Digital Marketing 101 (Complete 2025 Beginners Guide)
So what is digital marketing?
Well, to understand this, let’s take a step back and start from the beginning, and that is understanding what marketing even is and the role it plays within a business.
Marketing, in simple terms, is the process of attracting potential customers to your company to buy your products or services. At the end of the day, if no one knows about you, you’ve got absolutely no chance of ever selling anything to anyone.
Every business in the world that has ever existed will be doing some form of marketing, whether they know it or not.
Now in recent times, more so with the introduction of the internet, marketing has now been split into two different forms:
Traditional Marketing: This is the marketing that everyone knows about, no matter their age. This would be things such as newspaper, TV and radio adverts, billboards, magazines … pretty much anything that is printed will be classed as traditional marketing.
While traditional marketing can be effective and definitely still has its place, it usually comes with limitations such as higher costs, difficulty in tracking performance, and challenges in making sure your adverts are getting in front of the right target audience.
Digital Marketing: This is basically any form of marketing that can be done, well, you guessed it… digitally. Basically, anything online counts as digital marketing. The reason I love digital marketing so much is that you can essentially do everything that traditional marketing offers, but at larger scales, lower costs, from anywhere in the world, and most importantly, everything is trackable so that you can constantly analyse and improve your strategy over time.
So now we understand the difference, let’s dive deeper into how you can use digital marketing for your business, and everything starts with what is called the digital marketing funnel.
The Digital Marketing Funnel
Now, there are many versions of this funnel that you’ll hear about and see online, but I think the best way is to always keep things simple. To do that, I’m going to break it into four main stages:
Awareness
Consideration
Conversion
Loyalty
I’m going to take you on a journey through this in a moment and talk about the different marketing channels and where they fit within this, but essentially, as a digital marketer, your role is to get as many people as possible into the top of this funnel, all the way through it, and out of the bottom.
It sounds difficult to start, and you’ll never be able to perfect it, but as you learn more, you’ll notice improvements in your analytics because, remember, it’s all trackable.
1. Awareness (Top of Funnel)
Let’s start with awareness, which is going to be the most straightforward stage of the bunch. This is basically all about generating traffic for your business and doing everything you can to get as many people into your funnel.
When it comes to the marketing channels for this stage, the main ones that really play the biggest role in making this happen are:
Paid Media: This includes things such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads. In fact, most platforms these days have an option to run something paid on them in some capacity. It’s a marketing channel that brings quick results but, of course, at the expense of money being spent and sometimes a lot of money if you don’t know how to optimise it.
Organic Media: This is where you create your own content on social media or maybe a blog. With this, you rely on high engagement rates and algorithms to push your content to a newer audience. This usually takes a lot longer before you see results compared to a paid channel, but the two main benefits are: 1) it’s free (the only cost is your time), and 2) it has the chance to grow on autopilot over time with no limitations. Whereas with paid media, when you stop paying, your ads also stop getting shown.
My suggestion is to always do both. That’s actually what I’m doing with a current client of mine. On screen, you can see a real comparison: both of them produced similar results in terms of impressions. The only difference is that one took just under a year and was free, while the other took a quarter of that time but required a large ad spend.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is making sure that you’re optimizing your website and its content so that you can rank higher than your competitors on Google, which is the world’s number one search engine and the place most people go to when they want to find out about a product or service they know nothing about.
There are also other ways of generating awareness, such as affiliate and influencer marketing, but for me, the three mentioned above are the ones you’ll usually find in most marketing strategies.
2. Consideration
Once people start becoming aware of your business, they move into the consideration stage. With this comes, in my opinion, the most important marketing channel of them all: web design.
Your website will be the central point and foundation of everything you do when it comes to your business and marketing online. A good or bad website can literally be the difference between people progressing through your funnel or jumping out before you even get the chance to show them how great you are.
I always tell my clients: you could have the best paid ads strategy in the world, generate viral content, or have a bulletproof way of generating traffic, but that traffic means nothing if they come to your website and leave straight away.
Another powerful thing about your website is that it’s one of the few marketing channels that you exclusively own. For example, there’s nothing to say that your Google Ads account couldn’t get suspended at any time, or worse, you could work super hard for years to build up a social media following, only for the platform to go away overnight. Just look at what’s happening with TikTok right now.
But when it comes to your website, you will always own that traffic and have full control over someone’s experience, from when they first land on your page to when they leave.
Tying this in with the consideration part of the marketing funnel, your website should include some important aspects:
Display social proof (e.g., companies you’ve worked with or customer reviews/testimonials).
Provide trust-building elements, which are key deciding factors when someone is considering your business.
Blogs and organic media also play a role here. Everyone’s way of considering a service is different. Some people check reviews; others are convinced by good branding. Some may want to head to social media to find out more. Many channels overlap in your funnel, which is why you want to include as many as you can in your strategy.
3. Conversion
Now that you’ve got traffic considering your services or products, the next stage is about convincing them to take an action. This is normally measured as a conversion.
A conversion can look very different depending on your type of business:
For service-based businesses, it might mean someone filling out an inquiry form or calling your sales team.
For an online store, it might mean someone completing a purchase on your website.
A key factor in driving conversions is copywriting. This is the text on any form of marketing that convinces a customer to trust and buy from you. For example:
A basic gardening business website with just the text, “Hi, I’m a gardener. I’ll do your gardening. Do you want my help?” likely won’t convert many customers.
A well-crafted website that includes an engaging headline, your company’s backstory, detailed services, and social proof, on the other hand, significantly increases the chance of conversions.
Analytics also play a big role in improving conversions. Tools like Google Analytics and A/B testing help you see what works best. You can track where people drop off, how many click on ads and convert, and even how long they spend on your site.
4. Loyalty
This is often overlooked by many marketing teams and businesses, but it’s crucial. Getting a customer to convert is great, but what if you could get them returning over and over again without having to go through the entire funnel every time?
This is where automated email marketing comes in:
Send automated emails to check on a customer’s experience a week after their purchase.
Ask for a review to boost your trust score.
Offer exclusive customer deals to encourage repeat purchases.
By engaging with customers who already trust your brand, you can secure repeat business much more easily than with new customers. Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for this, even today.
Conclusion
So, looking back at the entire digital marketing funnel, you can see how different marketing channels fit into each stage. By implementing a strategy that covers awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty, you’ll create a sustainable system for growing your business online.
I hope you found this valuable, and I’ll see you in the next one!
