Effectively promoting and marketing a product, service, website, or brand online can be quite challenging in today's competitive environment, requiring a multi-faceted approach and a significant investment of time and effort as well as budget. For companies that are serious about getting their brand name out there on the Web, paying an experienced team of experts to do all the hard work seems to make the most sense from a time investment Vs outcome standpoint. However even with an extensive advertising budget, simply deciding what to invest in first can seem like a daunting task when you're just starting a company from scratch or embarking on the first steps to making it grow.

To provide a broad understanding of the main components of digital marketing, we've listed the following three promotion types that are essential in every marketing campaign.

1.  Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO)

    Any website that aims to receive a large number of visitors on a daily basis should work to increase organic traffic through SEO. Organic traffic comes from visitors that stumble upon your site naturally while searching for a topic or keyword in a search engine like Google or Bing. By writing and posting content that targets popular searches or answers popular queries, you'll be able to attract targeted traffic and, most importantly, if you can obtain a ranking between 1 and 3, your site will be showing up at the top of Google whenever someone searches for a specific term or phrase, which is, of course, is a reputation booster but even more importantly, a guarantee of higher traffic.

2. Social Networking and Social Media

   Every digital marketing campaign should involve the creation and ongoing maintenance of multiple social media networking accounts. Social media marketing can be defined as the practice of posting interesting and entertaining media to your social networking accounts so that it can be seen and shared by all of your followers, who then share it with their friends, creating the commonly mentioned "viral traffic" effect. You should devote a significant portion of your time to keeping social accounts updated and posting the best new content you can find or create.

3. PPC and Other Advertising Methods 

   If you've ever browsed the internet for more than a minute, you've probably seen a text or banner ad before. They're ubiquitous online, with advertising networks like Google Adwords making it easy for anyone to launch a campaign and have their ads posted on relevant sites in their niche the same day. For starters, you should be learning how to use Google's pay-per-click (PPC) services to attract targeted visitors. A PPC advertising scheme only requires you to pay a set amount every time a web surfer clicks on one of your ads and is brought to the landing page on your site.

After you attract a decent amount of traffic from the SEO and social media efforts and have started getting conversions with the PPC, you can then calculate, on average, how much you're having to spend on PPC before seeing the desired action (i.e. – a sales or newsletter sign-up) and from there you'll be able to work out a rough estimate of how much it will cost you per conversion using PPC investments alone.