What is online marketing?

Online marketing is the process of promoting a business through digital channels such as social media, email, influencer marketing, videos, SEO, and more.

More people are online than ever before. With so many different platforms and options available for online marketing, marketers need to decide which strategies are best for their businesses.

In this guide:

• What is online marketing?
• Online marketing benefits
• Types of online marketing
• What to consider when creating your online marketing strategy
• Get started with online marketing

Online marketing definition

Online marketing, also known as digital marketing or internet marketing, is a form of marketing that uses the internet and technology to connect with potential customers.

Traditional marketing channels include billboards, radio, print, and television, while online marketing shows up in many forms including social media, email, influencer marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click ads, videos, and much more.

The methods, strategies, and channels that fall under the umbrella of online marketing are diverse, but they all seek to use the internet to connect to larger and more targeted audiences.

Online marketing benefits

The internet has opened new possibilities and new benefits to marketers. In addition to driving traffic to your site, generating leads, and driving sales, online marketing offers:

• Reduced expenses. Online marketing strategies like content marketing generate three times more leads and cost 62% less than other marketing methods. Online marketing tends to be both more effective and affordable, which is useful for both SMBs and enterprise marketing teams.
• Speed. Your audience can act on your messaging right away, giving you a quick turnaround on your investment.
• Elegant communications. You can schedule marketing messages and even personalize messaging to each customer individually, allowing for seamless and targeted experiences.
• Better control. Online marketing strategies like pay-per-click ads allow you to set spending limits. They also allow you to gate content, segment audiences, and distribute content on your own terms. This gives businesses a greater degree of control over their messaging and brand that traditional marketing just can’t offer.
• Improved customer service. Shoppers expect near-immediate answers from the brands they buy from, which just isn’t possible with traditional marketing. With online marketing you can engage with customers quickly over many channels such as email, text messages, chatbots, and other online tools.
• Competitive advantage. Your business can get an easy edge over other providers that don’t invest in online marketing. This expands your audience, increases customer engagement, and ultimately boosts sales, which can help you stand out in a crowded market.

Types of online marketing

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most cost effective and efficient ways for businesses and organizations to communicate directly with their customers. Email marketing does take time and effort, but it can prove very lucrative if done well.

Email marketing can be done in a variety of different ways:

• Email marketing can help position a brand as an authority in a particular niche with a tailored informational or educational newsletter.
• Sales and promotional emails are more common in ecommerce and are often led by an offer or promotion with a clear call to action.
• Retargeting or “abandoned basket” emails can also be sent to customers who have left your website without converting.

What is email marketing most useful for?

Email marketing can be a great online marketing channel for reaching customers at all stages of the funnel. It can help acquire new customers, recover abandoned baskets, or promote brand loyalty.

What are the pros and cons?

• Email is a low-cost, high-return channel for many online businesses. If you can find a way to grow a high-quality list, email will likely be one of your best-performing channels.
• However, it’s important to have a solid list management strategy for email and segment your audience carefully. Solutions such as Adobe’s Marketo Engage platform can help you with your audience segmentation and personalize the content of your emails to help deliver the strongest ROI.

Paid search (PPC)

With paid search or pay-per-click (PPC), brands can pay to show ads to users on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. Google and Facebook are the top two platforms for paid advertisements, but other platforms are valuable as long as your audience uses them.

Using paid search, a business can choose to have their ad appear in the search results when somebody searches for a certain term or product on the internet — but only pay if someone clicks on the ad.

While it might seem simplistic on the face of things, there are complicated real time algorithms at play behind the scenes on Google Ads and Bing Ads every time a user search query is processed. Both solutions operate on an auction-based system, which looks at an advertiser’s bid and their relevancy for a particular query, which determines the ordering of the search results.

From a business’s perspective, there are decisions to make around:

• The budget that you’re allocating to each campaign or ad group.
• Which keywords or search queries you’re targeting.
• What the key messages are for your PPC ads.
• Which extensions you wish to append to your ads.

What is PPC most useful for?

Paid search is great for making sure your brand gets seen by your target audience when they are making a relevant search. This is incredibly powerful.

It’s often useful to plan your paid search campaigns while reviewing your positions in organic search. It may be possible to spread your budget further by strategically not bidding on key search terms that you rank well for organically.

What are the pros and cons?

• There is no better way of reaching your audience with the right message at a moment of intent. This is a major positive for pay-per-click advertising.
• The main drawback of paid search for businesses is often the cost. The costs can soon mount up, especially if you’re bidding on mid-funnel generic keywords with high volume but high cost-per-click (CPC) bids.
• A finite search volume for niche industries can also be limiting. You can only show as many times as your target keywords are searched for.

Social media

Social media marketing is the process that businesses follow to promote their brand, products, or services on popular social media platforms. The most common social media platforms are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• X (formerly known as Twitter)
• Linkedin
• Pinterest
• TikTok
• Snapchat

It’s important to have a solid organic social strategy and keep your brand profile pages up to date. This can help provide a sense of credibility to prospects and customers, as well as a platform for you to engage with your audience.

What is social media most useful for?

The versatility of marketing on social platforms is one thing that makes them so popular. You need to understand your proposition, know your audience, and determine which channels and messages are appropriate.

What are the pros and cons?

• The major positive for social media marketing as part of your strategy is the sheer global reach that is available to you. Social media is a great channel for customer acquisition and reaching new customers.
• With social media you can quite specifically target your audience.
• It can be challenging to make your ad creative stand out in such a busy environment, so it’s important to always be testing.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

The objective of search engine optimization (SEO) is to increase a website’s position in search engines, with the idea that the higher your website’s ranking, the more people will see it and click through, and the more organic traffic and sales you’ll get.

SEO is generally considered to include three main areas:

1. Technical, which includes such factors as site structure, crawlability, and page speed.
2. Site content, including authority content, regular content, relevant content.
3. Off-page SEO, which refers to links to valuable content.

It’s common to find a specialist (or specialists) to manage an SEO strategy’s technical and off-page aspects. There’s potentially a lot that can go wrong if the technical optimization or off-page work ends up in the hands of someone who isn't sufficiently experienced.

What is SEO most useful for?

Having a strong organic search presence has various useful benefits for a business. It’s possible to receive a high volume of zero-cost traffic for keywords and search queries that are relevant to your brand.

What are the pros and cons?

• The main positive for ranking well organically is that you receive relevant traffic for free. You can align the keywords you rank well for organically with PPC and look to make your budget stretch further by working strategically.
• However, SEO is a long-term part of your online market strategy. It can take months to see evidence of positive improvement from changes that are made.
• It is also important to make sure you bring in the right expertise with the right SEO skills to manage the technical aspects of SEO.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a broad term. But at its core, it’s about developing and promoting content that answers any questions your audience has and helps your target audience make informed decisions.

Managed correctly, an effective content marketing strategy can help attract consumers at the top of the funnel or help them with their mid-funnel decision-making.

Content marketing is more educational in nature than other digital campaigns like PPC or social media. Doing well in content marketing can help position your brand as an authority in a particular space.

Some content marketing examples might include blog posts, reports, guides, eBooks, or infographics.

What is content marketing most useful for?

If your business is attempting to solve a difficult issue, enter a new market, or validate an idea, establishing a strong content marketing plan is the way to go.

What are the pros and cons?

• Understanding your audience’s questions and answering them in an engaging way is a great opportunity to position your brand as an expert in the space.
• Answering your audience’s queries is also a great way to progress them along the buying cycle.
• Unless you’re using a multi-touch attribution solution offered on systems like Marketo Engage, it might be tough to calculate an exact ROI from content marketing.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is an online marketing strategy that uses the power of experts in a particular niche to reach potential customers with your brand message.

People often think of celebrities with a huge following on Instagram when the term influencer is used. However, anyone who is seen as an expert in a particular niche and publishes on a public channel — such as blogs, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or YouTube — can be an influencer.

The most important thing is to make sure that whatever you do comes across as authentic and aligns with your brand values, the influencer’s values, and the audience’s values.

What is influencer marketing most useful for?

Influencer marketing can be incredibly valuable for providing credibility for your product or service among a certain audience.

Complementing influencer marketing with retargeting strategies can be a very effective way to convert customers.

What are the pros and cons?

• Partnering with influencers in similar niches to their product or service can drive a lot of awareness, engagement, and qualified leads or sales.
• However, though influencer marketing may appear like a simple concept, there is a lot to manage behind the scenes to ensure that partnerships with influencers go well.

Display and video advertising

Display uses a variety of visual media, such as images and video, to catch people’s attention and get a brand message across.

Display and video are commonly priced on a CPM (cost per mille) basis, which means that advertisers pay a predetermined sum for every 1,000 impressions provided.

Display and video advertising can be useful for brand awareness and retargeting strategies.

What is display and video advertising most useful for?

If you have a creative, engaging advertisement, display and video advertising provides a great opportunity to reach your target customers at scale to build awareness.

Remember, if you’re running video ads, they need to make sense without audio.

What are the pros and cons?

• The main benefits of online display and video marketing are the broad reach that is available, and the comparatively cheap CPM figures compared with other online activities.
• However, it is important to ensure that your advertisements are sufficiently engaging to capture users’ attention while browsing.
• It is also worth noting that measuring the ROI of prospecting activity from display and video advertising can be challenging unless you use a solution such as multi-touch attribution from Adobe’s Marketo Engage platform.

Digital PR

Digital PR is a form of marketing that uses online tactics to get content seen by a large audience. This could be through getting articles featured on high-traffic websites or creating viral content.

There is often confusion about the differentiation between content marketing and digital PR.

The best way to explain the difference is that content marketing often has more tangible business objectives in mind — answering customers’ questions to help them through their purchase journey. Digital PR is more brand-focused, and the promotion is dedicated to increasing brand awareness.

What is digital PR most useful for?

Digital PR is most useful for raising awareness in major publications of updates, changes, and a brand’s thought leadership.

What are the pros and cons?

• Gaining syndicated coverage of an online press release can be relatively straightforward.
• However, making sure you gain inclusion in premium titles with tighter editorial control often relies on developing good relationships.
• The bottom-line business benefit of digital PR can also be challenging to measure.

Affiliate marketing

Businesses use affiliate marketing when they want other websites to promote their products or services in exchange for a cut of the money they make when those products or services are sold.

It can be a simple way to reach more people and get more users to visit your website.

When you use an affiliate marketing channel for your business, you only pay when someone buys something after clicking on a link from one of your partner publishers.

People often think of voucher code websites when affiliate marketing is mentioned. But it’s also possible to work with high-quality content and comparison websites to reach customers at all stages of their purchase journey.

An advertiser will require a network to get started with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate networks sit between advertisers and publishers, ensuring that everything is recorded and paid properly by all parties.

What is affiliate marketing most useful for?

Affiliate marketing is most useful when you need a low-risk method of generating sales, since you only pay when there is a conversion.

What are the pros and cons?

• Because advertisers only pay affiliates when a transaction is made, affiliate marketing is a low-risk online marketing channel.
• Because of this pay-for-results paradigm, it may be difficult for smaller or less well-known firms to get exposure. Affiliates will favor safer bets from well-known companies.

What to consider when creating your online marketing strategy

Define your proposition

Before you begin developing an online marketing strategy, it’s important to have a clear sense of your online value proposition. Your online value proposition is the foundation upon which your entire strategy will be built. Without a clear and concise message, potential customers will be confused about what you offer and why they should choose you over the competition.

A well-defined online proposition will help set your business apart from the rest and motivate customers to visit your website and take an action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a mailing list.

Understand your audience

Once you have a clear understanding of your proposition, you need to make sure you clearly define your audience.

If you’re trying to talk to everybody, you aren’t talking to anybody. When you get a clear understanding of your target audience, you can understand their problems, how you can best solve their problems, the language you need to speak with them, and which channels are most likely to be effective to engage with them.

Consider creating buyer personas to help visualize the target audience groups you’re addressing. This can help you optimize your marketing communications for maximum impact.

Once you have your value proposition and buyer personas confirmed, you can move on to the next step of crafting your digital marketing campaign.

Review your current and historic marketing activity

Before trialing anything new, it’s important to try to understand and rationalize the activity that is running currently and has been running before.

Reviewing past campaigns and understanding why they were discontinued will most likely prevent you from making previous mistakes or prompt inspiration to approach things slightly differently.

It’s also important to look at what is currently running and see if there are any learnings to take from it.

Ensure your site is set up to convert

The performance of your app or website can heavily impact the success of your online marketing efforts for converting traffic into leads or customers.

Another thing to review before you begin planning your new marketing approach is whether the website is as optimized as it can be for conversion success. A/B testing can help you review and measure whether changes to the website can impact your conversion rate.

Define how you’ll measure success

Before launching any new additions to your online marketing strategy, consider how they’ll be measured to gauge their success.

At a macro level, it’s easy to look at blended return on ad spend (ROAS) across all channels. ROAS is calculated as total revenue divided by total marketing expenditure.

But within this macro figure, how do you know which channels work for you and which channels don’t?

You can review performance in each of your marketing channels’ dashboards, but this will likely lead to inaccuracies in measurement, as a single sale might have had touchpoints on multiple marketing channels.

As your marketing activity scales, it is worth considering a revenue attribution solution that uses multi-touch attribution across every marketing touchpoint to give you a truer indication of which marketing channels are performing best for you.

Get started with online marketing with Adobe Marketo

For businesses, a good online marketing strategy isn’t just an advantage — it’s essential. That doesn’t mean you need to give up the familiar marketing tools that work. It’s a great idea to use online channels together with traditional ones. And it’s also a great idea to make sure that all your online marketing efforts are integrated.

Evaluate what your current online marketing strategy looks like. You might already have a website, social media accounts, and an email list. The next step is to evaluate how well each of these channels is working for you. You can quantify your answer by calculating the ROI of each digital marketing campaign. Identify the business goals that your digital marketing strategy should support, and then identify your digital marketing goals. Make a list of which aspects of your current online marketing strategy are working and which are not.

Adobe can help

Adobe Marketo Engage is a complete toolkit for all your online marketing efforts. This marketing automation platform can help you reach larger audiences at a lower cost, manage new leads, and keep a growing customer base engaged with personalized email campaigns. Be prepared for growth with technology that is scalable for businesses of any size.

To learn how it works, watch the overview video or take an interactive tour.