Digital marketing is the practice of promoting a business through online channels like search, social, paid, and email. It provides a powerful and cost-effective way to drive revenue.
In this guide, we’re diving into digital marketing basics to highlight everything you need to know to grow your revenue online:
- What is digital marketing?
- How does digital marketing work?
- 9 types of digital marketing
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics in digital marketing
- How to create a digital marketing strategy
- Digital marketing FAQs
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing definition
Digital marketing is the practice of promoting a business, person, product, or service using online channels, electronic devices, and digital technologies.
Some examples of digital marketing are:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- and more
How does digital marketing work?
How digital marketing works
Online marketing works by developing a coordinated omnichannel strategy that supports your target audience’s unique buying journey.
That means your business uses multiple channels (like social, email, and search) to support an overarching strategy (like generating brand awareness, leads, or sales).
For perspective, think about this digital marketing example:
- Goal: Earn leads
- Channels: Search, email, and digital advertising
- Strategies: Write a blog post that targets a middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU) need. Optimize the blog post for search engines and users. Include a downloadable resource that requires users to share their email address. Build a drip campaign for those email subscribers to move them to conversion.
It’s a basic example, but the above scenario shows how companies can use digital marketing to achieve global goals, like attracting leads. While you can use online marketing channels by themselves, they work best when used together, which is one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers.
Types of digital marketing
Want to know the different types of digital marketing strategies you can employ? Here are the different types of digital marketing:
Types of digital marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Content marketing
- Video marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Social media advertising
- Web design and development
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
Let’s dive into each one!
1. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is an online marketing strategy that improves your visibility or ranking in search results relevant to your business and target market.
By using SEO as a digital marketing strategy, companies can increase their visibility in search results on Google and other search engines. With a better spot in search results, your business can earn more website traffic, leads, and sales.
Increasing your ranking requires on-page SEO and off-page SEO. These two tactics focus on making your site friendlier and more authoritative to search engines and users.
There are many SEO strategies you can implement to increase your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), such as:
- Auditing your website’s SEO performance
- Researching keywords
- Creating quality content
- Making your website mobile-friendly
- Earning backlinks
- And more
When it comes to digital marketing techniques, SEO earns the most recommendations. With SEO, your business can drive long-term revenue to your company, without the upfront and continuous costs that come with strategies like social media advertising.
2. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
PPC advertising is a digital media marketing tactic that promotes your business, products, or services on search engines, websites, apps, and more.
PPC operates on a pay-per-click business model, which means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, which can include text, images, and video.
With PPC, your business can create a hyper-targeted campaign to reach ready-to-buy users in your target audience, which is one reason why PPC boasts an average ROI of $2 for every $1 spent.
3. Content marketing
Content marketing is a digital marketing technique that focuses on creating original and helpful content for users. In most cases, this content, which can range from blog posts to videos to online guides, will get optimized for search, shared on social media, and promoted to increase its reach and exposure.
With original, high-quality content, your business can generate more leads, as it’s three times more efficient at lead generation than outbound marketing.
If you use content marketing, you can get creative and create a range of content types, including:
- Blogs
- Articles
- Guides
- Infographics
- Video
- Podcasts
To create content that both engages your audience and ranks well in the search results, you’ll want to be sure to implement keywords throughout your content and ensure your content provides value and answers your audience’s questions.
4. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy that uses social media networks to promote your business, engage your target audience, and provide your customers with one-on-one support.
Most approaches include sharing content, answering comments, and promoting posts.
With social media marketing, companies can build a loyal following, as well as engage and interact with their followers to improve customer loyalty, increase sales, and reduce churn.
There are several social media platforms you can utilize to reach your audience, such as:
- TikTok