97% of people check a company’s online presence before deciding to visit their business. If they can’t find you online, you’ve lost them before they even knew you existed (and they’ll end up at your competitor instead).
If you don’t want this to happen to your business, then you will need to start making use of digital marketing, but before we go into the strategies, we need to understand what digital marketing is.
What is Digital Marketing? (Let’s Skip the Jargon)
Let’s start with the basics. At its core, digital marketing is the promotion of products, services, or brands using digital channels and platforms. Think websites, social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps. It can be anywhere your customers spend time online.
This raises the question: What is the difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing? Well, traditional marketing includes channels like billboards, radio ads, and newspaper classifieds. The key difference is that, unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing enables you to engage directly with your customers. You can track what works, adjust what doesn’t, and get real-time feedback on your marketing strategies.
Digital marketing refers to any marketing effort that uses electronic devices or the internet. Digital marketing encompasses everything from social media posts to Google Ads, email campaigns to video marketing content.
What is A Digital Marketing Agency?
A digital marketing agency is a company that specialises in helping businesses grow their online presence and reach customers through digital channels. They work with clients to create and manage marketing campaigns across platforms like social media, Google Ads, websites, and email marketing.
Core Digital Marketing Channels Explained
We’ve laid the foundation of what digital marketing is; now, let’s move on to the main digital marketing channels you’ll encounter. Think of these as different tools in your marketing toolkit. Each serves a specific purpose, and they work even better together.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Depending on who you ask, SEO is the science or art form (or both) of helping search engines provide users with meaningful and helpful content. It works like a transaction. Great and helpful in exchange for traffic to your website. It’s “free” cough, we mean organic traffic (though it requires time and effort), and it’s incredibly valuable because people are actively looking for what you offer.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you run a business that sells laptops. You’ve noticed that it’s mainly students buying from you because they need a laptop for university or school. You want to appear when someone searches for “best laptops for students” or “affordable laptops.” SEO can make that happen by optimising your website content and improving your site’s technical performance. This involves keyword research to understand what your potential customers are searching for. There are many other ways to optimise, but we won’t get into that here.
So, BaseCloud, what you’re saying is that I have to optimise my website, and I’ll get a lot of traffic for free? Well, there is a catch. SEO is a long-term game. Unlike paid ads, which can generate immediate results, SEO typically takes 3-6 months to show a significant impact. Everything worth its weight in gold usually takes time, but once that time elapses, the harvest you’ll reap will be immense.
Social Media Marketing
Social media platforms are a goldmine for digital marketing. Every Tom, Dick and Harry are on social media, from 5-year-old iPad kids on YouTube to 90-year-old grandmas sharing their knitting projects on Facebook. There are many social media channels to advertise, but the caveat is that not all of them are created equally.
Facebook remains the most popular platform globally, especially for reaching older demographics and building a community around your brand.
Instagram cuts the word vomit to an absolute minimum and instead emphasises images. This is ideal for brands with visually appealing products or behind-the-scenes content.
TikTok is THE social media platform to be on because short-form videos have taken over the world. Its algorithm is set up in a way that even if you’re a brand-new account, your first video could go viral. This means TikTok is the best social media app to reach a wide audience.
LinkedIn is your B2B hub – the place for professional networking and thought leadership.
A crucial aspect of social media marketing is understanding that each platform has its own unique culture and content style. What works on LinkedIn won’t necessarily work on TikTok, and that’s perfectly fine. Each user uses the platform for different content. Social media advertising can help you reach specific audiences on these digital platforms.
Content Marketing
If digital marketing is the house plan, then Content marketing is the foundation that supports all your other digital marketing efforts. The just of content marketing is creating valuable and relevant content that helps your audience solve problems or achieve goals, not just selling to them constantly.
Content marketing works in conjunction with your other channels: blog posts improve your SEO, videos can be shared across social media platforms, and email newsletters keep your audience engaged between purchases. With thoughtful planning and a little bit of creativity, you can repurpose content across all your digital marketing channels. A solid content marketing strategy will help you build brand awareness and generate leads consistently.
The types of digital marketing content that work include:
- Blog articles that answer common customer questions
- Videos that demonstrate your products or share expertise
- Infographics that make complex information digestible
- Case studies that show real results you’ve achieved
- Podcasts that build deeper relationships with your audience
Video marketing has become particularly important, with short-form video content dominating social platforms and helping businesses increase their online visibility.
Email Marketing
Despite all the fancy new digital marketing channels, email marketing still reigns amongst the best channels for delivering high ROI in digital marketing. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $42. This makes it one of the most effective digital marketing tools available.
When we mentioned email marketing, those annoying spam emails probably came to mind. Email marketing isn’t about spamming people’s inboxes. It’s about providing value, building relationships, and staying top-of-mind when your audience is ready to buy. Think of welcome sequences for new subscribers, educational newsletters, and personalised product recommendations.
The best part? You own your email list. Unlike social media followers (who can disappear if the platform changes its algorithm), your email subscribers are yours to communicate with directly (until they choose to unsubscribe). This direct relationship with existing customers is invaluable for long-term business growth.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising includes Google Ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads – basically any platform where you pay to put your message in front of potential customers. Pay-per-click advertising is one of the fastest ways to get immediate results from your digital marketing efforts.
The beauty of paid advertising is immediate results and precise targeting. You can target people based on what they search for, their demographics, interests, behaviours, and even life events. Digital ads can be incredibly effective when used correctly.
Google Ads work great when people are actively searching for your products or services. Social media ads are excellent for reaching people who may not yet be aware of what you offer, but who fit your ideal customer profile.
The key to anything in life, including PPC advertising, is to start small, test what works, and gradually scale up your successful campaigns.
Building Effective Digital Marketing Strategies
Here’s where things get a bit complicated. Having individual digital marketing channels is like having puzzle pieces. You need a strategy to put them together into something that actually works for your business. A successful digital marketing strategy requires careful planning and the right digital marketing techniques.
Setting Clear Goals
Before creating a mind map for your post, a single social media update, or writing a blog post, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Vague goals like “get more customers” or “increase brand awareness” won’t cut it.
Use the SMART framework to set goals that are:
- Specific: “Increase website traffic from organic search”
- Measurable: “by 30%”
- Achievable: based on your current traffic and resources
- Relevant: to your business objectives
- Time-bound: “within six months”
Good digital marketing goals might include:
- Increase website traffic by 25% in Q1
- Generate 50 new leads per month through content marketing
- Grow email subscriber list by 500 subscribers this quarter
- Achieve 15% conversion rate on Google Ads campaigns
Bad goals sound like:
- “Get more followers” (followers don’t automatically equal customers)
- “Go viral” (viral content rarely translates to business results)
- “Be everywhere online” (you’ll spread yourself too thin)
When setting goals, consider using key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business objectives and help measure the success of your digital marketing campaigns.
Understanding Your Target Audience
You can’t market effectively to “everyone.” Speaking to everyone means speaking to no one. If you try to market to everyone, it will often lack substance for anyone. The devil lies in the details. Even if your product could help anyone, your marketing messages need to speak to specific people with specific problems.
Start by creating buyer personas – detailed profiles of your ideal customers. Include demographics (age, location, income), but go deeper into their challenges, goals, where they spend time online, and how they make purchasing decisions.
For example, if you sell accounting software, your buyer persona might be: “Sam, 35, small business owner, struggles with manual bookkeeping, active on LinkedIn and Facebook, researches thoroughly before making business purchases, values time-saving solutions.”
Understanding Sam means knowing how to create content about bookkeeping pain points, share it on LinkedIn, and focus on the time-saving benefits in your messaging.
Choosing the Right Channels
Here’s the truth: you don’t need to be on every digital marketing channel. “But BaseCloud, how do I choose the right one then?”
Start with 1-2 channels and do them well. Choose based on:
- Where your audience spends time (not where you think they should be)
- Your content creation capacity (video content takes more resources than blog posts)
- Your budget (some channels require more paid promotion than others)
- Your business goals (lead generation vs. brand awareness require different approaches).
For most small businesses, we recommend starting with:
- SEO and content marketing (long-term, sustainable traffic)
- One social media platform where your audience is most active
- Email marketing (highest ROI, and you own the relationship)
You can continually expand later once these foundations are solid. Consider the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing methods when making your choice.
Creating a Content Strategy
Your content strategy should serve your business goals, not just fill up your social media calendar. Every piece of content should either:
- Attract new potential customers
- Nurture existing leads
- Delight current customers
- Support your SEO efforts
Create a content calendar that maps to your customer journey:
- Awareness stage: Educational content that helps people understand their problems
- Consideration stage: Comparison guides, case studies, detailed explanations of solutions
- Decision stage: Product demonstrations, testimonials, special offers
Repurpose your content across multiple channels. That detailed blog post can become a video, an infographic, several social media posts, and an email newsletter. Work smarter, not harder.
The Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing offers numerous advantages over offline marketing methods. The benefits of digital marketing include:
- Measurable Results: Unlike traditional marketing methods, you can track exactly how your marketing campaigns are performing using tools like Google Analytics.
- Cost-Effective: Digital marketing often costs less than traditional advertising while reaching more people.
- Targeted Reach: You can reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviours.
- Global Reach: Connect with customers worldwide, not just in your local area.
- Real-Time Engagement: Interact with customers instantly through social media and other digital platforms.
- Flexibility: Adjust your campaigns in real-time based on performance data.
Types of Digital Marketing
Understanding the different types of digital marketing can help you choose the best approach for your business:
- Search Engine Marketing: Including SEO and paid search ads
- Social Media Marketing: Organic posts and paid advertising on social platforms
- Content Marketing: Creating valuable content to attract and engage audiences
- Email Marketing: Direct communication with subscribers
- Influencer Marketing: Partnering with influential people to promote your brand
- Mobile Marketing: Targeting users on mobile devices
- Video Marketing: Using video content across various platforms
- Affiliate Marketing: Working with partners to promote your products
Each type requires specific digital marketing skills and can be effective depending on your target audience and goals.
Getting Started with Digital Marketing
The world of digital marketing can seem overwhelming, especially for those new to online marketing. However, with the right approach and some digital marketing courses to build your knowledge, anyone can develop a strong digital marketing strategy.
Digital marketing focuses on meeting customers where they spend their time—online. Whether through search engines, social media, email, or other digital channels, the goal is to connect with your audience in meaningful ways.
For those looking to develop their digital marketing skills, consider starting with:
- Learning basic Google Analytics to understand web page performance
- Understanding social media management for your chosen platforms
- Exploring inbound marketing principles
- Studying your competition to see what digital marketing techniques they use
Remember, digital marketers aren’t born overnight – they develop their skills through practice and continuous learning.
How Do You Begin Your Digital Marketing Journey?
There are as many digital marketing strategies and tools as there are stars in the sky. Every business is different and what works for another person might not work for you. There are also several factors at play, but the main goal of using any tool is to connect with your customers and grow your business.
When deciding what strategies to implement always remember the fundamentals which are:
- understand your audience
- choose the right channels for your business
- create valuable content
- measure what matters.
Digital marketing doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
At BaseCloud, we help South African businesses build digital strategies that actually work. Let’s chat and create a strategy that gets your business thriving online.
