What is digital marketing?

You may know the basics of digital marketing or have even set up a social media campaign. But there are many elements to digital marketing and all of them move at a rapid pace, which makes it hard to know everything you need to carve out a digital marketing career.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through digital marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most of all, artful and strategic storytelling.

Gary Vaynerchuk

Why is digital marketing so important?

Digital marketing helps you reach a larger audience than you could through traditional methods, and target the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service. Additionally, it's often more cost-effective than traditional advertising, and enables you to measure success on a daily basis and pivot as you see fit.

Here's a few major benefits of digital marketing:

  • Digital marketing is measurable.
  • It's more cost-effective than other traditional marketing methods.
  • Digital marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands.
  • Digital marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads.
  • You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing.
  • It’s easier to adapt and change a digital marketing strategy.

Types of digital marketing

The place to start when talking about digital marketing is the variety of digital channels available. There are several primary digital marketing channels you can use to drive traffic, engage prospects and convert customers.

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC)
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Affiliate Marketing

Be aware, while these are the most common digital marketing channels, the evolving digital landscape means that there could be more than these. Let’s dive in and find out more about each one.

1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in digital marketing. After all, it determines how and where your content, product or service gets found online.

SEO consists of many elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding SEO’s importance. The elements to include in your marketing are:

  • Keywords - Non-branded and branded keywords with high search rates and low competition
  • Local SEO - Locally focused content (directories) and keywords
  • Off-page SEO - External and third-party backlinks
  • Content - Keywords and internal links peppered through content
  • Search engine marketing - Paid marketing campaigns e.g. Google Ads, PPC, etc.

It’s crucial to include these SEO elements in your digital marketing strategy to increase visibility for your site and drive traffic.

2) Pay Per Click (PPC)

You may have heard the term PPC many times, but do you know what it means? It stands for Pay-Per-Click and is a targeted way of advertising online in which you pay for each click from an ad to your website or landing page.

As your PPC campaign directs prospects to your website or landing page, ensure those pages are optimized in advance. You also need to select a bidding strategy, research keywords, and set a budget.

3) Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing is an essential part of any modern marketer’s toolkit. It offers exciting and effective ways to connect with customers through various forms of content.

While there were once a limited number of social channels, the networks on offer are growing and attract new users every day. This offers great opportunities for marketers: just think about the viral possibilities on TikTok or the live stream features on WeChat.

It’s a bit of a playground when it comes to social media marketing, so do your research and choose your channels wisely. It’s not about being on every channel, but about being on the right ones for your brand and audience.

4)Content Marketing

The term content marketing makes this part of digital marketing self-explanatory, but it’s an area that can be difficult to get right. It’s easy to create tons of content to distribute online, but the key is creating great digital content that performs.

Content marketing encompasses a wide range of formats such as video, blogs, emails, webinars, social media posts, and eBooks which can be used at all stages of the sales funnel. The benefits of content marketing done well are increased web traffic, a spike in subscribers, boosted sales, and loyal customers.

5) Email Marketing

Email marketing is a structured, systematic process to deliver marketing messages to targeted subscribers. Email is the oldest form of online communication and is still very effective at bringing customers through the sales funnel and driving conversions.

With the death of third-party cookies on Google, email will become more important. As a first-party data channel (i.e., information collected straight from customers), companies will become more reliant on email to communicate and convert.

As a way to connect with your prospects and customers it’s an invaluable channel, so take some time to clean up your databases, tweak your email marketing strategy, and drive subscribers.

6) Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has been around for decades, but many marketers are still unsure how to take advantage of it. What is affiliate marketing? Basically, it’s when a company endorses another company’s products and gets paid for a click, lead or sale (depending on the deal arranged).

It works as a cycle by tracking the affiliate link, so it can be tied back to a sale that’s then credited to the affiliate. Amazon uses this tactic regularly to drive customers to its products through third-party sites, to great effect.



This strategy is commonly used by influencers, bloggers, large publishers or companies that include ads in their emails. It can be very useful for brands that want to plug into the rising number of customers looking for third-party or influencer recommendations before purchasing.

Conclusion

Any opportunity where you can connect to your audience is an opportunity to convert a lead or acquire a customer. Digital marketing creates so many more of those opportunities by allowing you to reach prospective buyers through a wide variety of channels. Whether it’s social media platforms, websites, text messages, or any online medium, it’s an invaluable way to promote your business, service, or product.

Within this article we put a definition on the term digital marketing, explained its key benefits, and discovered the main digital marketing channels that are used by businesses around the globe. I hope this article has been beneficial to you!