Demystifying Marketing: Types of Marketing

Marketing is an ever-evolving business function. Organizations structure their marketing teams in many different ways. Here is a primer on the most common marketing functions to help you understand how to build your marketing skills or bring in the right skills to create an effective marketing team.

Digital Marketing: Over the previous 15 years, most marketing has shifted to digital platforms, making it the cornerstone of Marketing. And during the last 15 months, even events have gone digital. However, when we speak of digital marketing, we are generally speaking of these three sub-marketing functions.

i. Website Marketing: The website is the most important digital asset. It is the virtual front door of an organization and the central component of all your digital campaigns. (P.S. read my blog on Website Content to learn how to approach the website content architecture). Website marketing entails creating a dynamic web presence — including building landing pages and microsites that tie into your various marketing programs — and boosting your rank on Search Engines (SEO).

ii. Email Marketing: Despite experts predicting the death of emails, Email Marketing remains the dominant leader in the digital marketing space. You can do a lot with email marketing — email marketing tools can become the central piece of your CRM — so a deep understanding of this capability is a must-have skill on your team.

iii. Social Media Marketing:

• Social Media Marketing (Own): This includes your marketing efforts using social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, Clubhouse, etc. It is not necessary to be on all channels; pick a few (even one) most relevant to your audience and commit to posting regularly.
• Social Media Advertising (Paid): Social Media Advertising is one part of Digital Advertising (an area of expertise in itself). If you want to keep it simple, boost your existing posts to a broader audience. If budget allows, work with an Ad Agency to create Ads that will engage your target audience. While some Ad fatigue is setting in with consumers, it is still quite effective, especially for an Awareness campaign.

Content Marketing: This spans all marketing functions and includes many different forms, such as presentations, articles, podcasts, webinars, white papers, videos, images, etc. Content Marketing has moved in the direction of rapid cadence. Keep in mind that the content you give your audience needs to offer value and be strategically delivered at the right time and on the right channel.

Brand Marketing: This team develops brand guidelines and is responsible for ensuring the brand elements are integrated across the organization and into different content and external communications. It also typically owns the relationship with the Marketing / P.R. Agency. Large organizations have a dedicated Brand Marketing team.

Influencer Marketing: This subset of Social Media Advertising deserves its own sub-heading since it is becoming a big part of Marketing/Advertising strategy. An “Influencer” is not necessarily a celebrity — it is anyone with a large following in the same space. They can be seasoned business leaders or teenagers; they could have millions of followers or tens of thousands; it can be a paid engagement, an organic mention (with some strategic outreach), or PSA by request.

Event Marketing (evolving to Experiential Marketing): This team puts together events that bring various teams, customers and partners together and can be in many different forms — conferences, seminars/webinars, round tables, company-wide All-Hands meetings, etc. No other type of marketing changed more drastically in the last 15 months than Event Marketing, and I expect it will continue to evolve.

Growth Marketing: I’ll be honest that while I keep seeing this term being used (primarily by startups), I am unclear about its exact role. My take is when a company is ready for the hyper-growth phase (after series A or series B funding), it needs to scale very quickly and get new customers. Since it is now flush with cash, growth marketing is about running very aggressive campaigns for customer acquisition.

The following three marketing functions are more common in tech companies.

Product Marketing: In tech companies, product marketing is the center of all marketing. They define the product’s positioning and messaging, develop the launch plan, and ensure that salespeople and customers understand its features.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing: This team owns the development of customer journeys and mainly focuses on driving marketing programs that increase retention, engagement, and revenue by upselling. This function is more common to SAAS companies.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM): If your target market or customer base is large companies, you need to create a personalized marketing strategy designed to engage each customer with a marketing campaign based on their specific needs.

And finally, Integrated Marketing: As the word suggested, Integrated Marketing pulls together various marketing functions under one team/role. This role is for a marketing generalist.

Have you seen other Marketing functions I have not included? Let me know as I am always curious to learn about specialized marketing skills. As I said at the outset, Marketing is an ever-evolving business function.