Advertising / Marketing · 28 Sep 2026
The answer to this question is constantly evolving, because digital marketing keeps pushing the boundaries of its influence.
Digital marketing emerged in the 1990s. It is the promotion of goods and services through digital technology. Modern shopping now happens on an entirely different scale, because technology has had such a strong influence on cultural and economic life around the world. Today, a single click takes you to an online shop where you can find whatever matters to you and your home. You know the philosophy: “Save time, shop from anywhere.”
Why do we need digital marketing?
Digital marketing uses every digital advertising channel to bring products and services to the widest possible audience. It builds a personal relationship with the customer and makes it possible to earn their trust, patience and loyalty. It shares many traits with traditional marketing, but differs in one key respect: it reaches its audience entirely through technology.
Digital marketing campaigns are a necessity for every business, and they are becoming ever more effective.
Digital marketing: how do you build a successful, original digital campaign?
A digital campaign is a network of marketing disciplines — content marketing, search engine optimisation, email marketing, Google Ads, marketing on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and more. It needs a talented team of specialists who understand the needs and wants of both the business client and its potential customers (the target audience). What matters is building an original strategy and marketing it well across the many digital channels.
The main types of digital marketing for a successful business
Content marketing: the foundation of digital marketing
Content marketing focuses on creating, publishing and distributing written content that is valuable, relevant and consistent for a specific online audience.
Its aims are to:
attract attention and generate interest in the form of enquiries about your products or services;
grow your customer base;
increase online sales effectively;
build engagement with a wide online audience.
Within a digital campaign, content marketing can work on a less rational level, creating a sense of loyalty to a brand, product or service. It does not involve direct selling; instead, it meets the audience’s need for accurate information.
Examples of marketing content include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, white papers and e-books.
Search engine optimisation (SEO): the most powerful tool in digital marketing
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most important types of digital marketing. It is the process of improving both the quality and the quantity of traffic to a website. Its goal is to make the site more visible to people who use search engines.
SEO can be applied to different kinds of search engine — both specialised ones (image, video, academic and other searches) and general-purpose ones such as Google. Without search engine optimisation, customers simply won’t be able to find you online.
Some optimisation techniques include researching keywords and working them into your website’s content, optimising your titles, and building relevant links.
Search engine marketing (SEM)
Originally, “search engine marketing” was used as an umbrella term for gaining both paid and free traffic from search. The industry has since moved to using “SEM” for paid activity only.
Search engine marketing is another form of digital marketing. It aims to increase your site’s visibility in search engines through paid methods — in other words, the ads you run on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.
Google Ads
Google Ads is one of the main advertising channels in digital marketing. It lets you put your business in front of thousands of interested potential customers. Unlike other advertising channels, Google Ads is exceptionally well suited to generating sales and enquiries, because your ad is shown to people who are actively trying to solve a problem, find a specific service or buy a particular product.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is the most powerful form of commercial influence on social networks. There, presenting a product or service is a showcase of original thinking, quality and marketing strategy. The social platforms realised their hidden power long ago, and now offer plenty of tools and services aimed at business customers. Their purpose is to help you find an audience for your brand, product or service quickly and effectively — and to let you analyse your campaigns and the return on your spend.
Social media is where customers can connect with you more directly, whether personally or in public.
Influencer marketing as part of social media marketing
This is the newest and fastest-growing way to promote your business. It creates a genuine connection with the audience most likely to become your customers. An influencer is a kind of digital ambassador: an interesting person with media influence in a particular field. They might be a blogger, a vlogger or a YouTube creator — people whose professional collaboration can make your brand’s advertising genuinely effective. Choosing the right person matters, so trust professionals who can carry out a thorough analysis of which influencer is the right link between you and your customers.
Email marketing
Email marketing is the familiar process of sending a commercial message to a group of people by email. It is perhaps one of the most mature areas of digital marketing, as its roots go back to the arrival of the internet for the mass market. It allows direct communication with each individual customer. It is especially important to judge the size of the group you are marketing to carefully, so that your message can be tailored in detail.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Pay-per-click is a type of advertising in which advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad. Essentially, it is a way of buying visits to your site, rather than earning them organically through SEO or other types of digital marketing.
PPC is one form of paid search. It is similar to SEM (search engine marketing), but can also include display advertising (priced per click) and affiliate advertising.
Affiliate marketing as part of digital marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways people earn money online today. If your affiliate programme is successful, it can bring in a very respectable passive income. Affiliate marketing is a type of digital marketing in which businesses work together: one earns a commission for the traffic it sends to the other. For example, you place a link to another website on your own blog or site. Every time a visitor follows that link and makes a purchase, you receive a commission.
Instant messaging
Instant messaging is the latest trend in marketing communication. Worldwide, 1.5 billion people use WhatsApp every month, followed by Facebook Messenger and WeChat. If you want to reach your audience, include instant messaging in your marketing strategy.
This type of digital marketing has taken off in the last few years. People are far more likely to trust information sent via a messaging app — as if it came from an acquaintance or a friend — than an email or text message, which are more exposed to spam.
This is by no means the end of the subject. As we said, digital marketing never stops evolving, like a living organism going through its own evolution.
Choose the types of digital marketing that you feel communicate best with your business, experiment, and track the results.
Who knows — tomorrow you might be the one to invent a new type of digital marketing!
Find out more about digital marketing in our upcoming articles.
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