8 Digital Marketing Channels That Drive Results (And How to Start)

There are dozens of different digital marketing channels to promote your business online. But only a handful will be effective and drive real measurable results.

In this guide, we’ll take an in-depth look at the 8 best digital marketing channels you should focus on, how to get started with each one, and how to choose the right channels for your business.

What Are Digital Marketing Channels?

Digital marketing channels are various platforms businesses can use to reach their target audience and promote their products or services online. These might include search engines, social media networks, websites, or email.

A simple way to group them is by who controls the channel:

• Owned channels are the ones you control, like your website, your blog, and your email list.
• Paid channels are the ones you pay to appear on, like search ads, social media ads, and influencer or affiliate commissions.
• Earned channels are the attention you win without paying for it, like organic search rankings, shares, reviews, and press mentions.

Most successful businesses combine all three: paid and earned channels bring people in, and owned channels keep them coming back.

8 Effective Digital Marketing Channels

1. Your Website
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Social Media Marketing
4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
5. Content Marketing
6. Email Marketing
7. Affiliate Marketing
8. Influencer Marketing

1. Your Website

Your website is the hub of your digital marketing. Almost every other channel on this list sends people somewhere, and in most cases that place is your website: your search rankings point to it, your ads link to it, and your emails and social posts bring readers back to it.

It is also the one channel you fully own. Social media platforms can change their algorithms and search engines can change their rankings, but your website, and the email list you build through it, stays yours.

How To Get Started With Your Website

Choose a platform and a domain: For most businesses, WordPress or a website builder is enough to start. Pick a short domain name that matches your brand.

Make it fast and mobile-friendly: Most visitors will see your site on a phone first, so make sure pages load quickly and are easy to use on a small screen.

Give every page a job: Your home page, product or service pages, about page, and contact page should each make it clear what you offer and what the visitor should do next.

Add ways to convert: Contact forms, email sign-up forms, and clear calls to action turn visitors from all your other channels into leads and customers.

Track what happens: Set up analytics so you can see which channels bring visitors and which of them turn into customers.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is making your website and the content you produce rank higher in search engines like Google. The higher you rank in the search results, the more likely people will click on your website.

Once your website ranks on search engines, you get “free” traffic since you don’t have to pay for your website to stay visible. Compare this to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), where you must pay for your website to show up continuously.

How To Get Started With SEO

Follow these steps to start using SEO in your marketing.

Do Keyword research: Keywords are one of the most important aspects of SEO. You’ll need to know how to research the best keywords for your site and optimize your site around those keywords.

Create high-quality content: Your content must be high quality and relevant to your visitors. You also need to publish content frequently/update older content, so it always provides value to your visitors.

Go mobile-first: Mobile optimization ensures your site and content are optimized for the mobile web, where more and more users spend their time. Plus, Google predominantly indexes the mobile version of your site first.

Optimize your site structure: Ensure your website has a logical hierarchy and simple navigation. This makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site and for users to find what they need, enhancing the user experience and SEO simultaneously.

Get high-quality backlinks: Focus on building relationships and creating share-worthy content to attract backlinks from reputable sites. These backlinks act as endorsements, boosting your site's authority and improving your rankings in search engine results.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing allows you to reach your target audience on social media. You can achieve various goals, including growing your social media accounts, selling more products, and sending traffic to your website.

One big reason to include social media marketing in your overall digital marketing strategy is to capture the attention of a specific audience, engage buyers, and convert customers.

The big challenge with social media marketing is that organic reach (the number of people who see your posts without paying for ads) has fallen a lot over the years. You can still grow organically with consistent, platform-native content, but most businesses combine it with paid social media ads to get predictable results.

How To Get Started With Social Media Marketing

Facebook Ads are one of the best ways to get started with social media marketing. It boasts a massive user base, and you’ll find very advanced targeting tools and ad formats (image, video, carousel, and collection ads) for Facebook and Instagram.

When you create a campaign in Meta Ads Manager, you start by choosing one of six objectives, depending on what you want to achieve:

• Awareness. Show your ads to the people most likely to remember them.
• Traffic. Send people to your website, landing page, or app.
• Engagement. Get more messages, video views, post engagement, or page likes.
• Leads. Collect sign-ups, for example with instant forms or messages, without people leaving Facebook or Instagram.
• App promotion. Get people to install your app or take an action in it.
• Sales. Find people likely to buy your products or services.

If your goal is to send traffic to your website, sell products, or capture email subscribers, the Traffic, Sales, and Leads objectives will be the most useful.

Here’s a brief overview of how to run Facebook ads:

1. Set up Meta Business Suite and open Ads Manager
2. Define your target audience. You can also create lookalike and custom audiences
3. Pick the campaign objective that matches your goal
4. Create your ad creative materials
5. Launch, test, and track your campaigns

4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) gets traffic from search engines by running paid ads. You’ll also hear this called paid search ads or PPC marketing.

With PPC, the advertiser (you) will pay every time someone clicks on your search ad and visits your site or landing page.

Paid search results appear on top of the standard organic search results. Instead of trying to rank high in the search engines, you buy top placement.

Here are a few advantages to paid search traffic over other models:

• Cheaper than traditional advertising. Old-school advertising spots can range into thousands of dollars for both media and non-media communication channels. With PPC ads, you only pay when someone clicks your ad.
• Target your audience. You can target your audience down to your ideal customer. For example, you can narrow it by age, location, demographics, gender, income level, job, interests, and more.
• Advanced metrics to test and improve your ads. Whenever you run an ad campaign, you’ll have access to all sorts of data to sort through. With this, you’ll be able to see what’s working and create more popular ads over time.

How To Get Started With PPC Ads

If you want to start getting into paid search traffic, there are two big networks where you’ll focus all of your efforts:

Google Ads - Google owns Google Ads and lets you display ads in the Google search results, on YouTube, or across the network of sites participating in Google AdSense.

Here’s a quick overview of how Google Ads works:

1. You create a Google Ads account.
2. You create an advertising campaign comprised of ad groups, keywords, and ads.
3. You narrow down your target audience for whom you’ll run your ads.
4. You start the campaign and will pay whenever someone clicks your ad.
5. You analyze the data, make changes, and steadily improve your ad campaigns.

Microsoft Advertising - Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) shows your ads on the Bing search engine and Microsoft’s partner sites. It doesn’t have as wide a reach as Google, but Bing still holds about 4.5% of the global search engine market.

Running Microsoft Advertising campaigns is very similar to running Google Ads, and you can import your existing Google Ads campaigns into it.

The good news about Microsoft Advertising is that it’s often less competitive, so clicks can cost less. This could be a good place to start if you’re wary about wasting your budget on paid ads.

Paid search can be tough, especially if you’re a beginner, so learn the basics before you spend a large budget. These resources will help:

5. Content Marketing

Content is the driving force of the internet, and you can harness it for your small business. All businesses have buyers at different levels of the customer awareness journey.

Content marketing addresses buyers at every level, but the initial awareness phase is a big focus. At this point, potential customers know they have a problem or need you can fulfill but aren’t quite ready to pull the trigger on a solution.

How To Get Started With Content Marketing

Content marketing does a great job of educating potential prospects and helping them solve problems, leading them to the natural solution your products and services provide.

Doing content marketing correctly also makes your visitors more receptive to the sale. Instead of overwhelming them with constant selling, you’re educating and helping until they’re ready.

The website content you create can take many forms, including:

• Blog posts
• eBooks
• Interviews
• Infographics
• White papers

However, three forms of content are more effective than most:

Pillar Content - Pillar content seeks to be the absolute best piece of content across the internet for your chosen topic. It provides your visitors with everything they need to know about that topic.

Your pillar content can be a single page (like a long, in-depth blog post) or a cluster of topics, almost like a massive category page.

Whatever route you choose, you’ll need to satisfy the following:

• They are typically much longer than traditional blog posts
• The content is focused on a single topic
• The content is easy to navigate and broken into multiple sections
• Each of these sections will cover a sub-topic of the larger topic

Pillar pages are important because they provide users and search engines with what they want. It makes users happy since it contains all the information they need in one place, and this makes the search engines happy because it creates a great experience for their users.

Original Research - One great way to create content that should be shared and linked to is to uncover original research. That way, when people write about a topic and need a source, they’ll link to you–the source.

Here are a few methods to create original research, even if your audience is small:

• Create a Facebook poll for your friends and followers
• Create a simple survey and send it out to your email list
• Create a compelling resource, run ads to it, and require a simple survey to download the report

Case Studies -

Case studies are valuable pieces of content. They’re used to demonstrate social proof to your audience that what you offer generates results.

Case studies are very powerful sales tools. They help your visitors put themselves in the shoes of your success story. There’s a reason that Shopify has an entire section of its website dedicated to customer success stories.

No matter what type of content you choose to create, content marketing can help you achieve a variety of different goals:

• Improve your organic search engine rankings
• Help you generate leads, subscribers, and customers
• Retain existing customers
• Establish yourself as an authority in your niche
• Support your audience before and after you’ve made a sale

6. Email Marketing

Every year, it seems that across the internet, people are claiming that “email marketing is dead”. Maybe you’ve even seen these articles yourself.

Even though this seems to arise nearly every year, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. Email is not dead. It’s one of the few channels you own: no algorithm change can take your subscribers away from you, and every email lands directly in their inbox.

Many people won’t have a Facebook or Instagram account, but nearly everyone has an email address. This widespread usage is part of the reason email remains one of the most effective digital channels.

The main goal of email marketing is to develop deep relationships with your existing and potential customers.

Some of the most common reasons to send emails to your subscribers include:

• Building your brand
• Promoting your products and services
• Offering subscriber-only coupons
• Promoting blog posts or other content you’ve published
• Sending educational value-add content

Overall, your goal is to build rapport and stay at the front of your customer's or potential customers' minds.

How To Get Started With Email Marketing

Best of all, email marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. Here’s a simple process you can follow:

1. Choose an email marketing software provider
2. Create a welcome sequence that will automatically send when someone subscribes
3. Encourage your website visitors to sign up via subscriber forms on your website
4. Write persuasive emails that have a single link and a specific goal
5. Write an engaging subject line that entices your visitors to open
6. Send your email and measure the results of your campaign

7. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing

is a marketing strategy where affiliates promote your products or services, and in return, they receive a percentage of the revenue generated from their referrals.

It's a very effective digital marketing channel for e-commerce sites and digital product providers, as it aligns incentives between marketers and product creators, driving sales while keeping marketing costs variable.

How To Get Started With Affiliate Marketing

• Identify influencers, bloggers, or content creators who align with your brand values and have an engaged audience relevant to your products or services.
• Establish clear, attractive commission rates. Whether a flat rate per sale or a percentage of the transaction, it should be competitive to entice high-quality affiliates.
• Provide your affiliates with high-quality content they can use in their promotions. This includes banners, product images, sample social media posts, or even exclusive promotional codes.
• Continuously monitor the performance of your affiliates. Use analytics to understand which affiliates bring the most value and optimize your strategies and support accordingly. Regularly update your offerings and marketing materials to keep the program fresh and appealing.

8. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing leverages the reach and credibility of influential people on social media to promote your brand or product.

These influencers have a dedicated following, often in a specific niche, and their recommendations can drive awareness, credibility, and sales.

Influencer marketing is especially powerful in today’s market, where consumers rely on social proof and peer recommendations over traditional advertising.

How To Get Started With Influencer Marketing

Look for influencers whose followers match your target audience. It's not just about follower count; engagement rate, content quality, and audience relevance are key.

• Be clear about what you want to achieve – brand awareness, lead generation, or direct sales. This will shape your campaign strategy.
• Contact potential influencers with a personalized message. Explain why a partnership would be mutually beneficial and align with their content and audience.
• Work with influencers to create content that feels authentic to their style while effectively conveying your brand message. Authenticity is crucial in influencer marketing.
• Use tracking links, promo codes, and analytics tools to measure the impact of influencer collaborations on your marketing goals. Adjust your strategy based on what works best.

How To Choose The Right Digital Marketing Channels

You don’t need to be on every channel. Most businesses get better results by doing one or two channels well than by spreading a small budget across all eight. Start with your website, then pick your first channels based on two questions.

What type of business do you have?

Business type	Channels to start with
eCommerce store	SEO, Google Shopping and search ads (PPC), email marketing
B2B company or professional service	Content marketing, SEO, LinkedIn, email marketing
Local business	Local SEO and a Google Business Profile, search ads (PPC)
Creator or personal brand	Social media, video, email marketing, affiliate marketing

What is your main goal?

• Brand awareness: social media marketing, influencer marketing, and content marketing reach new people.
• Leads: content marketing combined with email marketing, and search ads that capture people who are already looking for what you offer.
• Direct sales: PPC, email marketing to people who already know you, and affiliate marketing, where you only pay when a sale happens.

Once your first channels are working, measure which ones bring customers, not just visitors, and add the next channel from there. Our guide to building a digital marketing strategy shows how to plan it.

Use the following guides to learn about the various digital marketing channels.