Digital marketing is the practice of using online or digital communication channels to promote your business and engage with potential customers.
Inbound marketing involves using digital channels to attract and engage customers by providing content that resonates with them. This approach emphasizes creating meaningful interactions and building long-term trust with your audience.
Digital marketing, however, includes all forms of online marketing, both inbound and outbound. While inbound marketing strategically targets and nurtures leads with relevant content.
Outbound digital strategies typically aim to broadcast marketing messages to a large online audience, often without considering relevance or reception.
In contrast, inbound digital marketing tactics focus on attracting potential customers through valuable online content. Blogging is a prime example of an effective inbound marketing asset. This is because it can help your business website capture the attention of their ideal customers by addressing topics they’re actively searching for.
Learn more about how to start a blog for your small business
A digital marketing strategy is a comprehensive plan outlining how a business will utilise various digital channels and tactics to achieve its marketing KPIs and reach target audiences. It typically includes defining target audiences, understanding the fundamentals of digital marketing channels, and establishing objectives to measure success.
You can use multiple online channels to promote your products and services as part of a digital marketing strategy. No matter the size of your business, you can use digital marketing to:
Read on as we answer questions like, ‘What is a digital marketing strategy?’, as well as offer an introduction to the tactics used within this space.
Digital marketing allows everyone, from service providers, to e-commerce stores, to enterprise organisations, effectively compete in this digital era and reach their customers across a broader market. Unlike more traditional advertising campaigns, such as print or televised media, these strategies offer excellent flexibility, refined audience targeting, and often a greater return on investment.
Today, business owners can access all types of digital marketing. Here, we’ll break down your options to help you build your strategy.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps to increase your website's visibility on popular search engines like Google and Bing. To achieve higher search rankings, it helps to maintain several different aspects of the SEO fundamentals, including:
Most people today start their search for products and services with search engines, so having your website listed on results pages will help drive more online traffic and boost SEO. These algorithms are forever changing, so stay up-to-date on the latest best-practice measures to consistently drive more targeted traffic to your website.
'Pay-Per-Click' (PPC) advertising instantly boosts traffic and sales by placing paid ads online in high-traffic areas. You will only pay when someone clicks on your ad, ensuring better use of your marketing budget. Instead, it involves strategic keyword use, engaging ad copy, and eye-catching design.
PPC offers immediate ad placement on search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. It enables businesses to target specific audiences, track real-time performance, and optimise campaigns for better results.
As ‘content’ is used across many marketing campaigns, many business owners often wonder, ‘What is Content marketing?’ It’s a strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, engage and retain a clearly defined target audience.
When you regularly publish engaging content, you can:
Every content marketing strategy will be uniquely tailored to your business’s needs, preferences and pain points. Creating content in multiple formats, like blog posts, infographics, videos, e-books, and podcasts, allows you to cater to different audience preferences and increase engagement. What’s more, distributing your content through the proper channels, including your website and social media marketing, can amplify its reach and impact.
Learn more about the benefits of content creation for your business
Social media marketing means using social media platforms to promote your brand, products and services. Popular social media platforms include:
You can use these platforms to connect with your target audience through the use of social media advertising and organic posting. The latter involves posting engaging content and encouraging two-way communication with your customers.
A social media marketing strategy can help you:
A well-planned social media marketing strategy must consider each platform’s unique characteristics and user demographics. For example, LinkedIn is a corporate channel that’s great for building B2B connections. Whereas Instagram is great for brands that want to show off their products and services to consumers directly.
By understanding the right approach for each social media platform, you can better target specific user segments and increase the reach of your marketing messages.
Read more about how to create a social media strategy.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based partnership between businesses and online publishers who promote their products or services. These ‘affiliates’ receive a commission for each sale, lead, or action generated through their online marketing efforts, allowing businesses to tap into new audiences, increase sales, and better track marketing outlays.
Affiliate marketing's popularity stems from its accessibility and potential for steady revenue. Businesses can attract a wide range of affiliates, easily monitor their performance, and foster strong relationships through competitive commission rates. The result? Consistent exposure and a reliable income stream.
Influencer marketing involves partnering with individuals with a significant online following and robust credibility in their niche. By collaborating with these influencers to promote your brand, products, or services, you tap directly into their following. In doing so, you leverage their ‘influence’ over a target audience to increase awareness, trust, and engagement.
Influencers can help promote your products and services by:
Content creators and social media personalities are aplenty these days, making it somewhat difficult to identify the right influencers to represent your brand. Consider their audience demographics and content style, and even request information on their engagement rates.
Once you believe you have found the best fit, you will want to balance clear objectives from the campaign with the influencer’s creative freedom, coming together with the right tools to measure campaign results.
Email marketing is a highly effective, long-standing and proven digital marketing strategy built around sending targeted, personalised emails to lists of subscribers. Businesses can use well-structured email campaigns to repeatedly nurture leads, promote offers, and share valuable content. Moreover, these campaigns allow direct communication with customers, helping to maintain a strong relationship.
While some might see it as outdated, email marketing continues to prove that it offers a high return on investment (ROI) and the ability to drive customer retention.
Brands can build quality email lists by encouraging visitor subscriptions via their website or social media. Then, by segmenting contacts based on demographics, interests, or behaviour, they can deliver more relevant content to each subscriber.
Regularly monitoring email performance metrics can refine your email marketing strategy and achieve better results over time.
Digital marketing can help you to reach customers where they spend a lot of their time – online. So, how much does the average person spend on the internet? Research suggests it’s as much as 6 hours per day. This is why digital marketing is important.
If businesses want to grow and succeed in today's competitive landscape, the types of digital marketing mentioned above offer a range of benefits, including:
Developing a digital marketing strategy can be a daunting task for small businesses. Nevertheless, by following the below steps, you can craft an effective strategy that helps boosts sales, brand awareness and engagement.
Digital marketing includes a wide range of online strategies that you can use to help achieve your business goals.. Embracing this ever-evolving landscape, can help you unlock new possibilities, stay ahead of the competition, and work towards creating lasting success for your business.
Learn more about how to manage and outsource your digital marketing strategy
Originally published January 2024, updated September 2024.
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