11 Types of Online Marketing Strategies For Businesses in 2024

Worry not. We’ve created a complete guide to help you choose the best online marketing channel for your business.

You’ll find a description of all digital channels and estimate the cost and time it takes for that channel to generate revenue for your business. After comparing all the pros and cons, you’ll get a final summary of which channel we think works best.

Enjoy :)

What is digital marketing?

Let’s start by explaining the term “digital marketing”. It stands for all the promotional activities that you perform exclusively online but can happen on various platforms and online channels. Digital marketing is as much an in-app ad as a Facebook post or a YouTube video.

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11 Types of Digital Marketing

We’ve outlined ten types of digital marketing strategies for you, including how much each marketing channel costs, how long you can expect to see results after, and the effort required to drive that channel.

Additionally, we have divided these channels into:

Organic - those that you can run without investing any money in advertising.

Paid - those that require advertising budgets to be visible on the internet.

Organic marketing

By organic marketing, we refer to performing activities on the Internet aimed at, for example, selling products or services, but without incurring any costs associated with additional promotion. The only currency is our work, our time, or the time of an agency we hire and possibly other tools that allow us to carry out this process.

Usually, by organic marketing, we understand long-term marketing efforts because the effects are not visible immediately but then can last for weeks, months, or even years.

Let’s run through the summary.

1. Search engine optimization

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The search engine optimization (w ebsite positioning ) is all the activities performed within your website to increase its position in the search engines on the crucial words for your business that users in the search engine type. For example, if I were a dentist in New York City, I would want to rank high for the word dentist New York because my potential customers type that word on the internet to find my business’s services.

What we call a website positioning is, for example:

• Creating high-quality descriptions for your homepage, product pages, service pages that answer Google search’s guidelines.
• Adding high-quality and relevant images to the website.
• Creating dedicated pages for specific services or products.
• Acquiring links directing to our website from thematically related websites, e.g., from a blog about dog breeds to a store with the best food for a given dog breed.

Can you do it by yourself?

In theory - yes. In practice, it’s complicated. You would have to start with at least general digital marketing knowledge and learn how to use essential analytical tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console . Then, you’d have to buy and learn tools that help in this process, like Surfer SEO - a tool with which you can create optimized content for your website or a blog post. The keyword research, the planning - it takes a lot of time. If you decide to go for this type of promotion, we recommend hiring a good SEO agency.

In our next blog article, you’ll find a round up of the best online marketing tools for small business selected by the experts.

Price

Depending on the country and currency, if you want an SEO agency to help you position your website , the costs will start from 500 (USA/UAD/GBP/PLN…) per month and for an online store from 1500 (USA/UAD/GBP/PLN…) per month and depends on many factors.

The main factors that are taken into consideration when agencies are pricing search engine optimization for a website are:

• The current state of the website and its visibility on the internet
• Competitiveness in the industry
• Area - whether you want to position your business online within a city, within a certain radius, in a specific area, or for the whole country or globally
• The number of keywords (the size of the company’s offer) you want to rank highly on

Time

Positioning a website is a long-term effect, and business owners who opt for this service should be patient. Usually, the agency can give a rough estimate of the time they need for the website to be visible in Google and get organic traffic. Still, it is impossible to position a website in a month. The minimum time is a few months in which you will see an increase in website traffic and an increase in its online visibility.

Effort

Despite appearances, SEO requires a lot of knowledge and time, making it a very demanding channel. It would help if you learned how to create optimized and quality content, learn how to build a site structure, etc.

But if you manage to position one of your products or services, it can rank on the first position in Google for months.

Summary: Pros and cons

• Once positioned, a service/product can remain high in Google for a long time
• You can position your website/shop on thousands of keywords

• One or two-year investment can generate profits for another year or two years

• Requires time
• The first effects are visible only after a few months
• Requires a significant initial investment that will pay off in a few months at the earliest
• Positioning a website requires a lot of marketing and technical knowledge

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2. Positioning of Google business profile

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A Google company profile is how we call a company pin in maps, which displays in the search engine results and a map view when you type in the word, for example, dentist New York. It is also visible in the Google maps application. You can find the company’s address, phone number, website, and other necessary information about the company there.

Positioning a company profile on Google looks similar to positioning a website, but it is simpler and less demanding than ranking a website.

Can you do it by yourself?

Of course! Creating a company profile on Google and its subsequent maintenance, optimization, and positioning on Google is very easy to master , which allows you to manage and maintain it yourself - who better than you to take care of your business profile?

If you already have a business profile on Google, you can first take to check its visibility. You can do this by using the free Local rank checker tool.

Price

NOTHING - creating your business profile in Google and its subsequent maintenance (if you do it yourself) do not require any financial outlay. The only costs come when you decide to buy tools for the whole process that will allow you to do it faster and better. Depending on the country and currency, the total cost of the software should not exceed 100 (USD/UAD/GBP/PLN), and thanks to them, you will be able to increase the profits from your company profile on Google even several times.

Time

As with a website, everything depends on:

• The competitiveness of the area you are in
• The current state of your business profile (whether you’ve just launched it or it’s been in Google for a few months/years)

However, unlike a website, the effects are practically always visible faster, and you should see the first results in the form of increased business visibility within the first month.

Below you have the results of two companies. On the second day after adding the company’s profile to Google, you were visible to potential customers, who also decided to contact the company, visit the website, or set the route. The business profiles were just added and pre-optimized - this took between one and two hours. See how views and conversions grew.

Company #1

Company #2

Effort

You need to acquire some basic knowledge, which won’t take more than a week between other tasks. Then learn the tools and start systematic work on your profile.

The first optimization may take a few hours - a few days maximum. After that, it is enough to devote about 1-2 hours a week to the profile.

Summary: Pros and cons of positioning a Google business profile

+It is for free

+You can quickly learn the positioning and do it by yourself

+There are many tools which are easy and help you

+After the first optimization does not require so much effort and time

+The effects are often visible already in the first month

+Users can send messages to your business directly through your profile

+You can also measure the number of calls to your business, route determinations, and website visits

-Competitors can sometimes suggest changes to your Google profile and, e.g., change your title (but you can undo the changes later)

3. Social Media marketing

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Social media marketing is a one of marketing tactics when you publish posts on your company’s profile on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., contributing to comments, thematic posts of other companies as a specialist and thus building authority, or participating in various thematic groups.

Compare to Social Media Ads, you have to put much more effort into it to get the same number of fanpage likes - but you don’t spend money on it. You spend a lot of your time creating the social media posts.

If you run or want to run more than one fanpage, a fantastic option to save time may be to use a tool such as Buffer, in which you can publish one entry, and it will be published on all your profiles in Social Media.

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Can you do it by yourself?

Absolutely, unlike advertising, it only costs you your time. All you need to do at the beginning is to watch what your competitors and other industries are doing, develop your strategy and vision for the development of your Social Media account, and you are ready to go :)

With time you will gain more experience, and you will do it better and better.

Price

The price is your time. Estimate how much your hour of work costs, and you will see how much one post or entry costs you. :)

Time

You won’t spend more than 30 minutes on a short post. You will probably spend more than an hour for a longer, more substantial post with good graphics.

Though publishing posts is a process, it may take a year or two before it starts producing any financial results you can feel.

Effort

It will always look the same. You need to develop a topic for the post, create graphics content, put it together, and publish it. For creating graphics, we can confidently recommend a great and simple tool like Canva.

You should also follow and participate in thematic groups as much as possible.

Summary: Pros and cons of Social media marketing

+You can confidently publish posts yourself and participate in comments and discussions below posts, groups, etc.

+You don’t spend any money on it - it costs your time and costs your time, and the only cost is your time

+You build your brand image and can enter into a dialogue with your customers

• You should be available often to reply to comments

-The process of building fanpage likes in this way and trying to sell products or services is time-consuming

-Sometimes, a large number of likes and followers does not translate into actual sales (so-called vanity metrics )

4. Content marketing

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It’s an online marketing strategy that involves creating high-quality content on your website that answers users’ questions and helps them solve their problems. This strategy can include building a blog, a page with recipes, popular math solutions, a blog post with descriptions of medical ailments and how to treat them, etc.

For example, you have an online vitamin store, and you created an article about vitamin C, deficiency symptoms, benefits, dosage, etc. People read the post, then check what else you have on your website, and finally buy the product in your store.

You can confidently share such a post on your Facebook profile.

Can you do it by yourself?

Of course, but you must know that coming up with the whole content marketing strategy - a theme and what to include in them is time-consuming. With help can come such a tool as Surfer SEO, which will prepare you a ready list of article topics to write after entering your domain. It works in all languages.

The only obstacle you face is your website, or rather its system. Not everyone can add a page and content to their site. You may need the help of a programmer.

We also suggest you get some basic knowledge of how to build a website structure before you start:

• What is Meta Title and Meta Description
• What the H1-h6 header structure should look like on the page
• How to optimize images. Size, alt text, image name
• How to link internally to a product subpage

Price

If you decide to do it yourself, the price is your time. To reduce it, we suggest equipping yourself with a tool that will make finding a topic and writing a quality article faster and easier.

Time

On average, you will spend one day writing an article and another day editing it and uploading it to your website.

Regarding how long it will start paying off, you need to write a minimum of a few blog articles to start generating traffic to your website. Additionally, the post will not immediately be on the first page in Google. It needs time to show up there. Below you have an example of how traffic and visibility grow month by month on a blog with regular articles.

Effort

We believe that effort is often worth the price. The fact is that creating and adding an article takes a lot of time - at least two days, but after about a year of hard work, you may see great results like the ones above :)

Summary: Pros and cons of content marketing

+You can do it yourself

+There are tools which improve your work a lot

+After you write a quality article, it may take weeks, months, or even years until you benefit from it.

+You can create reviews and content about the products you sell

-You won’t see results right away, and it works like a snowball effect. The longer you create quality content, the more visibility and traffic your site will get.

-After a year, you may find that your strategy is not working

5. Video Marketing

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It is a type of digital marketing that consists of creating video content and publishing it on streaming platforms like YouTube or TikTok.

For example, you can create content about healthy eating, cool gadgets for the home, cars, cars, etc., and build yourself an audience composed of target customers- subscribers on YouTube or followers on TikTok.

Can you do it by yourself?

Of course! Prepare a topic script, set up a camera, and you are ready to go. :) Read also: How to plan an effective video marketing campaign guide

There are already many different simple video editing programs that you can use to trim your video for uploading to YouTube or other platforms.

On the other hand, Tik Tok has its editor, which is trivially easy, and you can learn it in one day. ‍

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Price

The price is your time and possibly the tool you buy to process the videos. If you also have a poor quality phone or camera and microphone, you will probably need to equip yourself with suitable recording equipment. If you want to prepare material that you intend to use in a more extensive campaign, you can hire an agency specializing in video preparation or a freelancer.

Time

It depends on how big a video you want to prepare, but it shouldn’t take you more than one day per video.

Effort

Preparing a good video takes work, commitment, and a good script, but it starts with an idea.

If you can make it happen, the win is in your pocket, and you’ll see that even in the first week or month of publishing your video.

While on Tik Tok, you can check what hashtags others are using. Unfortunately, you can’t do that on YouTube - unless you use a free plugin for Google: TubeBuddy. This tool will allow you to quickly review your competitors’ similar videos and find relevant hashtags for your videos.

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Summary: Pros and cons of video marketing

+You can grow your channel yourself on one of the streaming platforms

+First effects in the form of video views and possible traffic to your website should be visible in the first days, maximum of weeks (if the video fits what people are looking for and want to watch)

+Once recorded video can generate views even for several years

-You need to have basic knowledge about video editing

-Probably, you will need to equip yourself with essential recording equipment

6. Email Marketing

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Email marketing is compounds of various kinds of newsletters, newsletters, offers, promotions, etc. As the name suggests, email marketing requires us to obtain an email address from potential customers to whom you will send the marketing message.

How to possess a database of emails? The best way is to collect them on your website, e.g., on your blog in a pop-up informing that you will receive notifications about new articles to your email if you enter your email.

Can you do it by yourself?

You can easily do your email marketing, but you need to equip yourself with a tool that will allow you to send emails to, e.g., 1000 emails at once. We recommend using Mailchimp , making the entire email sending and analysis process much easier and more efficient.

Additionally, you first need to gather a base of people you want to send these emails to. You can source it using such a section on the site:

Price

The price is your time and the cost of the tool, which shouldn’t be much.

Time

Once started, email marketing should continue non-stop. The time to prepare one message and send it is 1-3 hours.

Effort

The most significant effort is to get a list of emails to which you can send your message. These must be people who may be interested in your product or service. Buying an email database can have a mediocre effect - you may end up sending thousands of emails that never get opened and have zero chance of generating revenue.

Summary: Pros and cons of email marketing

+You can do it yourself

+You don’t need to be very experienced to write emails

-Email marketing makes sense if you have at least 500-1000 email addresses you can send to.

-Collecting such a pool of email addresses is not easy

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Paid marketing

1. Google Ads

Google Ads is:

• Advertising in Google search results, whereby the advertised website appears in one of the top 4 positions in search results (above organic results and the map pack)
• Banner ads that Google displays, e.g., on various forums and websites
• Product advertising - products listed with a photo and price at the top of search results, e.g., after typing the word Nike shoes

This campaign works so that you pay per click (someone from the search results clicked the ad and went to the website) or display (cost of 1000 impressions). We generally call this type of online marketing ‘search engine marketing’ (SEM).

Can you do it by yourself?

Suppose you only have a few keywords you want to display high for, such as roadside assistance in New York. If you spend a few hours on the basic concept and then explore systematically (and you’re not intimidated by charts and tables!), then yes. In that case, you can do it yourself. But if you don’t like charts and tables or want to advertise for multiple keywords, you won’t be able to control the campaign yourself, and the best option is to entrust this task to an agency. Plus, they will take care of building a base of all creative assets for the campaign - texts, banner ads, etc.

Price

It all depends on how many keywords you have, how competitive they are and how much one click costs. For example, there are words for which you can pay $0.5 per click and words for which you will pay $50 per click.

A tremendous and free extension for Google Chrome called Keyword Surfer shows you how often users search for a keyword for a month and how much it costs on average for a user to 1-click an ad for that keyword.

Time

The same day the campaign is launched, your website will show high in the search results and generate clicks to your website.

A simple campaign is ready to launch in one day; a complex one can take a week or more.

Effort

Certainly, the greatest effort is getting it up and running and setting up conversions before launch, which takes anywhere from a day to a few weeks (depending on how big your offer and website are). Once launched, the campaign requires constant monitoring, analysis, and implementation of appropriate adjustments. These activities should not take more than 3-5 hours per week.

Summary: Pros and cons of Google ads

+After launching the campaign, the company’s offer is immediately visible at the top and displayed to the users.

+Generates traffic to the website from the very first day of the campaign

+Allows you to quickly verify whether a given product/service will sell after it has been positioned

-If you run out of money on your account for clicks or turn off the ad, it will be invisible right away.

-You can not influence the cost per click. It’s defined by the competition (who can pay more to be higher)

2. Facebook Ads

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Facebook Ads are ads (practically mostly graphic) that you can see on your Facebook wall.

These ads use attractive graphics and catchy text and encourage users to, for example, like a fanpage, write to a company, or go directly to a product or service page.

Can you do it by yourself?

Yes. This online marketing platform has relatively easy-to-use ad configurators, thanks to which you can easily and quickly run ads.

Worse is its effectiveness. A good agency can generate more likes or page views for the same amount of money spent on digital advertising. They use experienced graphic designers, content marketing specialists, and social media analysts and specialists.

Price

Depending on your country and currency, you should spend at least 10 (USD/UAD/GBP/PLN) per day.

In the case of Facebook, for example, you can charge differently. You pay for the achieved goal - for fanpage likes, ad views, ad clicks, page conversions, etc.

Time

Creating one ad should not take you more than a few hours (graphics, content, choosing the target audience, setting the budget). After that time, your campaign should be running. After that, you have to watch it (at least once a week for about 1-2 hours) and correct it accordingly, e.g., add or subtract the budget audience. Of course, if it is required after the analysis of the campaign.

Effort

The most extensive effort is to launch the campaign. It would be best to prepare nice and catchy graphics content that will encourage people to read the whole post, go to the site, buy it, set it up, and configure it in the ad configuration panel. After that, it’s downhill :)

Summary: Pros and cons of Facebook ads

+You can run a basic campaign by yourself

+You can set the Cost of the campaign by yourself - it can be either small or huge.

+The ad can be displayed on the day you decide to run it and generate conversions in likes, page views, etc.

-You need to have minimal knowledge about building digital marketing campaigns to choose the right target audience and be able to analyze the results

-You need to have at least minimal graphic, creative and analytical skills to prepare even a basic ad

3. YouTube Ads

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It’s an online marketing strategy that involves creating a video that you later promote to be displayed to a greater audience. A perfect example is the YouTube ads that appear before the video, which you can also skip.

Can you do it by yourself?

In theory, yes, in practice, it would be rather challenging. Preparing good quality, catchy marketing material that is supposed to sell and then setting up the ad properly and analyzing it is quite a challenge.

Price

In this case, there are many billing options - per display, per click, or per view of the entire ad material.

Depending on your country and currency, you should spend at least 1500 (USA/UAD/GBP/PLN).

Time

The ad is visible and displayed on the same day you add it, but it may take a week or more to prepare it (video + campaign setup).

Effort

YouTube ads are one of those advertising campaigns that require a considerable amount of time to prepare the material to be displayed. You have to take special care about the quality of the video, its content, and the marketing messages you want to convey.

Summary: Pros and cons of YouTube ads marketing

+Video material is displayed to users immediately after its launch

+Possible billing for clicking the ad by the user

+We can very precisely choose the target audience to which we want to display ads

-Preparing the material is time-consuming

-Setting up an ad campaign is not easy

-You can’t do it without a professional agency

4. Influencer marketing

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A type of digital marketing where a well-known person from the internet, who runs her YouTube channel, TikTok, or fanpage on Facebook or Instagram, etc., advertises your product or service among their audience or followers. This is simply a person who influences the purchasing decisions of their audience and who trusts his recommendations.

Can you do it by yourself?

All you can do is get in touch with a person who will promote your product or service.

Price

Usually, the model of accounting with an influencer looks like this:

• There is a barter collaboration, e.g., referral for referral
• You send him your product for free, e.g., a vacuum cleaner, which he then reviews publicly
• You pay him for recommending your company

Time

Usually, finding an influencer, you would like to cooperate with is not difficult. The most prolonged process is negotiating terms and conditions and getting the influencer to prepare the material.

Effort

What matters on your side is finding an influencer and getting along with them. That’s it :)

Summary: Pros and cons of influencer marketing

+Influencer has an audience that trusts him and thus is more likely to decide to buy your products or use your services

+You can often pay them simply with your products or services

-Good influencers are expensive

-You may find that the influencer has bought likes or followers, which will not translate into sales (you can verify this by checking how many comments they have under the posts or videos)

5. Sponsored Article

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A sponsored article is one on a blog or a website that does not belong to you but describes our service or product and links to our website.

For example, it could be an article on a medical blog about vitamin C that says in the summary that if you want to buy vitamin C, you can do so at this online store: [and here is a link to your website].

The publication of sponsored articles is often done together with the site’s positioning.

Can you do it by yourself?

You can write the article yourself, and then try to publish it on the website you cooperate with. The publication itself is done by the person who manages the blog.

Price

The cost of publishing a sponsored article varies and depends mainly on how strong the blog’s domain is and how much traffic it generates. You can safely assume that the cost of publishing sponsored articles on blogs you cooperate with, depending on the country, will start from 100 (USD/UAD/GBP/PLN).

Time

Such an article can be visible for a year, or you can buy the space for life. Then it will generate profits for the company for such a period.

Effort

It may take some time to find a blog that is willing to publish your article and then negotiate with the person who takes care of it and runs it.

Summary: Pros and cons

+You can publish a quality article on a solid and thematic website.

+You reach people who read the site

+It affects the positioning of your website

-Buying a sponsored article on a site not thematically related to ours can be counterproductive.

-Low-quality articles may not bring any value to your business.

-Finding a suitable blog and arranging with its administrator for publication can be exhausting.

What are the best online marketing efforts for a startup business?

Below are all the digital channels with our rating on a scale of 1 to 10, which we considered various factors.

Can you manage and run this channel yourself?

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Cost of the channel per month (service by agency + possible budget required to make the channel work).

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The effort you need to put into running the channel (creating or acquiring content, publishing, managing, etc.).

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How long it will take to see the first results (assuming, for example, that you start YouTube Ads or e-mail marketing now).

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CONCLUSION:

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Questions and Answers

Q: I am new to online marketing; where do I start?

A: To start, set up a business profile on Google for free. Then, unless you are confident that your business will stay in business for years to come, don’t decide to do anything long-term. We recommend optimizing your business profile on Google and running Google Ads to see how much interest there is in your products or services and whether anyone is asking for or buying them.

Q: Will all the types of online marketing work for my business?

The short answer - no. There are things like a website and a company profile on Google that you should have for sure, but for the rest of the activities, you should be careful. Check out what your competitors are investing in the most. And this solution is probably the most profitable channel. E.g., roadside assistance often invests only in paid ads on Google Ads because customers whose cars broke down expect quick help and click on one of the first search engine results. They’re usually in town in passing and don’t know of good local companies either. Customers are unlikely to watch videos of how roadside assistance works - that won’t sell you a service.

Q: Which digital marketing strategy will earn me the most money?

Choosing among the types of digital marketing strategies depends on your industry. If you have a roadside assistance business, I suggest that you run Google Ads and position your company profile on Google. If you were a dentist, I would recommend you to take care of the search engine optimization of your website, set up your company profile in Google, and running a Facebook and Instagram fanpage. If you had an online store, I would decide on Facebook Ads Google ads and probably come up with something cool for TikTok. Later I would gradually add more channels like content marketing, SEO, sponsored articles, and influencer marketing.

Q: I have no budget and no existing customers; where do I start?

If you own an online store, you can try to barter with influencers or try to leave meaningful comments on posts on streaming channels and social media platforms. You can also create excellent content on TikTok and YouTube.

If you have a service business that operates in a specific area, make a company profile on Google, create even a basic website that you can do to create a company profile on Google, and maintain your social media fanpage. Try to get as many positive reviews about the company as possible. The feature Localo - Google review poster will help you with this, so you will be able to get a lot of valuable reviews on Google quickly.