On 4 March 2021, the Instagram account for beauty brand Glossier published a new post: images of a pastel-pink washbag, displayed first in the perfectly manicured hands of a faceless model and then on a bathroom shelf next to some of its contents. The carefully filtered series of images was a product launch for the bag. Within minutes, comments flooded beneath the post. “Another thing for the collection,” said one fan; “I see the money flying out of my wallet already,” said another.

To the uninitiated, Glossier is a make-up and skincare company, founded in 2014 by former beauty blogger Emily Weiss, and is now one of the most successful examples of the wave of direct-to-consumer, digitally native start-ups of the last decade.

Via her blog, Into the Gloss (launched in 2010), Weiss built up an engaged audience and, through shrewd use of social media, turned that audience into a devout customer base before Glossier had even launched its first product.

That customer base has done nothing but grow over the last seven years. At its last fundraising round in March 2019, the company was valued at $1.2bn. Its ability to generate hype around its products – a sweatshirt emblazoned with the company’s logo had a 10,000-strong waiting list at one point – is almost unparalleled.

“Glossier has done some really good work in the way it presents its brand, and the community it’s built, the content it creates and the user-generated content it uses on its website and social media pages,” says Mudra Mukesh, a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Westminster. “It is very much engaged with its consumers, and has really harnessed the millennial market in that sense.”

Glossier is a prime example of the power of good digital marketing. In a few short years, Weiss and her team have built a global business in a competitive market dominated by conglomerates, and they’ve done so on platforms that didn’t exist 20 years ago.

The marketing landscape has been transformed since the turn of the century. In the early 1990s, businesses that wanted to get the word out about their brand might advertise on billboards, newspapers and magazines, or even TV. Those options still exist, but they’re now fighting for advertisers’ money alongside search engines and a plethora of social media sites.

Global spend on digital advertising in 2019 was $325bn – of which more than 60% went to just two companies, Google and Facebook, which made $134bn and $69bn respectively in ad revenue. By comparison, global spend on TV advertising was $176bn.

Businesses also have countless options to choose from when it comes to publishing content, ranging from blogs and email marketing to profiles on the growing number of social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and, latterly, TikTok and Clubhouse.

“I read recently that people who are on social media have on average eight profiles,” says Mukesh. “New platforms are proliferating, so brands need to be aware of what’s good for their industry.”

Marketing pounds are no longer just spent on advertising space and on creative talent paid to come up with ideas. Budget could now go on writers to populate your blog with articles that your customers might find interesting and help you climb up the Google rankings; or on social media personalities with thousands of followers paid to write about your product. Or it might go on elaborate customer relationship management (CRM) technology that provides you with endless insights.

The digital landscape isn’t just another place to advertise – it also allows companies to develop a stronger resonance with their customers, to have conversations with them and be useful to them. Glossier’s success came from speaking to its audience.

When it comes to social media, the accepted wisdom now is that vanity metrics – likes and follower numbers – are a poor representation of the strength of a brand’s presence on the platform. Instead, the marketers look to the amount of engagement a post has had – the number of times it has been shared or the number of people who clicked on attached links.

Daniel Rowles, digital marketing expert and CEO of Target Internet, says that the brands using social media successfully are speaking to their audiences in a “human and personable way. People can see through corporate branding a lot more, so we need to think: what do we really stand for? If you don’t understand your brand purpose or your strategic positioning, it’s very hard to know what to talk to your audience about.”

Mukesh says, “An interesting example on Twitter is fast-food brands such as Burger King, McDonald’s and KFC. Their strategy is to kind of mock each other and it’s more tongue in cheek – there’s banter between the various brands and that showcases their brand personality. I’m not sure if it was something they consciously planned for or if it developed organically over the last few years, but it gets a lot of attention. It makes people think ‘these brands are just like us’.”

Even B2B brands can benefit from behaving in a less formal way on social media, with more enterprise-focused businesses acting like consumer brands. As Mukesh points out, people who make purchasing decisions at work are still consumers using social media, too: “I might be browsing Instagram on a break, but I might come across content that will help me in my work. I could be a potential lead for a business as a B2B customer.”

For many businesses on social media, treading the fine line between relatable and human, while maintaining the brand’s tone and professionalism, is tricky. “There are different schools of thought on this but I think, generally speaking, the advice is to take a more devolved approach,” says Philip Alford, a lecturer in digital marketing at the University of Southampton, adding that empowering colleagues to be more vocal on social media can increase potential reach.

Rowles and Mukesh also both recommend having a strategy in place in case things go wrong online. “You can do social media in a risk-mitigated way, but it requires process. You need a policy that says what you do and don’t do,” says Rowles.

“Then you need social media monitoring in place to keep an eye on what’s being said about you. Most disasters happen because things escalate, and no one does anything.”

He recommends having the team brainstorm all the possible ways a campaign could go wrong, assessing the likelihood and then preparing the necessary troubleshooting responses.

“Everyone needs to be trained,” he adds. “All staff in your organisation need to know what their rights and responsibilities are with this stuff. [This includes] people working on reception or in the senior leadership team: what should they and shouldn’t they be saying?”

The advantage of digital marketing over more traditional activities is the volume of data you can collect on your customers, ranging from which page of your website they stayed on the longest to what time of day they’re most likely to look at your Facebook posts.

Alford says that while data is a game changer, businesses shouldn’t underestimate the resources needed to configure that data and turn it into useful insights. “A lot of small businesses might focus on how many users come to the site, what pages they’re landing on or how many are leaving the site immediately. But they are less able to address the key question of tracking conversions – which could be a sale, or it could be capturing information if your website is about lead generation.”

Rowles says marketers should push to demonstrate good returns on marketing activities, while finance teams must bear in mind that some things are not tangibly measurable. “It’s a chicken-and-egg situation and it requires a change of mindset.” He recommends taking a test-and-learn approach to digital marketing but says this needs to be part of the organisation's culture. “Just because people are talking about you, it doesn’t mean they’re going to buy your stuff,” he adds.

The starting point for putting together a digital marketing strategy should be simple, asking: “What’s the business objective for doing this?” Rowles says, “We’re bombarded with emails and social media posts. If you want to stand apart from that, you need to give me something that’s important to me at the right time and on the right channel.”

He explains that it can be broken into three elements. First is identifying your audience, what they care about and what they want. Second, understanding a customer’s user journey, from how they discover your brand to becoming a paying client. Finally, he says, you need a technology system to link it all up.

One common mistake is digital marketing for the sake of it, Rowles says. “Social media is probably the worst area for this; it’s done for the sake of needing to do it [without understanding] what people really want. Is it about: ‘we need to be seen to be doing the same as our competitors’? That isn’t much of a good reason for doing something.”

Oren Greenberg, a digital marketing consultant who works with companies on high-growth strategies, cautions against looking towards the marketing strategies of other companies for inspiration. Differences in everything from the marketing team’s size and budget to the proposition of the product or service mean that taking your cue from what other businesses are doing – even those in your sector – can be dangerous.

“There are things you can learn from really great companies [if] you’re looking at a very specific context. For example, ‘give me three examples of growth teams and how they’re structured for a team of 10 across three similar businesses’. That helps you formulate how to build a growth team. It’s a very specific point. Anything broader than that is going to derail your efforts rather than support you, in my opinion.”

Rowles argues there is a skills gap in digital marketing, driven by the rapid pace of change in the industry. Consumers’ expectations are raised by the interactions they have with brands that have well-funded tech, such as Uber and Deliveroo, which most businesses just can’t compete with, he says. “User expectations are [getting higher], but knowledge and technology are holding people back.”

That lack of knowledge, he says, often means putting the marketing operations in the hands of third-party agencies. “And the agencies could be doing a good job [or] they might not be, but the firms themselves haven’t got the people to ask the right questions. The agencies are steering them and they’re not able to challenge them.” He recommends that leaders and even middle managers improve their knowledge in this area, to be able to push back and challenge decisions that marketing agencies make on their behalf.

Similarly, Greenberg likens marketing to the Wild West, saying around half of marketers don’t have a qualification. There is no certifying body for the industry, making it tricky for hiring managers to assess the competency of potential recruits.

This lack of clarity around digital marketers’ skills reflects just how far – and how fast – this sector has come. “It used to be that marketing had to justify its place on the board,” says Rowles. “Now, the idea that marketing didn’t have a place on the board is crazy. It’s the voice of the customer.”

From email newsletters to sponsored posts to SEO, digital marketing covers a vast range of activities. Here’s a flash guide to the terms.

Owned media

This is everything owned and published online by your business. That will include your company website, any newsletters you send and social media, such as a Facebook page, a Twitter profile and even a YouTube channel.

Earned media

This is online content that is beyond your control and created by third parties, such as your customers or even the press. It could include people’s social media posts that mention your brand.

Paid-for media

As its name suggests, this is any media you pay for: digital advertising, sponsored posts on social media, affiliate links and so on. 

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

According to a 2020 study, the first organic (not paid for) result of a Google search receives on average 28.5% of the clicks, compared to the 2.5% received by the one in tenth place. The closer your company gets to the top of the list of search results, the more likely people are to end up on your site. SEO is the dark art that increases your chances.

Keyword

Important in SEO, keywords are the terms your target audience might use when looking something up online. Using them in your copy tells the search engine what your website is about, helping you to rank higher in the results for those terms.

Cost per click (CPC)

In digital advertising, this refers to the amount that a company pays per person clicking on their online advert, while…

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

…is the amount that a company spends on marketing to acquire a new customer.

Impressions

This is the number of times that an advert is seen by potential customers.

Click-through rate (CTR)

This is the percentage of people who have clicked on an advert, image or link in your marketing, taking them to your website. This could be an ad on Instagram, or it might be via your email newsletter.

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Further reading on social media marketing is available through the articles below.