Twelve guides, no jargon left unexplained

The Complete Guide to Digital Marketing

What the words actually mean, how to build a plan, what to spend plus how to tell whether any of it worked. Written for business owners who are tired of being sold something they have not had explained.

12 guidesDisciplinesChannelsPlanningBudgetsROI
12 guides
Four sections
Everything from £350 a month

Digital marketing has more vocabulary than almost any trade, plus most of it exists to make simple things sound difficult. Performance marketing, growth marketing, inbound, outbound, programmatic, attribution. Some of those are genuinely distinct things worth understanding. Several are the same activity renamed by whoever wanted to sell it to you. These guides tell you which is which, then get on to the parts that actually decide whether your money works: who you are talking to, what you spend plus how you measure it.

Start Here

What Is Digital Marketing?

The entry point for everything else here. What digital marketing actually covers, where it sits inside marketing as a whole plus how it differs from the traditional kind. Written for somebody who has been quoted for services they were never given a plain explanation of. If you only read one page on this site before speaking to any agency, read this one.

Read the explainer
The order these should be done in

Building A Plan

Most small businesses buy a channel before they have decided who they are talking to. That is the wrong way round, plus it is why so much marketing spend produces nothing anybody can point at.

Audience first, then a clear look at what you already have, then a plan, then a budget. These four are in that order deliberately.

Everything in these guides, from £350 a month

Read The Guides. Let Us Do The Work.

Once you know what the words mean plus what should happen in what order, the question is only whether you want to run it yourself. We handle the whole lot on one monthly fee: your search visibility, your listing, your website, your content plus your social accounts, with a written update every three weeks.

Everything included in your plan:

Local and national SEO Google Maps and reviews Content and strategy Website management Social media AI optimisation
£350per month

One clear retainer. No setup fee.

Using these guides

Frequently Asked

Where should I start?
With what digital marketing is, then the disciplines page. Between them those two cover the whole vocabulary, which matters because most of the confusion in this industry is linguistic rather than technical. After that go to Building A Plan and work through the four in the order they are listed.
Are all these disciplines genuinely different things?
No, plus that is worth knowing before somebody quotes you for several of them. Some are genuinely distinct: affiliate marketing works nothing like brand marketing. Others describe the same activity from a different angle. Some are simply a newer name for something that already had one. The disciplines guide says plainly which is which, including the ones we think are largely repackaging.
I have a small budget. Which of this actually applies?
Most of it, though not all at once. Start with defining your audience and the audit, since both cost time rather than money and both frequently reveal spend that is producing nothing. Then the budget guide, because when the total is modest, choosing the right channel matters far more than the amount.
How do I know whether my marketing is working?
That is what the return on investment guide is for. It covers attribution, cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value plus testing, which are the four things you need to answer the question properly. Be prepared for the answer to be that some of it is not working, since that is usually the finding and it is the useful one.
Do I need an agency for any of this?
Not necessarily. A capable person inside a business can run most of what these guides describe, plus the real constraint is usually time rather than knowledge. What an agency buys you is somebody doing it consistently every month rather than whenever the diary allows. If you would rather read the guides and do it yourself, that is a reasonable choice plus we would rather you made it knowingly.
Why are the SEO and content guides not on this page?
Because they have their own sections of the site and duplicating them here would mean two pages of ours competing for the same searches, which helps nobody. This cluster explains what digital marketing is plus how the pieces fit together. Where a subject is covered properly elsewhere on the site, these guides link across to it rather than saying the same thing again in slightly different words.