What is Digital Marketing: Your Ultimate Guide

16 min readSep 5, 2024

Advanced showcasing normally alludes to web based promoting efforts that show up on a PC, telephone, tablet, or other gadget. It can take many structures, including on the web video, show promotions, web search tool advertising, paid social advertisements and virtual entertainment posts.

Advanced showcasing is frequently contrasted with “conventional promoting” like magazine advertisements, bulletins, and post office based mail. Strangely, TV is normally generalized with the likes of customary showcasing.

Did you know nine-in-ten U.S. grown-ups go web-based consistently? Not just that, 41% are on the web “continually.” As an advertiser, it’s vital to exploit the computerized world with an internet promoting presence, by building a brand, giving an extraordinary client experience that likewise brings more possible clients and the sky is the limit from there, with a computerized system.

A computerized showcasing procedure permits you to use different advanced channels, for example, virtual entertainment, pay-per-click, website improvement, and email promoting to associate with existing clients and people keen on your items or administrations. Thus, you can fabricate a brand, give an extraordinary client experience, get possible clients, and that’s just the beginning.

What is digital marketing?

Computerized showcasing, likewise called web based advertising, is the advancement of brands to interface with potential clients utilizing the web and different types of computerized correspondence. This incorporates not just email, virtual entertainment, and online publicizing, yet in addition message and media messages as a showcasing channel.

Basically, in the event that a promoting effort includes computerized correspondence, it’s computerized showcasing.

Inbound marketing versus digital marketing

Computerized advertising and inbound showcasing are handily befuddled, and for good explanation. Computerized promoting involves a large number of similar devices as inbound showcasing — email and online substance, to give some examples. Both exist to catch the consideration of possibilities through the purchaser’s excursion and transform them into clients. However, the two methodologies take various perspectives on the connection between the device and the objective.

Computerized advertising thinks about how individual apparatuses or advanced channels can change over possibilities. All a brand’s computerized promoting system might utilize numerous stages or spotlight its endeavors on one stage. For instance, an organization may basically make content for virtual entertainment stages and email showcasing efforts while disregarding other computerized promoting roads.

Then again, inbound promoting is an all encompassing idea. It considers the objective first, then takes a gander at the accessible instruments to figure out which will successfully arrive at target clients, and afterward at which phase of the deals channel that ought to occur. For instance, say you need to increment site traffic to create more possibilities and leads. You can zero in on site improvement while fostering your substance advertising procedure, bringing about more enhanced content, including web journals, points of arrival, and the sky is the limit from there.

The main thing to recollect about computerized promoting and inbound showcasing is that as an advertising proficient, you don’t need to pick between the two. They work best together, as a matter of fact. Inbound showcasing gives construction and motivation to powerful computerized promoting to advanced promoting endeavors, ensuring that each advanced promoting channel pursues an objective.

Why is digital marketing important?

Any sort of advertising can assist your business with flourishing. Nonetheless, computerized advertising has become progressively significant due to how available advanced channels are. Truth be told, there were 5.45 billion web clients all around the world as of July 2024.

From online entertainment to instant messages, there are numerous ways of involving advanced advertising strategies to speak with your interest group. Moreover, computerized showcasing has insignificant forthright expenses, making it a practical promoting method for independent companies.

B2B versus B2C digital marketing

Advanced showcasing techniques work for B2B (business to business) as well as B2C (business to purchaser) organizations, yet best practices contrast fundamentally between the two. Here is a more critical glance at how computerized showcasing is utilized in B2B and B2C promoting procedures:

B2B clients will generally have longer dynamic cycles, and accordingly longer deals pipes. Relationship-building methodologies turn out better for these clients, though B2C clients will more often than not answer better to transient offers and messages.
B2B exchanges are typically founded on rationale and proof, which is what gifted B2B advanced advertisers present. B2C content is bound to be inwardly based, zeroing in on helping the client have a positive outlook on a buy.
B2B choices will generally require more than 1 individual’s feedback. The promoting materials that best drive these choices will quite often be shareable and downloadable. B2C clients, then again, favor one-on-one associations with a brand.
Obviously, there are exemptions for each standard. A B2C organization with a high-ticket item, like a vehicle or PC, could offer more instructive and serious substance. Therefore, your advanced promoting methodology in every case should be designed for your own client base, whether you’re B2B or B2C.

Investigate your ongoing crowd to make all around informed and designated internet advertising efforts. Doing so guarantees your advertising endeavors are successful and you can catch the consideration of likely clients.

Types of digital marketing

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing in itself. It is often called “an art and a science.”

The “science” part of SEO is what’s most important. SEO is a science because it requires you to research and weigh different contributing factors to achieve the highest possible ranking on a search engine results page (SERP).

Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines include:

Quality and uniqueness of content
Optimization of key elements for the targeted keyword (URL, title tag, H1, sub headlines)
Level of user engagement (time on page, bounce rate)
Number and quality of backlinks
Internal linking

In addition to the elements above, you need to prioritize technical SEO, which is all the back-end components of your site. This includes mobile-friendliness and loading times. Improving your technical SEO can help search engines better navigate and crawl your site.

The strategic use of these factors makes search engine optimization a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an “art” that often requires experienced SEO professionals.

Ultimately, the goal is to rank at or near the top of the first page of a search engine’s result page or in Google’s API Overviews. This ensures that those searching for a specific query related to your brand can easily find your products or services. While there are many search engines, digital marketers often focus on Google since it’s a global leader in the search engine market.

Google and other search engines change their algorithm almost constantly, so SEO is a never-ending progress. And your competitors most likely also invest in SEO. What you can do is closely monitor your page’s performance and make adjustments as needed.

Content marketing

As mentioned, the quality of your content is a key component of an optimized page. As a result, SEO is a major factor in content marketing, a strategy based on the distribution of relevant and valuable content to a target audience.

As in any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material, such as:

Blog posts
E-books
Newsletters
Video or audio transcripts
Whitepapers
Infographics

Content marketing matters, and there are plenty of stats to prove it:

84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful content experiences
62% of companies that have at least 5,000 employees produce content daily
92% of marketers believe that their company values content as an important asset

As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need to be able to rank highly in search engine results while also engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand. When the content is relevant, it can establish strong relationships throughout the pipeline.

To create effective content that’s highly relevant and engaging, it’s important to identify your audience. Who are you ultimately trying to reach with your content marketing efforts? Once you have a better grasp of your audience, you can determine the type of content you’ll create. You can use many formats of content in your content marketing, including videos, blog posts, printable worksheets, and more.

Regardless of which content you create, it’s a good idea to follow content marketing best practices. This means making content that’s grammatically correct, free of errors, easy to understand, relevant, and interesting. Your content should also funnel readers to the next stage in the pipeline, whether that’s a free consultation with a sales representative or a signup page.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. You can use social media marketing to highlight your brand, products, services, culture, and more. With billions of people spending their time engaging on social media platforms, focusing on social media marketing can be worthwhile.

The most popular digital platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, X, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Ultimately, which social media platforms you use for your business depends on your goals and audience. For example, if you want to find new leads for your FinTech startup, targeting your audience on LinkedIn is a good idea since industry professionals are active on the platform. On the other hand, running social media ads on Instagram may be better for your brand if you run a B2C focused on younger consumers.

Because social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way of getting attention. Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely useful in helping you to understand how well you’re reaching your audience. You get to decide which types of interactions mean the most to you, whether that means the number of shares, comments, or total clicks to your website.

Direct purchase may not even be a goal of your social media marketing strategy. Many brands use social media marketing to start dialogues with audiences rather than encourage them to spend money right away. This is especially common in brands that target older audiences or offer products and services not appropriate for impulse buys. It all depends on your company’s social media marketing goals.

To create an effective social media marketing strategy, it’s crucial to follow best practices. Here are a few of the most important social media marketing best practices:

Craft high-quality and engaging content
Reply to comments and questions in a professional manner
Create a social media posting schedule
Post at the right time
Hire social media managers to support your marketing efforts
Know your audience and which social media channels they’re most active on

To learn more about how Mailchimp can help with your social media strategy, check out the comparison of our free social media management tools versus others.

Pay-per-click marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing in which you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your digital ads. So, instead of paying a set amount to constantly run targeted ads on online marketing channels, you only pay for the ads individuals interact with. How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated.

One of the most common types of PPC is search engine advertising, and because Google is the most popular search engine, many businesses use Google Ads for this purpose. When a spot is available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engine fills the spot with what is essentially an instant auction. An algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on a number of factors, including:

Ad quality
Keyword relevance
Landing page quality
Bid amount

PPC ads are then placed at the top of search engine result pages based on the factors above whenever a person searches for a specific query.

Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers are meant to complete after clicking an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is a newsletter signup or a call made to your home office.

Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them via your chosen digital marketing channels to see how your campaign is doing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing tactic that lets someone make money by promoting another person’s business. You could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the same in either case.

It works using a revenue sharing model. If you’re the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you’re the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.

Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants.

Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the other party. You can use digital channels designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single-retailer program.

If you’re a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program appealing to potential promoters. You’ll need to provide those affiliates with the tools that they need to succeed. That includes incentives for great results as well as marketing tools and pre-made materials.

Native advertising

Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it’s less blatantly obvious as advertising.

Native advertising was created in reaction to the cynicism of today’s consumers toward ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.

A native ad gets around this bias by offering information or entertainment before it gets to anything promotional, downplaying the “ad” aspect.

It’s important to always label your native ads clearly. Use words like “promoted” or “sponsored.” If those indicators are concealed, readers might end up spending significant time engaging with the content before they realize that it’s advertising.

When your consumers know exactly what they’re getting, they’ll feel better about your content and your brand. Native ads are meant to be less obtrusive than traditional ads, but they’re not meant to be deceptive.

Influencer marketing

Like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing relies on working with an influencer–an individual with a large following, such as a celebrity, industry expert, or content creator–in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your products or services to their followers on several social media channels.

Influencer marketing works well for B2B and B2C companies who want to reach new audiences. However, it’s important to partner with reputable influencers since they’re essentially representing your brand. The wrong influencer can tarnish the trust consumers have with your business.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation uses software to power digital marketing campaigns, improving the efficiency and relevance of advertising. As a result, you can focus on creating the strategy behind your digital marketing efforts instead of cumbersome and time-consuming processes.

While marketing automation may seem like a luxury tool your business can do without, it can significantly improve the engagement between you and your audience.

According to statistics:

90% of US consumers find personalization either “very” or “somewhat” appealing
81% of consumers would like the brands they engage with to understand them better

Marketing automation lets companies keep up with the expectation of personalization. It allows brands to:

Collect and analyze consumer information
Design targeted marketing campaigns
Send and post digital marketing messages at the right times to the right audiences

Many marketing automation tools use prospect engagement (or lack thereof) with a particular message to determine when and how to reach out next. This level of real-time customization means that you can effectively create an individualized marketing strategy for each customer without any additional time investment.

Mailchimp’s marketing automation tools ensure you can interact with your audience via behavior-based automations, transactional emails, date-based automations, and more.

Email marketing

The concept of email marketing is simple — you send a promotional message and hope that your prospect clicks on it. However, the execution is much more complex. First of all, you have to make sure that your emails are wanted. This means having an email marketing provider that offers the following is crucial:

Individualizes the content, both in the body and in the subject line
An email signature that offers a clear unsubscribe option
Both, transactional and promotional emails

You want your prospects to see your campaign as a valued service, not just as a promotional tool.

Email marketing is a proven, effective technique all on its own, but it can be even better if you incorporate other digital marketing techniques such as marketing automation, which lets you segment and schedule your emails so that they meet your customer’s needs more effectively.

If you’re considering email marketing, here are a few tips that can help you craft great email marketing campaigns:

Segment your audience to send relevant campaigns to the right people
Ensure emails look good on mobile devices
Create a campaign schedule
Run A/B tests

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage with your target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be via SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more.

It’s crucial to ensure that all content is optimized for mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Center, Nine-in-ten Americans own a smartphone, so your marketing efforts can go a long way when you create content for computer and mobile screens.

The benefits of digital marketing

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers a number of other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing.

A broad geographic reach

When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business’s market reach and connect with a larger audience across different digital channels.

Cost efficiency

Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place.

With digital marketing, you can create just one content piece that draws visitors to your blog as long as it’s active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it’s easy to change that schedule or the content if you need to do so.

When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend.

Quantifiable results

To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?

There’s always the traditional option of asking each customer, “How did you find us?”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in all industries. Many companies don’t get to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don’t always get complete results.

With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.

Easier personalization

Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can’t. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.

Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to internet users people who have looked at your products. You know you’ll get better results if you target the offer to the person’s interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have looked at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.

How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone records would you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn’t read the brochure you sent out?

With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.

More connection with customers

Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.

Think about your social media strategy. It’s great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it’s even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.

Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand’s story. That sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.

Easy and convenient conversions

Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a company while they’re doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?

With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.

How to create a digital marketing strategy

For many small businesses and beginner digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.

Set SMART goals

Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals is crucial for any marketing strategy. While there are many goals you may want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will propel your strategy forward instead of causing it to remain stagnant.

Identify your audience

Before starting any marketing campaign, it’s best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want your campaign to reach based on similar attributes, such as age, gender, demographic, or purchasing behavior. Having a good understanding of your target audience can help you determine which digital marketing channels to use and the information to include in your campaigns.

Create a budget

A budget ensures you’re spending your money effectively towards your goals instead of overspending on digital marketing channels that may not provide the desired results. Consider your SMART goals and the digital channel you’re planning to use to create a budget.

Select your digital marketing channels

From content marketing to PPC campaigns and more, there are many digital marketing channels you can use to your advantage. Which digital marketing channels you use often depends on your goals, audience, and budget.

Refine your marketing efforts

Make sure to analyze your campaign’s data to identify what was done well and areas for improvement once the campaign is over. This allows you to create even better campaigns in the future. With the help of digital technologies and software, you can obtain this data in an easy-to-view dashboard. Mailchimp’s digital marketing analytics reports will help you keep track of all your marketing campaigns in one centralized location.