Digital Marketing
Any marketing that uses electronic devices and can be used by marketing specialists to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to online marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device. It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing.v
Types of digital marketing
There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. Here are a few key examples of types of digital marketing tactics.
: engine optimization
: Content marketing
: Social media marketing
: Pay-per-click marketing
: Affiliate marketing
: Native advertising
How Digital Marketing Works
Marketing encompasses a wide range of techniques and media that companies can use to promote their products and services to potential consumers and improve their market share. To be successful, it requires a combination of advertising and sales savvy. Professional marketers take on these tasks either internally at individual companies or externally at marketing firms that may serve many different clients.
Companies once focused on marketing through print, television, and radio because that was all they had. Although those options still exist, the internet gave companies another way to reach consumers and gave rise to digital marketing.
The new technologies and trends forced companies to change their marketing strategies and rethink their budgets. Email became a popular marketing tool in the early days of digital marketing. Then the focus shifted to search engines like Netscape, which allowed businesses to tag and keyword items to get themselves noticed. The development of social platforms like Facebook made it possible for companies to track user data and deliver their messages to very specific audiences.
Smartphones and other portable devices now make it easier for companies to market their products and services to consumers wherever those consumers happen to be. A 2022 Pew Research Center study found that 76% of American adults had made online purchases using their phones.1
Digital marketing can be interactive, unlike traditional print or television advertising.
Types of Digital Marketing Channels
Digital marketing channels have evolved since the 1990s and continue to do so. Here are eight of the most common channels in use today.
