Search "how to do digital marketing" and what you mostly get is a list of channels. SEO, social media, email, ads, content. The list is accurate, but on its own it doesn't help much. Everyone knows the channels exist; what nobody knows is which one your customers come from and where they get lost after they arrive.
In this post I'll explain digital marketing through the customer's path. We'll look at which channel to start with, what "performance marketing" actually is, and where your ad budget usually leaks. Google and Instagram ads each have their own guides with the details, and I link to them as they come up.
The most important word in that definition, in my view, is "measurement." Back when you ran newspaper ads, you had no way of knowing how many people saw the ad and called. Online, you can largely know that. You can, but most businesses don't, because campaigns get launched before measurement is set up.
There's another common mix-up: thinking digital marketing means "being everywhere." For a small business, the right plan usually starts with two channels, three at most. Every new channel takes its own effort, its own content and its own budget; four half-managed channels almost always cost more than two well-managed ones.
Start by writing down how customers reach you, and let channel selection come after that. The path roughly passes through four stops.
Ask one question at each stop: what does the customer see here, and where do they give up? Most businesses spend money on the first stop, discovery. But the problem I see most often is at the third stop. The form sits in an email inbox, the WhatsApp message gets answered two days later, the phone isn't picked up after business hours.
That's why the first item in your plan should be the weakest stop. Raising your ad budget is like filling a leaky bucket faster. If the bucket leaks, plug the hole first. If you work with a digital marketing agency, that should be the job of the first few weeks too: auditing these four stops before launching any new campaign.
The answer largely depends on one thing: is your customer already searching for you?
| The customer is already searching | The customer isn't searching yet | |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | Types into Google when the need arises ("boiler repair," "dietitian") | Wants the product on seeing it, doesn't search (design, fashion, a new product) |
| First channel | Google search ads, SEO, Google Business Profile | Instagram and Facebook ads, content |
| First results | Fast with ads, slow with SEO | Needs testing, depends heavily on the creative |
| Common mistake | Paying for ads and neglecting the website | Mistaking likes for sales |
Both can apply at once. A café wants to show up in "coffee shop near me" searches and also show off its new menu on Instagram. But knowing which one weighs more at the start determines where the budget goes.
If you're on the search side, you'll find how to set up Google Ads step by step in the Google Ads guide; if you'd rather hand this off, take a look at the Google Ads agency page. If you have a visual product, the Instagram ads guide is the better starting point, and if you want to hand it off, there's the Instagram ad agency page.
Right now you might be thinking, "My competitors are everywhere, so I should be everywhere too." Your competitor may be everywhere, but you don't know which channel is bringing them sales. Maybe they don't either.
Performance marketing is marketing where the budget is managed by a measurable result (leads, sales, sign-ups) rather than by visibility. Every campaign is tied to a goal, and spending that doesn't deliver that goal gets cut. It sounds obvious, but it can't be done without measurement, and in most accounts measurement is incomplete.
The simplest piece of measurement is link tagging. If you add UTM parameters to the link in your Instagram bio, your email newsletter or a partner's website, Google Analytics can tell where that visit came from. Google's help page asks you to use at least utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign on every link (in Turkish); a missing parameter shows up as "(not set)" in reports. It's ten minutes of work, but it answers half of the "where did this sale come from?" question.
Visibility report
Performance report
I do have one reservation here. Performance marketing has become so fashionable in recent years that anything you can't measure has started to be treated as unnecessary. But people often see a brand several times before buying, and those first encounters barely show up in reports. I can't say I know a tool that splits, down to the last cent, the share of each channel a customer touched before buying. Comparing with a consistent yardstick and writing your assumptions down openly is, I think, the most honest thing you can do.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the work of improving a website or landing page so that a larger share of visitors fill out a form, call or buy. It's how you get more results without more traffic. The scene below shows the funnel of a business that keeps adding budget to the top layer.
A dental clinic's monthly funnel
Budget is raised at the top layer every month; the losses are in the lower layers.
The most useful habit in CRO is making changes one at a time. If you change the headline, the pricing info, the form length and the position of the WhatsApp button in the same week, you won't know which one did it, even if results improve. Slow, but instructive.
If you don't know where to start, open your most visited page on your phone and look at it like a stranger. On the first screen, can you see what you sell, who you sell to and how to get in touch? Most pages trip on one of those three questions.
It varies a lot by channel. Ads bring traffic the day they go live; SEO takes months. But whichever channel you choose, answering "which channel actually sells" takes a few weeks of correctly measured data.
An illustrative flow for the first six months
Most of the first month goes into "invisible" work, and that makes people impatient, I know. But a budget decision made on badly measured data is more expensive than making no decision at all. I can't give a firm date to someone asking when they'll see definite results. It depends on the product, the price, the season and the competition.
The list below is a rough version of an audit. As you check items off, it'll become clear which stop you need to start from.
Digital marketing self-audit
0/8Check the items one by one; at the end you'll see which stop to start from.
The item most often left unchecked on this list is the fourth one. If some leads sit in email and some on someone's phone, you can't build a bridge between marketing and sales. Even a simple spreadsheet will do; what matters is writing next to every lead where it came from.
If you have a clear-cut business on a single channel, you may not need an umbrella service. Working with a specialist in that channel, or learning it yourself, is enough. If you're spending money on multiple channels, the reports contradict each other and nobody can tell you which channel is selling, a digital marketing agency that brings everything into a single plan will save you time.
When choosing an agency, the question to ask is: what would this agency do in my situation, and what wouldn't it do? Be cautious with anyone who guarantees revenue or ROAS. Results also depend on your product, your price and your sales team, and none of those are in the agency's hands. A good digital marketing agency will suggest fixing measurement first and growing the budget second. Question anyone who suggests the reverse.
It ties ad channels, landing pages, measurement and lead follow-up into a single plan. The difference from a single-channel agency is that it also checks whether the click turned into a sale.
There's no fixed number. It's healthier to work backward: decide the most a customer can cost you, then set aside a starting budget large enough to collect the data you need to make decisions on the channel you've chosen. A very small budget won't produce meaningful data on any channel.
Not exactly. Digital marketing is the general term covering all online channels; performance marketing sits within it, as the approach where the budget is managed by measurable results. Work done for brand awareness is also digital marketing, but it doesn't always count as performance marketing.
First, find where your customers look for you and set up that one channel properly. Add measurement and a simple list that tracks incoming leads. Move to a second channel only after the first one starts producing data.
Usually not. The headline, the offer, the form length, the speed and the position of the contact button can all be changed on your existing site. A rebuild only comes up if the site's underlying platform won't allow those changes.
Last updated: September 27, 2026. As channel rules change, I update this guide along with the guides I link to.
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