Online Marketing 101 (A Beginner's Guide To Marketing)

Updated Sep 17, 2026Published Mar 6, 20215 min read

Since the last few decades, there has been an exponential growth in the total number of internet users all over the world. Currently, around 3 billion people stay online in any online platform, they send more than 100 billion mails, watch 3 billion YouTube videos and Tweet 500 million messages every single day!

Online Marketing Made Simple

With the evolution of the internet, there has also been an unavoidable change in online marketing as well. Now there are multiple departments, different new approaches and customized roles to be played by professionals.

If you’re someone who is eager to start your career in the digital marketing field, you should check out the cheat-sheet of the digital marketing roles. This will let you gain a better understanding of your position in the bigger picture.

DIGITAL MARKETING

With the help of digital marketing, it is possible to create a unified and seamless customer experience through a wide array of digital channels that include games, apps, mobile, internet radio, podcasts, SMS messaging and many more.

INBOUND MARKETING

Through inbound marketing, one can attract, nurture, inform and also entertain your future customers with the help of technical SEO, engaging content and interactive tools for being able to win business and at the same time earn loyalty of your customers.

CONTENT CURATION

Takes you through a sea of online content, chooses premium quality content that are share-worthy, creates a one-stop newsfeed for all members who are a part of your target audience.

CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing produces interesting, effective and entertaining content like ebooks, blog posts, infographics and videos to lure attention of target audience. The Content marketing can also build brand authority and bring in new business for the company.

TYPES OF MEDIA

Paid Media: This includes sponsored posts, paid advertising and paid search
Earned Media: When the customers spread about your company through word of mouth marketing
Owned Media: Your own online real estate, mobile site, official website, social media pages or blog.

NATIVE ADVERTISING & SPONSORED CONTENT

Native advertising is that section through which you can create editorial content which has been totally customized to match the website of the online publisher. He then pays to place the content along with the other content of that site.

REMARKETING

This targets advertisements to people who already visited your website but who didn’t make any purchase. This is done through tailored messaging or through exclusive offers.

With the display and banner ads, you can catch the attention of your target customers and hence they either click to enter your website or they become aware of your brand. Banner ads also play a vital role here.

CONTEXTUAL ADS

With the help of contextual ads, you can display ads on a specific website based on the content, the hyperlinks of the definite keywords to an advertiser’s website. This lets you promote your site with the help of ads.

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION

With conversion rate optimization, you can use user feedback, analytics to enhance your website and turn passive browsers into customers who will pay you.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing enhances the visibility of the site in SERPs (search engine result pages), boosting website rankings with the help of SEO, back links and saturation.

INFLUENCER MARKETING

With the help of influencer marketing, you can build relationships with chosen group of people who can overall influence the buying decisions of your target market.

PAY-PER-CLICK (PPC)

Pay-per-click targets definite customers with the help of sponsored links and A/B tests to check out which advertisement leads to increased number of clicks.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

SEO plays a pivotal role in digital marketing without which it is tough to promote your website. Insert the best searched keywords into the pages of your website to boost search engine result ranks. This way you can also ensure your website is optimized for content, navigation, quality inbound links and keyword-rich meta-tags.

SPLIT TESTING

This is a random experiment where two variants are A/B tested with a blind control group to check which gives you the most successful results.

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing finds external partners to promote your company’s products to their own audience in lieu of a commission.

You can extend the reach of your company to new target audience with the help of paid ads or promoted posts on different social networking sites.

EMAIL MARKETING

With the help of email marketing, relevant and proper email messages are sent to recipients to keep themselves engaged with the company and to build the loyalty of your brand.

This increases brand awareness and boosts site traffic by building a community of customers through social media, posts updates which spread virally and responds to complaints, praise and requests. Social media marketing is a must for digital marketing.

LEAD NURTURING

With lead nurturing, building relationships is possible who are not ready to purchase through helpful emails, interesting content and social media engagement.

LEAD SCORING

Lead scoring is analyzing the online behavior of the leads to determine their interest level in your company’s product. Scoring tracks the position of each potential customer in the sales funnel.

ONLINE PUBLIC RELATIONS

Influences online communities and media, keeps a close watch on what people are discussing about the company online and watches out for new ways of connecting with the customers.

MOBILE MARKETING

With mobile marketing, you can send customized SMS messaging, in-app ads, push notifications, and QR code scans to the mobile devices of the customers based on their behavior and location at that time of the day.

MARKETING AUTOMATION

With marketing automation, repetitive marketing tasks can be automated and you can also get instant alerts to your customer behavior to let you determine the right message to send to the right person at the right time.

All digital marketers require a powerful collaboration as well as project management tool to coordinate all team efforts, adjusts and handles changing priorities and keeps every marketing campaign organized and effective.

Infographic brought to you by Wrike most popular project management tools.