Digital marketing is no longer optional — it’s essential. Whether you’re a start-up or a global enterprise, digital marketing offers the tools to connect with customers, build brand awareness, and drive growth in a competitive marketplace.

This guide breaks down everything you need to know about digital marketing: its core principles, types, and how to implement strategies that deliver results.

In this guide:

• What is digital marketing?
• The benefits of digital marketing
• Is digital marketing the same as online marketing?
• Types of digital marketing
• How to do digital marketing
• Rely on a powerful platform for your digital marketing efforts

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of digital channels to market products to boost brand awareness, drive traffic, and hit marketing goals. 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. It relies on consumer data to find a business’s target audience and deliver the most relevant messaging possible.

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 difference between B2B and B2C digital marketing.

• 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.

Regardless of whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, digital marketing can help you get to know your audience, understand their pain points, and provide metrics that will give your marketing team credibility. Benefits include:

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, seamlessly.

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.

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.

Easier personalization for customers.

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, you can segment customers based on their demographics and customize your messaging for each segment.

Opportunity to engage with customers at various stages.

With digital marketing, you can engage with 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.

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.

Aligns digital marketing efforts with business goals.

An aligned digital marketing strategy means your digital marketing efforts meet and work with your wider strategic goals such as revenue growth, brand awareness and customer retention. With digital marketing, you can focus on the right tactics for your company, refine strategies and set realistic marketing goals using data, and track important metrics across teams.

Is digital marketing the same as online marketing?

Importantly, digital marketing is not the same as online or internet marketing. Instead, these terms are a subset of digital marketing. Let’s explore these terms further.

Digital marketing.

As the umbrella term, digital marketing uses any digital channel, including television, radio, and digital billboards, as well as any marketing methods that rely on a phone, tablet, or computer and the internet. Marketing that requires the internet also falls into the more specific category of online or internet marketing.

Online or internet marketing.

A subset of digital marketing, online or internet marketing includes email, social media, SEO, and pay-per-click (PPC). The terms online marketing and internet marketing are interchangeable.

Challenges in digital marketing.

While digital marketing offers numerous benefits, it also comes with its own hurdles you need to navigate. Don’t let unforeseen challenges trip you up — try to be aware of the following:

• Changing algorithms. Platforms like Google and social media frequently update their algorithms, which can affect your SEO, paid campaigns, and visibility.
• Data privacy and compliance. With regulations like GDPR and CCPA, businesses must carefully handle customer data to stay compliant.
• Competition. Digital marketing has a low entry barrier, making it easy for competitors to flood channels and reduce visibility.
• Measuring ROI. While digital marketing offers analytics, tying specific campaigns to ROI can still be challenging, particularly for long-term strategies.
• Customer trust. With so much content available, gaining trust can be difficult. Brands need to deliver value and consistency to stand out.

By understanding these challenges, businesses can adapt their strategies and overcome obstacles with proactive solutions.

12 types of digital marketing.

There are many forms of digital marketing, from web pages to social media platforms and content creation. Some key types include:

Owned media.

1. Content marketing.

Content marketing aims to educate and share value to readers instead of promoting a product or service. It isn’t outwardly promotional 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. Content marketing forms include:

• Blog posts
• eBooks
• Newsletters
• 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.

2. Email marketing.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing where you reach out to your customers through strategic email messages. Email marketing can take many forms, but the more common types of emails businesses send include blog subscriptions, newsletters, welcome emails, and post-purchase follow-ups.

Best practices to get more out of your email marketing campaigns:

• Include the recipient’s 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.
• Integrate transactional and promotional emails.

3. 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 results page (SERP) for a specific set of keyword terms. Some important terms include:

• On-page SEO. With the right list of target keywords, you can optimize your web copy to answer your audience’s most important questions.
• Off-page SEO. The ways you can garner external attention to your website. This generally focuses on gathering quality backlinks to your site.
• Technical SEO. Monitors the back end of your website and the coding of each page. Considers page speed, image compression, and metadata.

Paid media.

4. Search engine marketing (SEM).

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 Microsoft 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.

5. Affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing 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.

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.

6. Pay per click (PPC).

With pay-per-click advertising you pay every time someone clicks on your ad. Google Ads is the most popular PPC platform for search engines, but Microsoft Ads, Meta Ads, YouTube Ads, and Amazon Ads are also valuable platforms for PPC.

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.

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.

Earned media.

7. Social media marketing.

Social media marketing promotes your business organically through various social networks. It is effective for digital marketing because it gives businesses the power to chat with their most engaged followers one –on one. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) are the most popular social platforms.

Here are some best practices to increase your reach on social media:

• Know your audience, including their favorite social media platforms.
• Produce engaging, high-quality content.
• Respond to comments and questions within 24 hours, if possible.
• Stick to a consistent posting schedule.

The more your audience is inspired to engage with your content, the more likely they are to share it.

8. Influencer marketing.

With influencer marketing, brands 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.

But influencer marketing doesn’t involve profit sharing. Instead, you typically pay the influencer a flat fee in exchange for promoting your product.

With an average engagement rate of nearly 16% on platforms like TikTok, it’s no wonder why more brands are embracing influencer marketing.

Tips to make the most of influencer marketing:

• Partner with influencers with familiarity to your industry and a good reputation.
• Establish a clear and precise written agreement for compensation.
• Provide the influencer with clear guidelines on language, tone, and logistics.

9. Native advertising.

Native advertising 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.

Shoppers assume paid ads are biased and ignore them, so native ads are advertisers’ answer to declining conversion rates. For example, a business with a native ad might design it to look like a typical Facebook post.

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.

Other marketing.

10. Marketing automation.

Marketing automation streamlines marketing tasks by automating them. This type of digital marketing uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to power digital marketing campaigns. Marketing automation handles mundane and repetitive tasks so marketers can focus on high-level strategy and creativity instead.

Typical marketing automation tasks include:

• Streamlining tasks and workflows.
• Measuring results.
• Calculating campaign ROI.

With automation, you can analyze larger amounts of customer data in little time. Use these insights to create better, more personalized campaigns.

11. Mobile marketing.

Mobile marketing is 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 often 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.

12. Video marketing.

In video marketing you promote your business through either long-form or short-form video. 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 it isn’t primarily a social network — it’s a search engine.

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.

How to do digital marketing.

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

1. Define your goals.

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. 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)

Regardless of the goals you set, it’s easier to develop effective digital marketing strategies when you have realistic goals first.

2. Identify your target audience.

Next, 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.

3. 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. 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.

4. Select your digital marketing channels.

With a budget in place, it’s time to decide on which channels you’ll focus your digital marketing efforts. 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.

Since you know your target audience at this stage, opt for the channels they use the most. For example, if you’re targeting Gen Z college students, you would go for platforms like TikTok instead of Facebook.

5. Optimize your digital assets for mobile.

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.

6. 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.

7. Create cohesive campaigns across multiple channels.

Don’t think of digital marketing strategies as tools to use in isolation — they can often work better together. For example, you may not want to focus solely on TikTok — even if your core audience is there. By utilizing the right technology, you can track data across multiple channels in a central location.

Digital marketing trends for the future.

The digital marketing landscape is evolving rapidly. Here are key trends shaping its future:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. AI tools will continue optimizing tasks like personalization, content creation, and analytics.
• Voice search and smart devices. With tools like Alexa and Siri, optimizing content for voice search will become a crucial way to reach people.
• Interactive content. Polls, quizzes, and interactive videos are becoming popular for boosting user engagement — especially on social media.
• Personalization at scale. Businesses are leveraging data to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to individual customers.
• Sustainability and ethical marketing. Consumers increasingly favor brands that align with environmental and social causes.

Staying on top of these trends will ensure your marketing strategies remain competitive and relevant in a rapidly changing digital landscape.

Rely on a powerful platform for your digital 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 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.