What is Digital Marketing? A Business Owner’s Guide

Digital marketing is the promotion and marketing of products and services to consumers through digital channels and electronic devices. Digital marketing efforts leverage various digital channels to reach and engage the target audience effectively. These include the internet, mobile devices, social media platforms, webinars, search engines, online customer communities, and various other digital platforms. B2B digital marketing focuses on lead generation targeting other businesses, while B2C digital marketing targets individual consumers. Digital marketing is a combination of strategies and tactics to reach and persuade your target audience through digital media. Whether it’s through social media posts, targeted search ads, or blog content, digital marketing allows you to connect with your audience more personally and interactively. Influencer marketing leverages influential content creators to promote products or services to their established follower base, helping businesses reach a wider audience and build credibility.

In today’s digital age, having an online presence isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have for business success. But what is digital marketing, and how can it help your business? Digital marketing efforts are a combination of strategies and tactics to connect with your audience. Since the 1990s, digital marketing has transformed the way brands utilize technology for marketing, making it an essential tool for business growth. Let’s get into everything you need to know about this business growth tool.

What is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing activities that utilize electronic devices or the internet to connect with prospective customers. Unlike traditional marketing methods, digital marketing efforts allow you to target your audience more precisely and measure results in real time. Additionally, digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, differentiating it from online marketing. Digital marketing tactics allow for direct communication and personalization of content, along your customer’s journey, and drive engagement and conversions.

Why Your Business Needs Digital Marketing Campaigns

1. Wider Audience: With billions of internet users worldwide, digital marketing lets you reach potential customers everywhere.
2. Cheaper: Compared to traditional media, digital channels give you better ROI and let’s all businesses compete. Traditional marketing channels typically have higher costs than digital channels, making digital marketing a more accessible option for businesses of all sizes.
3. Measurable Results: Digital marketing gives you the analytics to track your marketing and adjust. Digital marketing allows you to reach a wider customer base with less effort, making it a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes.
4. More Targeted: Reach your ideal customer with advanced targeting across all digital platforms.

Digital marketing is the promotion of products, services, or brands through digital channels, platforms, and technologies. It includes SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, email campaigns, and pay-per-click advertising. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing allows targeting, real-time analytics, and cost cost-effective way to reach potential customers globally through mobile devices and internet platforms. This modern marketing helps you to increase brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales through online marketing.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

The benefits of digital marketing are many and big for businesses of all sizes. One of the biggest is increased brand awareness. Digital marketing efforts can significantly enhance brand awareness and improve website traffic by leveraging various digital channels and tailoring messages to target audiences. By using digital channels, you can reach a wider audience and make your brand more visible. Improved website traffic is another big benefit as effective digital marketing drives more traffic to your site and increases conversions.

Digital marketing also excels at lead generation, bringing in potential customers who are interested in your products or services. Better customer engagement is another big benefit as digital marketing allows real-time interaction with your audience and builds stronger relationships and loyalty.

Plus, digital marketing gives you measurable results and ROI. With tools like Google Analytics, you can track your campaigns and make data-driven decisions. And digital marketing is cost-effective, offering a higher return on investment compared to traditional marketing methods, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes to compete.

Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing involves a diverse array of strategies and tactics aimed at effectively reaching and engaging your target audience. Here are some of the most common types of digital marketing:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO involves enhancing your website’s content and structure to achieve higher rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• By using relevant keywords and improving site performance, SEO helps increase organic traffic from search engines.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: PPC is a form of digital advertising where you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. These ads are typically displayed on search engines or social media platforms, providing immediate visibility and targeted reach.
• Social Media Marketing: This strategy uses social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to promote your products, services, or brand. By engaging with your audience through posts, stories, and ads, you can build brand awareness and foster a community around your business.
• Content Marketing: This approach centers on creating and sharing valuable, relevant content designed to attract and engage your target audience.
• This can include blog posts, videos, infographics, and more, all aimed at providing value and building trust with your audience.
• Influencer Marketing: Partnering with influencers allows you to leverage their followers to promote your products or services. Influencers can help you reach a wider audience and build credibility within your target market.
• Email Marketing: Email marketing involves sending targeted and personalized messages to your customers or potential customers. It’s an effective way to nurture leads, build relationships, and drive conversions.
• Digital Advertising: This encompasses various forms of online ads, including display ads, video ads, and social media ads. Digital advertising allows for precise targeting and measurable results, making it a powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.
• Affiliate Marketing: In affiliate marketing, affiliates earn commissions by promoting your products or services to their networks. This performance-based strategy can help you reach new audiences and drive sales through partnerships.
• Video Marketing: Using video content to promote your brand can be highly engaging and effective. Videos can be shared on social media, embedded in emails, or hosted on your website to capture your audience’s attention.
• Mobile Marketing: With the increasing use of mobile devices, mobile marketing focuses on reaching your audience through mobile-optimized content and ads. This includes SMS marketing, mobile app advertising, and mobile-friendly websites.
• Native Advertising: Native advertising creates ads that blend in with the surrounding content on a platform to reduce ad fatigue and skepticism among consumers.

Digital Marketing Channels

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Makes your website visible in search engines
• Keyword research and optimization
• On-page and off-page optimization
• Organic (free) traffic to your website

Also search engine marketing (SEM) complements SEO by allowing businesses to promote their brand through paid search options and get more targeted leads at the point where most online experiences begin.

2. Social Media Marketing

• Engage with customers on social media
• Build brand awareness and community
• Leverage social media influencers
• Create shareable social media posts on various social media channels to promote video content and increase visibility

3. Content Marketing

• Create valuable content
• Attract and retain the target audience
• Implement a content marketing strategy
• Blog posts, videos, and infographics

4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

• Google Ads and other paid ads
• Immediate visibility
• Advanced targeting options
• Measure ROI
• PPC requires businesses to pay for each click on their ads, providing an immediate way to reach potential customers and drive traffic to their offerings.

5. Email Marketing

• Nurture leads through email marketing campaigns
• Automate marketing messages
• Personalise communication
• Build long-term customer relationships
• Email marketing is still the quickest and most direct way to reach customers, making it an essential tool for nurturing leads and driving conversions.

6. Mobile Marketing

• Reach customers on mobile devices
• Mobile advertising
• Mobile optimised
• On-the-go consumers

7. Cross-Channel Digital Marketing

Cross-channel digital marketing is talking to your customers or prospects across every digital channel and every device they use. Digital marketing is key in this scenario as it helps you to leverage multiple digital channels, tailor your message to your audience, and optimise resource allocation to get higher engagement and conversion rates. Marketing automation uses software to streamline and automate marketing tasks, allowing marketers to focus on strategy and engagement. So whether your audience is interacting with your brand via email, social media or your website, it’s a seamless and consistent experience. Digital channels are the inbox, social networks, laptops, tablets and smartphones, each with its own way to connect with your audience.

A cross-channel marketing strategy works when you have a deep understanding of the most-used digital marketing channels and how they work together. For example, a customer might hear about your brand through a social media post, visit your website through a search engine, and then make a purchase after receiving an email offer. With a joined-up marketing strategy, you can guide your customer through a journey and increase their overall experience and conversions.

How to Build a Digital Marketing Strategy

Set Your Goals

• Awareness
• Leads
• Sales
• Engagement

Digital marketing is key to setting your goals and choosing the right channels. It can help business success by using multiple digital channels, targeting messages to your audience, and optimising resource allocation for higher engagement and conversion rates.

Know Your Audience

• Audience preferences
• Behaviour
• Buyer personas
• Pain points

Choose Your Channels

• The right digital channels
• Where your audience is
• Multiple channels
• Branding
• Content

Create

• Content
• Video
• Inbound
• Quality and consistency

Measure

• Track activity
• Automate marketing
• Measure results
• Adjust

Building a Digital Marketing Team

Building a successful digital marketing team requires a diverse set of skills, expertise, and strong collaboration. Here are some essential roles to consider:

• Digital Marketing Manager: This role oversees the development and execution of digital marketing strategies and campaigns. The manager ensures that all efforts align with business goals and coordinates the team’s activities.
• SEO Specialist: An SEO specialist is tasked with enhancing your website’s content and structure to boost its rankings on search engines.
• They conduct keyword research, implement on-page and off-page SEO tactics, and monitor performance.
• Social Media Manager: This role involves developing and implementing social media marketing strategies. The social media manager engages with your audience, creates content, and monitors social media channels to build brand awareness and community.
• Content Creator: Content creators produce high-quality, engaging content to attract and retain your target audience. This can include writing blog posts, creating videos, designing infographics, and more.
• Email Marketing Specialist: An email marketing specialist develops and implements email marketing campaigns. They create targeted and personalized messages to nurture leads and drive conversions.
• Digital Advertising Specialist: This role focuses on creating and executing digital advertising campaigns. The specialist uses various platforms to deliver targeted ads and measure their effectiveness.
• Analytics Specialist: An analytics specialist tracks and analyzes digital marketing metrics to measure campaign performance. They provide insights and recommendations to inform future strategies and optimize current efforts.

Web Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimization

Web analytics is a tool to optimise the visitor journey and purchase funnel on your website. By looking at web analytics data, you can see how people behave and where to improve. Digital marketing is key here as it involves using multiple digital channels, messaging to target audiences, and optimising resource allocation to get more engagement and conversion. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a big part of digital marketing to get more of your website visitors to do a desired action, e.g., buy or fill out a form.

CRO involves 5 steps: define goals, understand the audience, develop a hypothesis, test and analyse, refine and iterate. By following these steps, businesses can make data-driven decisions to improve their website and user experience.

In digital marketing, web analytics and CRO is key to measuring your efforts and improving the customer experience. By looking at website data and optimising the conversion rate you can get more online conversions, return on investment (ROI), and overall digital marketing strategy.

Social media, email, and search engines drive traffic to your website and conversions. Social media marketing is a way to reach your audience and drive conversions. By using social media platforms, businesses can engage with customers, build brand awareness, and drive website traffic.

Influencer marketing is another digital marketing tactic that drives conversions. By partnering with influencers, businesses can reach a bigger audience and build credibility with their target market. Search engine optimization (SEO) is key to driving conversions. By optimising your website for search engines, you can get more visibility, more traffic, and conversions.

Digital Marketing Challenges

• Keep up to date with digital

Digital marketing is all about managing multiple platforms and keeping up with the latest and greatest.

• Manage multiple platforms
• Organic and paid
• Consistent across channels

Future of Digital Marketing

The future of digital marketing is always changing with new technologies and trends emerging. Here are some to watch:

• Artificial Intelligence (AI): AI is changing digital marketing by enabling personalised and targeted campaigns. AI can process huge amounts of data to deliver content and improve customer experiences.
• Voice Search: As more people use voice search to find and buy, voice search is becoming more important. This means using natural language and long-tail keywords.
• Video Content: Video content is growing in digital marketing strategies. Videos are engaging and can be used across all platforms to grab your audience’s attention.
• Mobile-First: Most people are accessing content on mobile so mobile optimization is key. This means mobile-friendly websites and ads to reach on-the-go customers.
• Personalization: Using data and analytics to create personalised experiences for your audience is becoming a big focus. Personalised content can increase engagement and conversions by speaking to individual preferences and needs.
• Account-Based Marketing (ABM): ABM targets specific accounts and decision makers with personalised content and messaging. This is particularly effective for B2B businesses looking to build relationships with key clients.
• Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing is still a powerful way to reach your target audience. Partner with influencers to build credibility and reach within your niche.

Get Started

Audit Your Current Situation

• Website audit
• Social media audit
• Content review
• Research competitors

In this phase, it’s crucial to evaluate your digital marketing efforts to understand how well they are leveraging various digital channels, tailoring messages to target audiences, and optimizing resource allocation to achieve higher engagement and conversion rates.

Define Goals

• Success metrics
• Realistic timelines
• Budget allocation
• Resource planning

Implement Gradually

• Start with core channels
• Test and learn
• Scale what works
• Monitor and adjust

End

Digital marketing gives you the ability to reach and engage with your audience like never before. Whether you’re a small local business or a large enterprise, a successful digital marketing strategy can drive business growth. Start small, measure results, and optimise as you go based on data and insights.

Digital marketing isn’t just about being online, it’s about creating connections with your potential customers and delivering value through digital channels. Start your digital marketing journey today and see your business thrive in the digital world.

Need help getting started? Consider working with experienced digital marketers or marketing agencies who can help you with your digital marketing and achieve your business goals.

Digital Marketing FAQs

Q: How much does digital marketing cost for a small business?

Digital marketing costs vary depending on your goals and channels. Small businesses start from $500-$5000 per month. This can be a mix of SEO ($300-$1500/month), social media marketing ($250-$1000/month) and paid advertising ($200-$2500/month). Many businesses start with one channel and add more as they see results. Posting on social media and creating blogs typically only costs the time spent producing the content, making it a cost-effective option for businesses with limited budgets.

Q: How long does it take to see results from digital marketing?

Results timeline varies by channel:

• PPC/Google Ads: Immediate results (24-48 hours)
• Social Media Marketing: 1-3 months
• Content Marketing: 3-6 months
• SEO: 4-12 months for noticeable results
• Email Marketing: 1-3 months

Q: Which digital marketing channel should I start with?

Best channel to start with depends on your business type:

• Local businesses: Google Business Profile + Local SEO
• E-commerce: Social Media Marketing + PPC
• B2B services: LinkedIn Marketing + Content Marketing
• Professional services: SEO + Content Marketing Choose where your target audience spends time and what’s your immediate business goal.

Q: Do I need a website to do digital marketing?

While having a website is recommended, you can start digital marketing without one by using:

• Social media platforms
• Google Business Profile
• Marketplace listings (Amazon, Etsy)
• Directory listings, but a website gives you more control and long-term benefits for your digital presence.

Q: Can digital marketing work for any business?

Yes, digital marketing can work for any business but strategies vary by industry:

• Retail: Social media, PPC, email marketing
• Services: Content marketing, SEO, LinkedIn
• Local businesses: Local SEO, Google Business Profile
• B2B: LinkedIn, content marketing, email campaigns

Q: How do I measure digital marketing ROI?

Track these metrics to measure ROI:

• Website traffic and conversions
• Lead generation numbers
• Social media engagement
• Email open and click rates
• Sales from digital channels
• Cost per lead/acquisition: Use Google Analytics to monitor these metrics. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) is important for evaluating digital marketing success and ensuring your strategies are effective.

Q: Should I hire an agency or do digital marketing in-house?

Consider:

• Budget: Agencies cost more but bring expertise
• Time: In-house requires more time
• Expertise: Agencies have specific knowledge
• Control: In-house gives more direct control. Many businesses start with an agency and build internal capabilities over time.

Q: Is SEO or paid advertising better?

Both serve different purposes:

• SEO: Long-term strategy, sustainable results, lower long-term cost
• Paid Ads: Immediate results, more predictable, higher short-term cost. Most businesses use both for the best results.

Q: How often should I post on social media?

Recommended posting frequency by platform:

• Facebook: 3-5 times a week
• Instagram: 4-7 times a week
• LinkedIn: 2-5 times a week
• Twitter: 3-5 times a day. Quality matters more than quantity – be consistent and valuable.

Q: What’s the most common mistake in digital marketing?

Mistakes include:

• Not setting clear goals
• Targeting the wrong audience
• Inconsistent posting
• Ignoring analytics
• Spreading too thin across channels
• Not mobile optimised. Focus on setting clear objectives and being consistent.

Pragati Rawatkar Content Writer

Pragati Rawatkar is an excellent content writer and expert in blog writing, as well as having good skills in social media management. Pragati is passionate about helping her clients reach their goals, expand their online presence, and create meaningful connections with their audiences.

See Full Bio

Social Media Marketing Content Writing Google Ads Bing Ads Meta Ads