What IsDigital Marketing?

While traditional marketing might live in print ads, phone calls or physical marketing, digital marketing happens electronically and online. That gives brands far more ways to reach customers, including email, video, social media and search engines.

Today, digital marketing is vital for your business and your brand awareness. It seems every other brand has a website, and those that don't at least have a social media presence or a digital advertising strategy. Digital content and marketing are so common that consumers now expect them and rely on them to get to know brands.

Long story short: to stay competitive as a business owner, you'll need to embrace some aspects of digital marketing.

Because digital marketing comes with so many options and strategies, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of tactics on a limited budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to track the success and ROI of your campaigns far more closely than you could with traditional promotional content such as a billboard or a print ad.

• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)
• Affiliate marketing
• Native advertising
• Marketing automation
• Email marketing
• Online PR
• Inbound marketing
• Sponsored content

Digital marketers are responsible for driving brand awareness and generating leads through all the digital channels, free and paid, at a company's disposal. These channels include social media, the company's own website, search engine rankings, email, display advertising and the company blog.

A digital marketer usually focuses on a different key performance indicator (KPI) for each channel so they can properly measure the company's performance on each one. For example, a digital marketer in charge of SEO measures their website's “organic traffic”: the visits that come from people who found a page on the business's website through a Google search.

Digital marketing is carried out across many marketing roles today. In small companies, one generalist might own several of the digital marketing tactics described above at once. In larger companies, these tactics are covered by several specialists, each focusing on just one or two of the brand's digital channels.

Digital marketing can work for any business in any industry. Whatever your company sells, digital marketing still involves building buyer personas to identify your audience's needs and creating valuable online content. That doesn't mean, however, that every business should run its digital marketing strategy the same way.

Email marketing is a part of digital marketing that uses email to promote brands, products and services to subscribers. It helps your brand build a great relationship with customers and keeps them up to date on your new products, offers, discounts and other services.