We have talked to clients and colleagues through networking, and often noticed that not everyone knows what the term ‘digital marketing’ means or encompasses, so we thought it was time for a brief explainer post.

Digital marketing is a form of marketing to customers using the internet and your electronic device, whatever it may be. Digital marketing channels include social media, email, websites, search engines and blogs.

These are important ways to reach and engage customers online, particularly as they open up your product or service to more people, locally, nationally and internationally, depending on your offering.

Here are the key digital marketing channels you could consider in your business:

Social media

Social media promotes your business online to increase your brand awareness. Its main driver is to get more visitors to your website and generate more leads. Social media marketing channels include:

• Facebook

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• Instagram

• Snapchat

• Pinterest

• Google+

Check out this article if you want to make your social media pages more eye-catching and effective.  

Websites and email

You will have seen many businesses using email marketing to communicate with their audiences. Email is often used to promote useful and actionable content, discounts, and events. All of these activities generally direct readers to your business website. Email marketing campaigns include:

• Blog subscriber’s newsletters

• Email follow ups to visitors who downloaded something from the website

• New customer welcome emails

• Seasonal promotional emails

• Tips emails to engage customers

Have a look at these examples for the most interesting and effective email marketing campaigns we have seen.

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimising your website and its pages so it ranks higher in search engine results, like the ones you see in Google. This can increase the amount of organic (free and not paid for) visitors your website receives. The main channels that benefit from SEO include:

• Websites

• Blogs

If you haven’t already optimised your website organically, have a look at these five things you can do yourself to increase your ranking.  

Paid search

Paid search is a way to drive traffic to your website by paying every time your ad is clicked. Google Ads is the most common PPC (pay-per-click) platform, where you pay to compete for the top ‘ad’ slots on Google's search engine results pages. As the name suggests, you pay a price ‘per click’ of the links or keywords you put into place. PPM (Pay Per Thousand) is another form of paid search. It is mainly used on social media channels such as Facebook, where you pay every time your ad has been viewed a thousand times. The channels where you can use paid search include:

• Google Ads

• Paid ads on Facebook

• Promoted Tweets on Twitter

• Promoted posts on Instagram

• Sponsored Messages on LinkedIn

Blogs and eBooks

The purpose of creating blogs and eBooks is to promote your business and generate some brand awareness, grow traffic, generate leads and eventually new customers. Channels that can help promote content include:

• Blog posts

• eBooks and white papers

• Online brochures

If you need help writing blogs or white papers, get in touch with Sail at As in Boat and he’ll be able to help you get started.

Bringing it all together

The success of digital marketing has come from more and more of us being online, more and more of the time. Phones, tablets, watches, etc. have all contributed to our increased time on the internet and has opened up greater opportunities for businesses to target customers.

This means that any of the tactics above may not work well on their own, but need to be part of an overall digital marketing strategy. Digital marketers manage advert campaigns, social media, SEO and paid search, together with offline campaigns like print and PR, to increase the chances of reaching your target customer.

For a digital marketing campaign to be successful, your business needs to learn about the digital channels and devices your customers are using, as this varies with different products, services and industries.

As a business, it’s important to engage with prospects and customers to build fruitful and useful relationships. Managing these relationships across a variety of channels, including digital and traditional will be key to your digital marketing success.

If you’d like to discuss a branding design project with us, drop us a line on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call us on 01353 882111. You can also find out more information on our graphic design service here.