B2B businesses with a niche audience, like medical companies that want to target exact hospitals.

There is typically a minimum number of accounts you must provide for account-based marketing to succeed. Many advertising solutions let you upload a mass sheet with the targeted businesses so that you only pay for ads served to them.

Types of Marketing

Digital marketing

Content Marketing

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