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What is digital marketing? A complete guide

Adobe Experience Cloud Team

07-26-2023

Digital marketing has become the go-to marketing strategy for small businesses
and enterprises alike. You’ve probably heard about digital marketing before, but it
encompasses many different strategies for businesses.

Digital marketing is a vast umbrella term that covers multiple areas, from SEO to
blog writing and distribution channels to budgets. This post will cover everything
you need to know about digital marketing, including its benefits, the various
types, and how to embrace it in your own business.

This guide will discuss:

What digital marketing is

The benefits of digital marketing
Types of digital marketing
 How to do digital marketing
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What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of digital channels to market products. Also known as
online marketing, digital marketing promotes brands and connects them to
potential customers via the internet. It takes many forms, including:

Search engines
Websites
Social media
Email
Mobile apps
Text messaging
Web-based advertising

Digital marketing uses the same principles as traditional offline marketing but in a
digital space. It relies on consumer data to find a business’s target audience and
deliver the most relevant messaging possible. This is effective, but digital
marketing is so popular that the biggest challenge today is learning how to stand
out from the crowd.

Your company’s use of digital marketing depends on its model. Business-to-

business (B2B) companies sell to other businesses, which requires a longer, more
strategic approach. Business-to-consumer (B2C) companies sell directly to
everyday customers, which requires shorter sales cycles and a larger audience.
The main differences between B2B and B2C include:

B2B decisions involve multiple people, while B2C typically only involves a
single person.
B2B clients tend to have a longer decision-making process, so digital
marketing should focus on building relationships.
The B2C buying process is generally shorter, so this requires short-term,
urgent messaging.
B2B transactions are more driven by logic, while B2C is driven more by
emotion.

Fortunately, digital marketing works for both approaches. Whether you’re

targeting businesses or consumers, digital marketing will help you streamline the
marketing process for results.
The benefits of digital marketing Sign In

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, digital marketing helps

businesses better understand their customers and deliver tailored experiences
across every channel.

Digital marketing can help you get to know your audience, understand their pain
points, and provide metrics that will give your marketing team credibility. Digital
marketing has several benefits.

Reach a large demographic

Digital marketing allows you to reach a wider customer base with less effort.
When you post an ad online, it can reach anyone, regardless of their location. You
can connect with customers on the other side of the world, in multiple time zones,
as seamlessly as though you were taking out an ad in the local newspaper. You
can expand your market reach and grow your business in ways that would have
seemed impossible before.

Cost efficiency

Traditional marketing channels like TV, radio, and print media typically have
higher costs than digital channels. Posting on social media and creating blogs
doesn’t have a cost beyond the time you spend producing the content. You can
create a slick, professional website for a relatively low cost by using one of the
many templated systems or paying more for a bespoke creation. You can create
social media accounts for free, and partner with an email service provider (ESP)
for a competitive price.

Plus, digital channels remain on the internet for as long as you maintain them.
People will continue to find your content again and again long after you’ve posted
it. This amounts to greater staying power than a temporary TV ad.

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, digital marketing

helps businesses better understand their customers and deliver
tailored experiences across every channel.

Traditional marketing is more ephemeral because it only plays at certain times —

and usually outside of your control — before it’s gone forever. A newspaper ad
doesn’t run continuously unless you keep paying for it, and then it disappears
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when people recycle the paper or toss it in the trash.

Whether you have a small business or you work at a big business that’s trying to
cut costs, digital marketing is the way to go.

Results are measurable

Digital marketing comes with a host of analytics opportunities that traditional

marketing just can’t match. You can track the number of conversions and leads,
visits to your website, and much more — giving you plenty of valuable insight to
help grow your business. For example, digital marketing allows you to:

Measure social media engagement with built-in analytics.

Track the organic traffic and SERP rankings of every blog post.
Pull accurate data on paid ad views, clicks, and conversions.

Traditional marketing doesn’t allow for further engagement and only allows for
one-way communication. But digital marketing gives you the opportunity to chat
one-on-one with customers. You can engage with them directly on a blog or social
media post to learn how they found you, what they think, and what they need.
This gives you both quantitative and qualitative information on your marketing
efforts, which is worth its weight in gold.

Easier personalization for customers

Customer data is the foundation of digital marketing. Because it requires so much

data, businesses naturally learn a lot about their ideal customers during a digital
marketing campaign. Thanks to this data, it’s never been easier to personalize your
marketing campaigns.

For example, businesses use customer data to:

Monitor the behavior of their social media followers to see which types of
content and post formats they prefer.
Segment customers based on their demographics, which makes it easier to
personalize messaging based on their pain points.
Address customers by name in email campaigns.
Acknowledge key events like customer birthdays and anniversaries.

Opportunity to engage with customers at various stages

Digital marketing is more cost-effective, which means you can engage with
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customers at several points during the buying process. For example, you can
create a paid advertising campaign and then follow up with those leads after
they’ve made a purchase. This could be as simple as saying thank you, or using it
as an opportunity to upsell with related items or a subscription. A traditional TV
ad can’t do that.

Easy and convenient conversions

Thanks to its cross-channel connectivity, digital marketing makes it a cinch to

increase conversions. Shoppers can move from a social media platform to your
ecommerce store to make a purchase in just a few taps. Digital marketing also
allows for automation, so if customers don’t make a purchase right away, you can
quickly follow up with them to recapture their business before they forget about
you.

Types of digital marketing

Digital marketing is so beneficial because of its flexibility. It comes in various
forms, which gives businesses more opportunities than ever before to connect
with their target audiences. Let’s look at the 12 key types of digital marketing.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a type of digital marketing that aims to educate and share
value to readers instead of promoting a product or service. It isn’t outwardly
promotional in nature, but establishes your business as a thought leader and a
trustworthy source of information.

Businesses use content marketing to attract leads and convert them into loyal
customers. It’s also an effective strategy because it offers potential customers
something for free, which entices them into (hopefully) making a purchase at
some point.

Like digital marketing, content marketing also comes in many forms, including:

Blog posts
Ebooks
 Newsletters
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Guides
Infographics
Audio content, like podcasts
Video content, like YouTube Shorts

Content marketing is not only affordable, but it’s also effective. In 2022, 80% of
marketers thought their content marketing strategy was very successful. It’s no
wonder why the content marketing industry is projected to be worth $107 billion
by 2026.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing the content, technical setup, and reach of your
website so your pages appear at the top of a search engine result page for a
specific set of keyword terms. With SEO, businesses analyze their website’s
performance, score it against competitors, and create a data-backed strategy to
improve their rankings over time.

In digital marketing, the goal is to get your content to the top of the search engine
results page (SERP). This is important because 67.6% of organic traffic clicks come
from the first five results on the SERP. Most businesses boost their rankings on the
SERPs by:

Creating quality content

Fostering user engagement
Ensuring marketing material is mobile-friendly

Businesses also have to consider on-page and off-page SEO, as well as technical
SEO. On-page SEO focuses on optimizing aspects of your website that users
engage with. This facet of SEO leans heavily into keyword research. With the right
list of target keywords, you can optimize your web copy to answer your audience’s
most important questions.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is the practice of optimizing activity outside of
your website that could affect your rankings. With off-page SEO, you look at all the
ways you can garner external attention to your website. This generally focuses on
gathering quality backlinks to your site, which can affect your rankings in the long
term.
Finally, technical SEO looks at the back end of your website and the coding of each
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page. Search engines crawl the back end of your site code to determine SERP
rankings, so you’ll need programming knowledge to optimize this. With technical
SEO, you’ll look at page speed, image compression, and metadata to ensure you’re
set up for SERP success.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

Not to be confused with SEO, SEM revolves around paid ads that display in the
SERPs. Paid search typically refers to the sponsored result on the top or side of a
SERP. These ads appear when users enter a certain search term. As the advertiser,
you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. The two most popular SEM
platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads.

SEM works because 68% of online experiences start with organic and paid
searches. By promoting your brand at the source of most online experiences, you
can attract more interested leads to your site.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing involves promoting your business organically through

various social networks. But this isn’t just a promotional channel — social media is
effective for digital marketing because it gives businesses the power to chat with
their most engaged followers one-on-one.

Social media is everywhere, so your business must be active on different

platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are the most popular
social platforms right now. But depending on your industry and target audience,
LinkedIn can also be a lucrative platform. However, the key to effective social
media marketing goes far beyond simply having a few social media accounts.

Many social networks, like Instagram, allow your followers to make direct
purchases within the app, although sales alone might not be your goal.
Companies often use social media marketing to start conversations with their
audience. It’s also a fantastic tool for promoting your content marketing pieces to a
wider audience.

Follow these best practices to increase your reach on social media:

 Know your audience, including their favorite social media platforms.
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Produce engaging, high-quality content.
Respond to comments and questions within 24 hours, if possible.
Stick to a consistent posting schedule.
Post at optimal times for your target audience.
Hire a social media manager to facilitate campaigns.

The goal of social media marketing is to engage with your followers. The more
your audience is inspired to engage with your content, the more likely they are to
share it, potentially inspiring their peers to become customers as well.

Pay per click (PPC)

Pay-per-click advertising is a type of digital marketing where you pay every time
someone clicks on your ad. With PPC, you only pay when someone interacts with
your ads. PPC is similar to search engine marketing, but businesses can do PPC on
both search engines and social media platforms.

Google Ads is the most popular PPC platform for search engines, but Bing Ads is
the second most popular. Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, and even Amazon Ads are
also valuable platforms for PPC.

PPC is a paid digital marketing strategy, so it’s critical to make every cent count by
optimizing your campaigns. Follow these quick best practices to get more out of
your paid ads:

Improve ad quality by optimizing your Quality Score in Google Ads.

Create ads that are relevant to your target audience’s pain points.
Optimize the quality of your landing pages.
Use smart bidding strategies to bid an appropriate amount — not too much,
and not too little.

PPC can generate results almost instantly, but it isn’t without its risks. Ad prices
vary a lot, and without a solid plan and experience, PPC can become very
expensive. Make sure you understand the nuances of bidding on your PPC
platform of choice, and that you’re tracking the right metrics along the way to
ensure return on investment (ROI).

Digital marketing can help you get to know your audience, understand
their pain points, and provide metrics that will give your marketing
team credibility.
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Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a strategy that recruits affiliates to promote a business’s

product or service to their followers. When a customer makes a purchase through
that affiliate, the affiliate earns either a percentage commission or a flat-rate
finder’s fee. Affiliate marketing overlaps with influencer marketing, but the main
difference is that you only pay affiliates an agreed-upon amount if someone
makes a purchase based on their referral.

With affiliate marketing, you’re promoting your business through someone with
an established platform and connections to your target audience. The affiliate’s
audience already trusts them, and if the affiliate recommends your brand, their
audience is more likely to trust your business by association.

Affiliate marketing comes in different forms. For example, some affiliates will do
reviews or unboxing videos for products. Other affiliates might use your products
and will link to your company in their content.

Affiliates often insert promotions within helpful content, which increases the odds
that your target audience will pay attention to the messaging. That might look like
a mixologist on YouTube promoting a barware company’s goods, or a makeup
content creator on TikTok reviewing the durability of different eyeliners. More
often than not, these affiliates will share a unique code or URL provided by you to
track their sales.

Native advertising

Native advertising is a type of paid advertising that creates ads that mimic the look
and feel of a platform. The goal is to make the ads not seem like advertising, but
as just another piece of content. Native ads blend in with their surrounding
environment, so it’s not immediately obvious that you’re advertising something.

More businesses embraced native ads because users are so skeptical of

mainstream paid ads. Shoppers assume paid ads are biased and ignore them, so
native ads are advertisers’ answer to declining conversion rates.

Native ads attempt to circumvent consumer cynicism with entertaining and

informative content, or by downplaying the promotional nature of the content. For
example, a business with a native ad might design it to look like a typical
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Facebook post, or a business might write a sponsored article on a news site.

Native ads are tricky because they mimic the look and feel of organic content, but
advertisers still need to be transparent about the fact that these are ads. Native
ads usually include qualifiers like “sponsored” or “promoted” so it’s clear that it’s
paid content. Even though they’re ads, users tend to react better to native ads
because they appear to be less intrusive than traditional paid ads.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is a digital marketing strategy that streamlines marketing

tasks by automating them. This type of digital marketing uses artificial intelligence
(AI) and machine learning (ML) software to power digital marketing campaigns.
While it isn’t a replacement for human labor, marketing automation handles
mundane and repetitive tasks so marketers can focus on high-level strategy and
creativity instead.

Marketing automation tools can handle a lot of work for small or overwhelmed
marketing teams, including:

Streamlining marketing tasks and workflows.

Measuring results.
Calculating campaign ROI.
Determining which marketing efforts are working, and which aren’t.

With automation, you can analyze larger amounts of customer data in no time at
all. Use these insights to create better, more personalized campaigns that increase
the odds of conversions and sales.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing where you reach out to your
customers through strategic email messages. After more than two decades, email
is still the quickest and most direct way to reach customers. However, to avoid
getting buried by competing content in your subscribers’ inboxes, your content
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needs to be incredibly engaging, relevant, informative, and entertaining.

Email marketing can take many forms, but these are the more common types of
emails businesses send:

Blog subscription newsletter

Welcome emails to new customers
Holiday or special event promotions
Post-purchase follow-ups that include tips, tricks, and best practices

Email might be the oldest form of digital marketing, but it’s kept up with the times.
Follow these best practices to get even more out of your email marketing
campaigns:

Your audience expects personalized emails, so include their name in the

email body and subject line, at a minimum.
Always make the intention of the email clear with a single call to action.
Include an unsubscribe link in all of your email signatures.
Timing and scheduling are important. Don’t bombard customers’ inboxes
with repetitive or irrelevant messaging, or they could hit the unsubscribe
button.
Integrate transaction and promotion emails.

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing, which is also called SMS marketing, is a type of digital

marketing tailored to mobile devices and mobile users. It engages your target
audience on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets, as well as wearables
like smartwatches.

With mobile marketing, businesses reach out to subscribers via SMS messaging.
Since most of us have our phones on us 24/7 no matter where we are, mobile
marketing makes it possible for businesses to send timely messages. Like email
marketing, mobile marketing gives you a one-on-one connection with your
customers. It’s no wonder why companies report a 102% ROI on SMS marketing.

Video marketing

Video marketing is a type of digital marketing where you promote your business
through either long-form or short-form video. Video content allows you to
communicate more information in less time, so it’s no surprise that many
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platforms allow — and even encourage — video marketing.

YouTube is the most obvious place to do video marketing, but social media
platforms like TikTok and Instagram are also great for promoting your brand with
videos.

If you want to go all-in on YouTube, remember that this isn’t primarily a social
network — it’s

actually a search engine. In fact, 70% of shoppers have made a purchase after
seeing a brand on YouTube. While the majority of people stream TV shows and
movies online, 46% also watch videos on YouTube or Facebook for entertainment.

Video content is valuable to so many users, so tap into this growing area of digital
marketing. If you have a smartphone, you have the capability to make quality
videos for your company’s website, social media, email campaigns, and paid ads.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a digital marketing strategy that brands use to promote

their products or services through popular content creators. Influencer marketing
is similar to affiliate marketing in that you can capitalize on an established, captive
audience that inherently trusts the influencer.

While many of us think of influencer marketing as a B2C tactic for selling

consumer goods, it can also work for B2B companies selling office supplies, SaaS
subscriptions, and nearly anything else. It just comes down to partnering with the
right influencer for your audience.

Influencer marketing is different from affiliate marketing because it doesn’t involve

profit sharing. Instead, you typically pay the influencer a flat fee in exchange for
promoting your product. With this digital marketing strategy, the influencer is paid
regardless of sales related to their promotion. You can certainly add an affiliate
spin to the arrangement to incentivize sales, but it isn’t necessary.

With an average engagement rate of nearly 16% on platforms like TikTok, it’s no
wonder why more brands are embracing influencer marketing. However, you
need the right strategy to glean value from these partnerships. Follow these tips to
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make the most of influencer marketing:

Partner with influencers who are familiar with your industry and who have a
good reputation — they’re representing your brand, after all.
Establish a clear and precise written agreement for compensation.
Provide the influencer with clear guidelines on language, tone, and logistics.

How to do digital marketing

Digital marketing can take so many forms that it can feel overwhelming to choose
from all the options. That’s why it’s so important to understand how to pair digital
marketing with your overall business strategy.

Regardless of your industry or business model, you can follow this six-step process
to strategically embrace digital marketing.

Define your goals

Goals are a necessary part of any marketing strategy, and digital marketing is no
exception. The first step is to define measurable, achievable, and relevant goals for
your digital marketing campaigns that align with your company’s objectives.

Think of your goals as the guiding principles that shape your approach to digital
marketing. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, maybe you
invest in social media marketing to get the word out.

You should back up every goal with metrics, too. This makes it easier to determine
whether your campaigns are on track or if you need to course-correct. Important
metrics include:

Impressions
Reach
Clicks
Click-through rate (CTR)
Engagement rate
Conversions
Cost per lead (CPL)
Effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM)
There are also the back-end metrics like return on investment (ROI), return on ad
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spend (ROAS), first-touch and multitouch attribution, and customer lifetime value
(CLV).

Regardless of the goals you set, it’s easier to develop effective digital marketing
strategies when you have realistic goals first. This ensures your marketing
activities will actually make a difference for your business.

Identify your target audience

Now that you know your goals, you need to define your target audience. These
are the people your campaign will reach. Every audience is different, so it’s critical
to understand the people consuming your messaging. Plus, the target audience
varies from channel to channel, so put in the effort to understand your followers
on every platform.

Digital marketing helps you reach more people, minimize costs, and
better engage with your target audience.

Set a budget for each digital channel

Setting a budget helps you allocate resources appropriately. This is especially

important if you’re using a mix of organic and paid advertising — you don’t want
your paid channels using too much of your budget.

Generally speaking, B2B companies have a longer buying cycle, so they might
need a bigger marketing budget. Your goals, target metrics, and existing costs will
also have a big impact on your budget.

If you have a variable budget, assign a percentage of your budget — instead of a

flat dollar amount — to each digital marketing strategy. This way, you can invest in
the digital strategies that are important to you without breaking the bank.

Select your digital marketing channels

With a budget in place, it’s time to decide which channels you’ll focus your digital
marketing efforts on. The goal is to strike a balance between paid and organic
channels. While paid strategies like PPC can garner immediate results, organic
strategies like SEO come with long-term gains. Pursuing both types of strategies
will set you up for digital marketing success.
Since you know your target audience at this stage, opt for the channels they use
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the most. For example, if you’re targeting Gen Z college students, you would go for
platforms like TikTok instead of Facebook. By going where your audience already
is, you’ll increase your odds of connecting with the right people.

Optimize your digital assets for mobile

In Q1 of 2023, mobile traffic accounted for 45.49% of all internet traffic in the
United States. Mobile traffic is on track to outpace desktop traffic in the coming
years, so make sure all of your marketing content performs well on mobile
devices, too — even if it was designed for a traditional browser. It’s also important
to design a seamless experience between mobile and desktop so you don’t lose
users moving between the two.

Refine your marketing efforts

Digital marketing is never truly done. It evolves over time, which is why it’s so
important to monitor and analyze your performance. Consumers and trends are
never static, so you’ll need to use data to constantly refine your strategy and
remain current. Review your social media metrics, email marketing data, and site
analytics to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space.

Rely on a powerful platform for your digital marketing

efforts
Since digital marketing channels are so accessible and affordable, marketing your
business on these platforms will give you a wider reach. Digital marketing helps
you reach more people, minimize costs, and better engage with your target
audience. While there are many forms of digital marketing available to businesses
today, this variety makes it easier than ever to see results from your marketing
efforts.

When you’re ready to get started, evaluate your current marketing platform to see
if it can handle multifaceted digital marketing campaigns. These campaigns can
get complicated, but tools like Adobe Marketo Engage help businesses reduce
complexity and increase ROI.

Marketo Engage specializes in customer engagement for complex B2B buying

journeys. As a complete solution for lead management, it brings marketing and
sales together to nurture leads, orchestrate personalized experiences, optimize
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content, and measure business impact across every channel.

Start your digital marketing campaigns on the right foot. Watch the Adobe
Marketo Engage overview video or take an interactive product tour now.

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