What Is Digital Marketing? Types, Skills, and Careers
The internet has revolutionized marketing. Find out how you can leverage digital marketing to launch your career.
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Digital marketing, or online marketing, is a form of advertising that uses the internet and digital technologies to connect with customers. Rather than traditional media, such as print, radio, or television, digital marketing uses computers, mobile, social media, search engines, and other digital channels to reach consumers wherever they spend the most time.
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What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is a form of marketing that leverages the internet and digital technologies to connect with customers. Digital marketing can take on many forms, including videos, long-form content, social media posts, display ads, paid media, or email newsletters. Users can come across these digital marketing forms on computers, laptops, mobile devices, tablets, or mobile apps.
Over 60 percent of the global population is online, and more people are joining them every day [1]. That's why companies are now increasing their digital marketing budgets while traditional marketing gets slashed [2].
More than running a sponsored Instagram ad to drive sales, digital marketing includes strategies and best practices for interacting with customers at every stage of the buying journey.
Data plays a big part in digital marketing. With marketing analytics, marketers can collect valuable information by tracking a customer’s journey in real time and target specific audiences by tailoring content to their preferred digital channels. For example, Starbucks has collected data from their rewards mobile apps to help identify seasonal trends and create tailored promotions [3].
Watch this short video from Google's Digital Marketing & E-commerce Professional Certificate on how digital marketing creates value:
7 types of digital marketing (with examples)
Digital marketers connect with potential customers through different channels. The following digital marketing channels, used by small companies and big businesses alike, remain among the most popular and impactful used today.
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1. Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM)
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique that seeks to improve the ranking of online material on search engines such as Google or Bing. If you have ever searched for something on Google, you’ve likely noticed that even the simplest search can yield millions of results. Yet, you probably rarely go past the first few suggestions, let alone the next page.
In such a highly crowded space, digital marketers use SEO marketing to ensure that their webpages rank high in Google searches so that potential customers actually find their products or services online. Generally, SEO marketing targets organic search terms, meaning marketers create content that naturally aligns with and ranks for top search terms related to their product. Search engine marketing (SEM) strategies typically incorporate both organic and paid media, such as buying ads on Google.
Some common ways to go about SEO include:
Creating quality content that meets searcher intent
Using keywords to help search engines identify relevant material
Using long-tail keywords (specific phrases that searchers use) to help content reach its target audience
Ensuring that content loads quickly and is compatible with mobile devices
Data drives SEO marketing
In SEO marketing, you'll be in charge of monitoring data, such as the bounce rate or clickthrough rate, to measure how well a blog, product page, or social media post is doing. You'll need to become familiar with tools like SEMRush and Google Analytics, as well as business intelligence tools like Tableau and Looker to generate and analyze data from your organization.
Read more: What Is SEO Marketing? + How to Improve Your SEO
2. Content marketing
Content marketing connects with target audiences through original content, such as blogs, articles, and newsletters. It is often used to raise brand awareness through material that appeals to a particular audience.
Content marketing can take many forms across a range of digital media channels, including:
Informative articles and blog posts
Original videos
Podcasts
Newsletters (like Substack, Medium, or LinkedIn)
Read more: How to Develop a Content Strategy: Step-by-Step Guide
3. Email marketing
Marketers send out timely emails to large groups of people who have signed up for their contact list to inform potential customers of sales, discounts, and product launches. The impact of email marketing is clear: When used strategically, it can have an average return on investment (ROI) of 4,200 percent for every dollar invested [4].
Some common examples of emailing marketing include:
Timed emails that raise brand awareness during holiday seasons
Blast emails that inform recipients about upcoming sales events
Targeted emails that send personalized offers and messages to specific groups on an email list
4. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a digital marketing model that involves an advertiser paying a publisher each time their ads are clicked. Typically, the publisher is a website owner, search engine operator, or social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram.
Typical examples of PPC advertising include:
Banner ads that flank web content on the sides or top of the page
Social media ads that appear in the feeds of targeted audiences
Ads that appear when a specific keyword is searched on a search engine, such as Google
5. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that uses social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, to reach customers. It leverages the reach of social media channels with data-driven efforts to reach targeted consumers.
Whether through computers, mobile devices, or mobile apps, social media offers the opportunity to reach a wide—and targeted—audience of possible consumers.
Examples of social media marketing include:
Videos posted onto social media as a part of a larger campaign, such as this 80s-themed music video produced by peanut company Planters for the holidays
Pictures posted on Instagram that reflect a brand’s identity, such as Patagonia’s nature-filled Instagram account
Watch this video to get a glimpse at how you can use YouTube to reach audiences.
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