Digital Marketing: The Ultimate Guide [2025]

Digital marketing isn’t just about posting videos on social media or running Facebook ads. It involves deeper things, like market research and data analysis, which separate the businesses that succeed from those that fall short.

This ultimate guide breaks down everything you need to know about digital marketing, helping you understand the what, why, and how—so you can attract more customers, boost your brand, and grow your business with confidence.

Key Points

• Digital marketing is the use of internet-based tools and platforms like search engines, social media, email, and websites to promote and sell products or services. It helps businesses reach potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
  
  
• There are seven major types of digital marketing: search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, paid advertising, influencer marketing, and event-based marketing—each with unique strategies and advantages.
  
  
• The benefits of digital marketing for business owners include wider reach, targeted messaging, measurable results, and automation.
  
  
• A successful digital marketing campaign is built on a clear strategy, thorough market and audience research, and a deep understanding of customer behavior and business goals.
  
  

What exactly is digital marketing

Digital marketing is the use of digital technologies like the internet, social media, and email to reach customers, promote your business, and sell your products.

Digital means “relating to the internet or computer technology.” Marketing is “the process of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.” – Wordweb.

Therefore, digital marketing is using the internet or computer technology to promote, sell, and distribute a product or service.

THE SEO GENIUS

What are the top 7 types of digital marketing

Digital marketing is grouped into different types, depending on the channel or strategy used.

Here are the 7 most popular types of digital marketing.

1) Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing focuses on promoting products via search engines like Google and Bing.

People use search engines to find things [answers, solutions, entertainment, products, services] online.

If you position your business well, you can make search engines work for you.

There are 2 major ways to promote business via search engines. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

a) SEO:

Search Engine Optimisation involves using special techniques to make your website show up when people search for the products or services you offer.

For example, THE SEO GENIUS is a digital marketing agency in Bayelsa. One of our services is to help other businesses promote their products through SEO.

If people search on Google for “SEO agency in Bayelsa” we appear on the No. 1 spot.

Therefore, we’re more likely to get customers who are looking for an SEO agency in Bayelsa.

We’re not ranking on the No. 1 spot by accident. As digital marketers, we understand SEO deeply and how to make it work for our business.

b) Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.

In PPC advertising, a website owner pays the search engine to help them advertise their business.

So instead of going through the rigor of implementing the special techniques needed to make a website show up first organically, you pay the advertiser to put your website on the top spot.

For example, search on Google for “hosting” you’ll see some results tagged sponsored. 

[Screenshot]

Those are sites paying Google to advertise their business.

Both SEO and PPC have their advantages and disadvantages. Learn more in this article about search engine marketing.

2) Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing uses social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X to market products and services.

People spend a lot of time on social media, as high as [?2+ hours a day]. Establishing your business on social media and applying basic marketing principles can help you reach new customers, engage with existing customers, and stay top of mind.

Top brands like Nike, Apple, and Coca-Cola use social media to continually promote their business.

3) Email Marketing

If you guessed that email marketing uses email to promote a business, you’re absolutely correct.

It involves getting people to sign up on your email list and sending promotional messages to them, convincing them to buy your products or services.

As a matter of fact, email marketing is one of the most effective types digital marketing. [Research by xyz shows that the conversion rate for email can be as high as ??%. That means for every 100 email subscribers, about ??% end up buying.

The key to successful email marketing is to ensure that only people who need your product and want to be on your email list are added. You also need to strike a balance between sharing insights that can help solve their problems and pitching your product.

A good example is HubSpot. 

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HubSpot has a software that helps marketers do their work more effectively. While they regularly pitch their product via emails, they also regularly share tips, insights in the marketing industry, webinars and courses to help marketers up their game.

4) Content Marketing 

Content marketing involves creating “content” to inform, educate, entertain, and eventually persuade customers to buy from you.

Content marketing is vital for any successful digital marketing campaign. Every other type of digital marketing depends on it.

Whether you’re doing social media marketing, email marketing, search engine marketing, or any other type of marketing, you’ll need to create content.

You’ll need to write something in your emails. That’s content. You’ll need to create content for social media. Your ads also need content.

Understanding the fundamentals of content marketing will set you apart and help you succeed in any of your digital marketing efforts.

5) Paid Advertising

Paid advertising involves paying the owner of a digital platform to help you promote your business to their users.

Most digital platforms make provision for advertisers to register, pay money, and market their business.

Facebook for example has Facebook ads (now Meta Ads).

Anyone who wants to promote their business can simply create a business profile, set up an ad, fund their ad account, and start reaching customers all over the Meta Ads network.

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The benefit of paid advertising is that as a new business owner, you can hit the ground running without taking the time to build your following on social media, build an email list, or implement SEO techniques.

On the flip side though, the results are often unsustainable. You have to continually pay the platform to reach new customers. As you grow, you hit a point where you spend more than you make to reach new customers.

A helpful advise is to combine other forms of marketing with paid advertising. Early on, you can major on paid advertising while you build your brand and influence via other channels. As you grow and start to see results from your organic efforts, you can reduce your ad spend till it gets to the bare minimum.

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6) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is simply partnering with influencers to market your products. Like what Nike does with football and basketball stars.

Celebrities like Cristiano Ronaldo have built a huge following and have influence. When people see their role models use or talk about a product, they become interested. That can improve sales drastically.

[Al Nasir’s Jersey sales went up by ???% when they signed the man]

You may be saying “but I don’t have the budget to partner with someone like C. Ronaldo.”

The good news is that there are influencers of different sizes. You don’t need the most popular person in the world. There are micro-influencers in your community, city, state, and country. 

Sometimes, partnering with micro-influencers can give you a better return on investments. The aim is not to get the most known person to help you promote your products, but the person who has influence over your target audience.

For example, there’s a lady named Aleyda Solis. She’s a digital marketer, more specifically an SEO Expert. You may not have heard of her, and she’s nowhere near Ronaldo in terms of popularity.

But if you’re marketing an SEO software, Aleyda Solis is a better bet than Ronaldo because she has more influence over the SEO community.

7) Events Based Marketing

Hosting events is another good way to market your business. The key is to find something your customers care about and host an event around it.

 

The event could be targeted at solving a pain point, fulfilling a desire, or helping customers get closer to a goal.

For example, a life coach can host an online workshop themed ‘’Finding Purpose.” People who are interested in such a topic are potential customers of a life coach. During and after the event, the coach can pitch his business to the attendees and even sign new clients.

This type of marketing is suited for Coaches, B2B Companies, Non-profit organisations, and Social enterprises.

Another strategy is to sponsor an event your users care about. This event doesn’t necessarily need to relate directly to your business, but should touch on your customers in a meaningful way.

Benefits of digital marketing for business owners

In one sentence I’d say “more sales or consistent sales revenue.”

The ultimate aim of marketing is to increase revenue, or at least ensure that your income doesn’t fall below what is needed to sustain your business.

Every other benefit of digital marketing is tied to that main aim.

Now here are specific benefits of digital marketing for business owners.

Reach more customers

Making more sales starts with reaching more people. If only 500 people know about your business you can’t expect to have 500 customers. Compare that to 5,000, 50,000, 500,000 or millions of people.

Digital marketing gives you more reach than you can ever expect from offline or traditional marketing efforts.

Targeted messaging 

Due to the nature of the internet and digital platforms, it’s easier to target specific groups of people who are more likely to buy from you.

You can narrow down your marketing efforts to specific age groups, location, and interests.

On Facebook, for example, you can target people by age, gender, the pages they follow, the topics they’re interested in, and the descriptions on their profile.

Say you sell perfumes, you can look at your customer base and find things they have in common. With that, you can reach many more people who are similar to your existing customer base.

Track and measure efforts

Digital marketing also gives you better tracking options.

You can tell which advertising campaign increased your leads, which post got more likes and comments, which message got more replies.

This ability to track your marketing efforts and measure their impact on your business helps you make better marketing decisions as it shows you what to focus on, what to do more of, and what to stop doing.

Integration and automation

Digital marketing also gives you the advantage of working with technology that can connect your marketing and sales across different channels and do some things for you automatically.

Someone can land on your website, subscribe to your email list, receive promotional messages, go to your online shop, and buy your product or book your service without you lifting a finger.

Basics of digital marketing for business growth

Here we talk about the fundamentals of digital marketing. These are the important things you need to successfully reach potential customers online and convert them into paying customers.

It doesn’t matter the product/service, industry, location, target audience, or type of digital marketing.

Every successful digital marketing campaign has the following.

Digital marketing strategy

Digital marketing strategy is the long-term view of how you expect your business to grow through digital marketing.

An example is the digital marketing plan for DSP.

DSP is a provider of skills training. Their digital marketing strategy is to enroll 10,000 learners through SEO and social media by 2027.

Another example of digital marketing strategy can be “get 1,000 leads monthly through search engine and content marketing.”

It is like a vision, a long term goal.

Good digital marketing strategy isn’t just created randomly. It is born out of excellent market research, a deep understanding of your customers, and clarity on your business model.

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Market research will help you know

• if there’s business worthy need for your product or service 
• how many people truly need your product

Audience research will help you get into the minds of your customers, know what they truly care about and the best ways to reach them online.

From audience research, you’ll create an ICP (ideal customer profile), buyer personas, and customer journeys.

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Learn more about digital marketing strategy here.

Digital marketing plan

Digital marketing plan is the step by step process of how you would achieve your marketing goals.

A simple digital marketing plan for a business who wants to focus on Instagram can be:

1. Find 30 hashtags related to my business
2. Create new Instagram account
3. Write bio including 3 hashtags
4. Add highlights
5. Add link to profile 
6. Follow 5 accounts
7. Create 30 day content calendar 
8. Post 3 times daily (1 reel, 1 picture, 1 story)
9. Comment 15 times daily.
10. Measure performance after 30 days
    
    

Digital marketing analytics

Digital marketing analytics involves tracking your marketing efforts to see what is driving results.

It could be:

• which Facebook post is driving people to your website
• which page on your website are people visiting through Google
• how many of them end up in your DMs asking about your product/service?
• Are people signing up on your newsletter from your social media profiles?

It is essential to track your digital marketing moves so you can make better decisions and get better returns on the time, energy, and money invested in digital marketing.

Things to consider before you start digital marketing

Your market 

Ask yourself this question “are my customers online?”. If your answer is no then you don’t need to worry about digital marketing. There’s no point doing digital marketing if the people you want to reach via digital channels don’t spend time on digital platforms.

But here’s the thing. There’s hardly any business today that wouldn’t benefit from digital marketing.

Whether you have a physical shop and your business requires your physical presence, digital marketing can help you reach more people, increase orders/bookings.

Digital marketing is effective if there’s a segment of the market you can serve but currently can’t reach with physical efforts.

Even if you operate in an industry where your customers are barely online, having the basics in place like a website and social media accounts on popular platforms can give customers a good perception of you and boost your credibility.

Your goals

What are your business goals? Are you okay with being one of the businesses in your city or do you want to expand across the country? Do you want to dominate an area or do you want to remain a small player? Do you aim to become a global brand?

But more importantly, how much does your business need to make to stay profitable? How many customers do you need to help you achieve your goals?

Your Budget

Digital marketing is only beneficial when you make more money than you spend on it.

Think about your profits after other business expenses needed to serve your customers.

For example, if your product costs $1,000 per unit and you need to spend $700 to make, package, and deliver each unit, it means your marketing budget should be less than $300 per customer, else you’ll be operating at a loss.

Multiply that by the number of customers you expect and that gives you your marketing budget. E.g. if you’re estimating to reach 20 people, then your budget will be $300 × 20, which is $6,000 at the upper end.

If your business is such that customers usually return repeatedly after the first purchase, then you may spend above your initial budget and sell at a loss on your first contact with the customer, banking on the repeat purchases to make profits.

Most importantly, you should view marketing from the perspective of return on investment. It is better to spend $50,000 to make $60,000 more, than to spend $5,000 on marketing without any increase in revenue.

Time commitment 

If you want to start digital marketing as a business owner, know that it will take time to get the basics right and set up marketing operations for your business.

People dedicate their lives to digital marketing, yet it can take weeks to months for them to nail the right messaging and strategy for explosive growth.

Starting out, you may need to put in 20 – 30 hours per week (3 to 5 hours per day) to get practical knowledge of digital marketing and consumer psychology.

If you’re not willing to go through the hassle, or simply don’t have the time, consider hiring a digital marketing agency to do your marketing for you, while you focus on the aspects of your business you know how to do best and keep your customers happy.

Skills requirement 

You need skills like copywriting, data analysis, basic design and content creation skills.

You’d also work with a handful of software, depending on the type of marketing you want to do.

Although I strongly believe that anyone can learn anything, provided the person gives it time and attention, I also know that we all have different natural abilities and interests. The skills required may not be things you want to dabble into, so I’m showing you a glimpse of what lies ahead.

Nevertheless, I’d still advise that you get the basics of digital marketing, so you know what to look out for if you ever decide to partner with/hire a digital marketing company.

What you need to start digital marketing 

Here are the basic things you need to effectively market your business.

• The basics of digital marketing (shared above)
• Copywriting skills
• The internet
• Your smartphone/PC
• Simple graphic design software e.g. Canva

Coding isn’t required for digital marketing, but it could make you better in certain aspects like search engine optimisation.

Believe it or not, you can start digital marketing with no money. Sure spending can accelerate your growth, but without the right foundation, you’ll end up accelerating your losses.

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“My advice is to start small, using only free tools and resources, until you start seeing results, then you buy better software, spend on paid ads, or join mentorship groups.”

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How to start digital marketing

I’ve been into digital marketing since 2022. That’s about 3 years now. In that time, I’ve explored deep and wide, tried different strategies and tactics. Some work, some are sheer nonsense. Now that I know what works, here’s what I would do if I were to start all over again.

1) Learn digital marketing and copywriting 

Learn (read and watch videos) about digital marketing.

You can do this on your own, from the comfort of your home.

There are many free courses out there. One I’ll recommend is HubSpot Academy’s digital marketing course.

Although YouTube has good learning resources too, it’s not structured. You could be going round in circles before making significant progress.

I wouldn’t recommend paying for a course or bootcamp right away, especially if the whole concept of marketing is new to you.

The free courses/videos will show you what digital marketing is all about, so you can decide whether or not it’s something you’d want to do.

You get to know which type of digital marketing is easy for you and what will suit your business best.

Same thing for copywriting. Search for free copywriting courses. I learned from Prof. Akpe Emmanuel via his flagship Bachelor of Copywriting course. [But I don’t know if it’s still available.]

{Search for good free copywriting course in 2025 to recommend}

This initial learning can take you anywhere between two weeks to two months.

2) Get hands-on experience

Now you have the knowledge, it’s time to apply it.

This is what separates business owners who succeed in reaching customers online, from those who say digital marketing doesn’t work.

You can read all the marketing books in the world, watch all the expert videos on YouTube, enroll in the best courses and bootcamps, pay for mentorship, buy the most expensive software, even get a certificate, but until you set up a social media account and grow it from zero to 1,000, you don’t know enough about marketing.

Until you create lead magnets and grow an email list from zero to 1,000, increase website traffic significantly and turn website visitors into paying customers, you don’t know what marketing really is. All you have is information.

Pick one type of digital marketing. Don’t try to do it all at once. Become proficient in one area before spreading out. Pick the one that best suits your business model and looks like it will give you better results [your initial guess may be wrong, but it’s part of the learning process].

I’ll also advise that you add social media as an aside to whatever type of digital marketing you choose to focus on. While you may spend less time on it, simply creating your social media page and optimising it can go a long way.

3) Application

Knowing what works from hands-on experience, you can start using it to grow your business.

Although you can test on your own business, that may not be the best thing to do since you may run into troubles that could damage your credibility.

If you choose to test what you’ve learned on your business, ensure you don’t try wild high risk strategies.

4) Continuous learning and improvement 

Remember that learning never stops. Digital marketing isn’t stagnant.

Strategies change as disruptors like new technology alter consumer behavior.

To succeed continually, join mastermind groups, get a mentor or a digital marketing consultant.

Read books like Cashvertising, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook, and How Brands Grow.

Questions people usually ask about digital marketing

Which type of digital marketing is best for beginners 

Digital marketing isn’t a one size fits all path. But if I’m to answer, I’d say social media marketing.

Because of the nature of social media, it’s easier to test your knowledge and get quick feedback.

That means you can find out what works and refine your skills faster.

What does a digital marketer do

A digital marketer does market research to understand how to position their company’s products/services. Digital marketers also create strategies and plans on to help a business grow, reach more customers, and convince them to buy.

Finally, digital marketers track and monitor their work, analyse data, and optimise campaigns to get the best results while spending less.

Is coding required for digital marketing

No it’s not. You can be successful at digital marketing without having any idea about coding.