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.

So what is digital marketing? Digital marketing encompasses all of your marketing activities that take place online. Its influence to engage customers grows every year as more people use the internet to browse, connect and buy.

According to Digital 2022: Global Overview Report, the number of people using the internet is 4.95 billion. That’s nearly 63 percent of the world’s population! The increase in mobile use also continues, as 5.31 billion people now use their phones to access the internet.

That’s a lot of potential customers to reach online and it’s the job of digital marketers to devise and execute digital campaigns that do just that.

To make it easy for you, we’ve divided this blog into sections so you can easily find what you need, and if you aren’t sure of a term have a look at our comprehensive glossary of digital marketing terms.

• What are the digital marketing channels?

• What are the benefits of digital marketing?

• What is a digital marketing strategy?

• What are good examples of digital marketing?

• How do you do digital marketing?

• How do you get into digital marketing?

What are the digital marketing channels?

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

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2. Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC)

3. Social Media Marketing

4. Content Marketing

5. Email Marketing

6. Mobile Marketing

7. Affiliate Marketing

Be aware, that while these are the most common digital marketing channels, the evolving digital landscape means that there could be more than these. Use our channel performance tracker if you’re looking for a simple way to monitor those you use in one place. So, let’s dive in and find out more about each channel.

SEO marketing or website marketing

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.

But what is SEO in digital marketing? 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.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is all about optimizing your paid search advertising – unlike SEO which focuses on organic traffic.

SEM and SEO are a match made in heaven as they complement each other by ensuring your brand has a presence on search engines and spreading your budget across organic and paid channels.

While the marketing techniques for SEO and SEM are different, they both need to work together. Remember that both rely on keywords to drive traffic and will become more important as a good UX is ranked positively by Google, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has more of a role in content and search activities.

PPC Advertising

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.

This comprehensive PPC guide explains everything you need to know if you’re just getting started. You can also use our handy PPC for eCommerce tracker to keep an eye on the budget and targets for your paid campaigns.

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.

Influencer Marketing or Sponsored Content

Influencer marketing came into the spotlight a few years ago and it’s now an important part of the digital marketing landscape. In a nutshell, it’s when a brand collaborates with an influencer, celebrity or industry leader on social media to endorse or sponsor a product or service.

The statistics speak for themselves as to how powerful it can be, with nearly half of consumers depending on influencers for recommendations. The real benefit of an influencer is when the collaboration makes sense to an audience.

Take Travis Scott and McDonald’s. Through a collaboration known as #cactusjack, the rapper created a limited edition menu of choice for the fast-food giant alongside selling merchandise such as hoodies and t-shirts.

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.

Social Media Marketing

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. It’s also about being on-trends and piggybacking on topical issues, check out the 2022 social media calendar to see if you can find any event of interest.

Have a look at our social media marketing resources if you’re trying to figure out where to start or need more info on a specific platform.

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.

Video Marketing

Video is one of the most popular content formats around and the growth of TikTok and Instagram’s recent focus on video content has cemented its role in audience engagement and lead generation.

Video is important because it offers customers a way to be educated and informed in an engaging way. It’s a core part of social media marketing but can also help to increase engagement on your website and landing pages or be used to offer live webinars to capture email data.

SMS Marketing

SMS (or short message service) marketing is an effective way to send promotional campaigns or transactional messages to customers that have given prior consent.

Juniper Research found that in 2020, global mobile business messaging traffic hit 2.7 trillion, up 10% from the year before, driven by an increase in online retail. This channel can be used by marketers to communicate with customers, provide support, promote products, and send transactional messages.

Instant Messaging Marketing

Instant messaging marketing is when two people take part in a conversation via messaging apps. It can be text-based or used to share images and videos between parties.

This channel has come into its own over the past two years and has been used by people across the globe to communicate with friends, family and brands. When Facebook acquired the platform WhatsApp, it became obvious that this was a channel with great marketing potential.

It offers marketers the opportunity to connect directly with customers without the noise of social media or search engines. Brands such as KLM and Santander are already using it effectively to enable queries or updates. This is a channel to look into if you’re not already using it.

Omnichannel Marketing

Digital marketing is no longer just about digital. It’s about integrated marketing across channels working with traditional marketing, not in competition with it.

As the customer journey continues to evolve and more touchpoints are introduced, businesses must use an omnichannel approach in their marketing. The goal is to create an integrated experience so if a customer uses an event coupon or clicks on a social media post, they will have a relevant and easy online journey through your omnichannel ecommerce campaign.

Take the Starbucks Rewards app as an example. The app enables customers to add money that will allow purchases but also the option to check and reload the card via a mobile, website, in-store, or in-app. If you make any changes to the account or add money, this will be updated in real-time across all channels. It’s a great way to build customer loyalty and provide a seamless experience.

What are the benefits of digital marketing?

As we’ve already said, the wonderful thing about digital marketing is that it allows you to engage customers across multiple touchpoints.

This means you and your brand can make connections with prospects and customers in a way that builds meaningful and hopefully long-lasting relationships. Let’s look at the key benefits of digital marketing in detail.

01 Reach new audiences

You already know about the billions of people you can engage with and influence online. But did you realize there are no boundaries when it comes to digital?

Unlike traditional marketing, the possibilities to engage are limitless, as your social media post or blog article can be read by anyone across the globe at any time. Time differences don’t matter online and with scheduling and automation, you can reach people on the right days and at the right times.

You can also create interesting content to reach new audiences. So if you’re struggling to engage a particular audience, create a targeted campaign that just reaches that group across relevant digital channels.

02 Enable Hyper-Targeting – location, demographics & psychographics

Digital marketing gives you the ability to target specific audiences through segmentation. What this means is that you can target individuals based on their location, demographic (e.g. gender, age, job role) or psychographics (goals, desires, interests) in your online marketing campaigns.

But before you target anyone, you need to know who you want to connect with. The way to do that is to define a buyer persona. Put simply, a buyer persona is your ideal customer. That doesn’t mean it’s just one individual, you can have a few personas to reflect your diverse audience.

Understanding your audience means that you can tailor content and reach out on the channels that are relevant to that persona. If you want some help developing personas, just download our buyer persona template.

03 Become cost-efficient

Forget about putting an ad in a magazine or paper and wondering who reads it, or handing out flyers in a busy shopping mall wondering if anyone uses the discount. A huge benefit to digital marketing campaigns is that they are trackable and cost-efficient.

Across your campaigns, whether it’s paid search or display advertising or social media, you can put a cap on spending to keep track of costs. This means you can set a daily, weekly or even monthly budget so you stick to what was agreed on and never overspend.

The best way to do this is to plan your budgets from the outset and work out your limit for a certain period.

04 Get measurable results

Along with being cost-efficient, digital marketing is measurable. You can easily choose Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and track them across digital channels.

The secret to KPIs is to focus on the metrics that matter. Avoid vanity metrics such as likes or comments on social media channels. Instead, you need to set clear, action-orientated KPIs that show measurable results like conversion rates, sales, and revenue things that matter to the bottom line.

Download our targets and KPIs toolkit if you need help tracking your analytics.

05 Personalize & customize campaigns

It’s no surprise that campaigns that are relevant and personalized perform better. HubSpot’s State of Marketing 2021 report found that message personalization is the top tactic used by email marketers and improves engagement rates by 20 percent.

This is the same across digital channels. Just think of your Twitter feed for example: would you click on an ad that had no relation to your interests? Or when you browse a website, are you coming across relatable content in your journey?

To cut through the online noise, marketers need to create content that is relevant and timely. Inject personalization into your marketing strategy to ensure you reach out to your personas but also engage them with content they have an interest in.

06 Easy to adapt or quickly change strategy

Digital is fast. That means that you can adapt and change content or campaigns quickly. This can be a huge benefit when you realize that one of your social media campaigns isn’t performing. You can narrow the audience, change the location or tweak the messaging to see if that makes a difference.

There’s also the benefit of being able to test campaigns or copy. A/B testing is invaluable to many marketing teams as they can try out two campaigns at a time to see which one resonates.

This avoids spending time and money on a campaign that will never work as from the outset you’ve learned the best route to go. If you’re new to A/B testing, just watch our expert video or download our toolkit to see what’s involved.

07 Engage audiences at different stages of the funnel

If you’ve been reading about marketing, you’ll have heard of the marketing and sales funnel. There are a few parts to the funnel that offer a way for marketers to create tailored content that brings a prospect on a journey with the goal of conversion.

The funnel has four stages as outlined in the image below:

• Awareness

• Interest

• Decision

• Purchase

The funnel is important as each stage requires nurturing in a way that matches the customer’s level of intent. For example, a person at the awareness stage is just browsing, so they may want more information about your product or sector. While a person at the decision-making stage needs credibility and reassurance in the form of something like customer testimonials or reviews.

08 Level out the playing field for big and small brands

Global brands benefit from digital marketing, but the same goes for small brands too. The great thing about digital is that it levels the playing field and offers the same opportunities to organizations of all sizes.

You have access to social media networks that can deliver personalized messaging and can use customer relationship management platforms to streamline your email marketing. Your organization can also cap budgets for display ads and search marketing to make sure you stick to what you can afford.

Sure, a big brand may have a greater budget and a larger marketing team. But if you understand your personas, have identified the key digital channels to use, and know what content works, your small business is on the way to online success.

You can also consider Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to engage customers on issues that matter to society such as the environment or racism. Look at 16 brands doing CSR successfully to get inspiration.