Think of advertising as an imposition on your attention.

Ads kind of follow you around and actively try to get you to notice them. That’s why advertising is often called interruption marketing. To avoid these interruptions, you might find yourself taking evasive measures – like muting the TV or changing channels during the commercial break, hitting the fast-forward 30 seconds button on a podcast and using an adblocker while browsing the web.

So why advertise?

Because it can be great for brand awareness, and it can be useful to target an audience that has already shown interest in your brand (that’s why, for instance, you might see banner ads for discount boots on websites after you’ve been shopping for them).

The downside of advertising is that you’re sure to be paying money every time you get your content in front of an audience. In this sense, it’s less cost-effective over the course of a campaign than a well-executed organic content marketing effort.

Unlike advertising, the purpose of content marketing is to create content that’s so valuable to a target audience that they’ll seek it out. Where do most people go when they’re seeking out content?

The internet – and specifically a search engine.

That’s why content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are often conflated.

Technically, they’re a little different.

Content marketing is the development of original high-quality content that a target audience will find useful, and that isn’t overly promotional. This includes blog posts, podcasts, how-to-videos, original research, infographics, eBooks, white papers, free online tools and other non-interruptive marketing efforts.

SEO is about making this content more discoverable on search engines: It improves the odds that your target audience will discover your webpages when they search for questions and information that your brand has answered through digital content.

Content marketing and SEO both fall under the umbrella of digital marketing, which is why you may hear them imprecisely referred to as online marketing/internet marketing.

The core benefit of content marketing is that it gets people on your website, where you can further engage them – for instance, by encouraging them to sign up for your newsletter or to download additional resources in exchange for an email address. Great content also gives other sites something to link back to, which can help improve your site ranking.

Direct marketing, sometimes called one-on-one marketing, is a direct proposal. It can be a proposal for a trial, or in the case of the example above, just a conversation.

Technically, direct marketing falls under the umbrella of outbound marketing. Tracy, for instance, might be a regular reader of the Brafton newsletter, but she didn’t log onto her email that morning expecting to receive a personalized analysis of her site’s domain authority followed by a request for a call. It may be a little more, say, direct than she’s used to.

Nevertheless, direct marketing has its place in inbound marketing. It’s possible, for instance, that Tracy downloaded, say, an eBook we wrote about building domain authority. In that case, she’s an inbound lead that has been primed, making her an ideal prospect for a more direct approach.

Other examples of direct marketing are in the mail – like those “you’re pre-approved” credit card offers, and cold calling a list of leads.

In a vacuum, direct marketing comes across as aggressive and spammy. But when well timed as part of a bigger marketing plan, it can be the push that gets a prospect to become a customer.

Account-based marketing is simply any marketing campaigns that target specific accounts. In the example above, GumGum – a computer vision technology company – was trying to close a deal with T-Mobile. They were so invested, that they hired a creative team to create a comic book inspired by the partnership of the two brands.

It’s incredibly unconventional, but it supposedly got the attention of T-Mobile’s CEO.

The gamble with account-based marketing is that it might not work. And if the campaign is too narrow in scope – say, like a comic book about T-Mobile – it runs the risk of being a wasted investment if the target ultimately gets away.

Guerilla marketing is basically just any type of unconventional marketing that’s meant to generate publicity for a brand.

It can be a clever, attention-grabbing ploy like the KitKat bench or this Frontline ad:

Generally speaking, the more unexpected and surprising the tactic, the better. At its best, guerilla marketing inspires people to take to social media and gets bloggers, magazines and news outlets talking about the crazy-cool thing your brand did.

Guerilla marketing is not to be confused with experiential marketing. They’re similar in that they tend to be highly creative and attention-grabbing. However, the latter is little more experience oriented. An example would be Refinery 29’s 29 rooms:

Guerilla (and experiential) marketing doesn’t have to be super expensive. However, it does require resourcefulness, and cautiousness not to end up on the wrong side of the law (especially if you plan to paint on things that don’t technically belong to you).

Guerilla marketing inspires people to take to social media and gets people talking about the crazy-cool thing your brand did.

Marketing automation is basically the practice of automating certain marketing tasks. An example is the automated email we send out to users who sign up for our newsletter.

A marketing automation platform can improve segmentation (creating lists of recipients) by programming certain messages to send out to certain leads at a very particular time and day.

Marketing automation was made for email marketing and digital advertising.

The idea is that certain content is sent to or displayed for certain users based on their content consumption habits. Said habits are recorded within a tool like Pardot or Marketo. Ideally, you’ll know exactly what post the email contact was reading when they first gave you their information, and what, if any, marketing collateral they’ve downloaded since then.

Public relations is any attempt by a brand to maintain a favorable image for its audiences regardless of what might be happening. For example, when KFC experienced an embarrassing shortage of chicken in the U.K., it ran the above full-page ad in The Sun and Metro. The ad casts humor on the situation while providing a sincere apology to the chicken-deprived denizens of the U.K.

Public relations isn’t reserved just for the KFCs of the world, though.

Small businesses also need PR. For instance, how they communicate with their customers and their business partners following a data breach is important to their recovery as an organization.

And PR doesn’t necessarily have to follow a disaster. Highlighting your charitable exploits in a blog post is an opportunity to earn some positive publicity. So is attending local events in the community and publishing a press release when your brand is recognized by an industry magazine.

Anything you can do (within your means) to earn positive media attention will ultimately help your brand.