What is Digital Marketing?

Simply put, digital marketing is all the types of marketing you will find on the internet or on electronic devices. But within that statement, there are lots of smaller fields that make up the digital marketing umbrella.

Even if you don’t work in digital marketing, most of us are bombarded with digital marketing efforts constantly. It’s the display network advertisements popping up in your Facebook news feed reminding you of online shops and items you’ve viewed, it’s the articles that tempt you to visit a website in google when you ask a question. That’s just two examples of digital marketing each of us encounter on a daily basis, but what are the others?

What are the different types of digital marketing?

SEM marketing (SEO and PPC)

Search Engine Marketing is the idea of getting your website to rank high up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) through either organic or paid means. When we talk about ranking organically, it means we are using Search Engine Optimisation techniques to improve rankings whereas Pay Per Click enables you to pay for advertisements that are placed above the organic search rankings. An easy way to remember is SEO is free (in terms of money) and PPC is paid.

In the image below, the top two results are Pay Per Click ads whilst the third result is the top organic result.

Both SEO and PPC utilise keywords - you chose the keywords you want to rank for to drive people to your site. For example, on this blog I want to rank for searches related to digital marketing and online marketing, so if I were to run some PPC ads on Google Ads, those are the terms I would target. In order to rank for those terms organically, I spend time writing content related to those terms, such as this very article, and link build so that search engines recognise that my site is trustworthy. Behind the scenes, my site structure has to be good to ensure it is able to be crawled and indexed - you can have the best content in the world but if it cannot be crawled it cannot be indexed by search engines like Google.

SEO is a huge area of digital marketing that is a discipline all on its own and involves a lot of work. From technical SEO that focuses on site structure, speed and the ability for search engines to index your site to traditional SEO that focuses on keywords and link building, it’s a vast area of digital marketing.

Social media marketing

Many of us use social media in our personal lives and know what it’s like to be targeted by businesses through our feeds. Businesses who utilise social media well can hugely impact their conversion. Although probably best used by B2C companies, there is a place on social media for most businesses, it’s all about finding which platform is best suited for your messaging and where you can find your customers. For example, an obvious choice for a B2B business would be LinkedIn.

When I see an effective social media campaign or a viral post that everyone is talking about, the company involved isn’t usually “selling”. They are providing valuable, shareable content to their followers. Think brands like ASOS, they have a huge social media following and high engagement, but they rarely post items or links as a hard sell.

For social media marketing, find the platform(s) your audience uses and consistently post and share things relevant to that audience. Selling and promoting your products and services is fine, but it shouldn’t be the main part of your feed in order to be effective.

Content marketing

Content marketing is extremely valuable and shifts the focus from your products and services to how you add value through useful and relevant content. Useful and relevant are the key terms here. For example, if you had a business that sold camping gear, there would be no point writing or blogging an article about the weather, but an article talking about how to identify the best camping gear for hot weather or rainy weather etc. could prove useful to your target audience, promoting you as a trusted source in the industry and the first place they think of next time they require camping equipment.

Email marketing

Email marketing is one of my favourite digital marketing strategies as it is very cost effective and can yield fantastic results for businesses. For a start, the people in your database should have already shown an interest in your product or service, and depending on how much you have segmented your data the ways in which you can tailor your messaging to people is endless. From abandoned checkout emails to helpful guides and advice, email marketing possibilities are substantial and with a low investment and a bit of time you can generate reasonable income from your email marketing communications.

Video marketing

How many videos have you watched on your Facebook or Instagram feeds today? And that’s without thinking about purely video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. We love video, so why not use it as part of your marketing strategy? There’s a huge amount of different types of videos you can do to add value to your brand.

I think videos are also great for adding a face to your brand. In the internet age, particularly in ecommerce, it can be hard to show the people behind the business, video marketing is a great way to show the personality of your brand. From creating tutorial videos for your products or a video of your employees showing what it’s like to work for you, video marketing can assist with all aspects of business from converting sales to recruitment.

Influencer marketing and affiliate marketing

Although these are two separate aspects of digital marketing, there is a link in which a lot of influencers use affiliate marketing to generate income through social media marketing. Influencer marketing was virtually unheard of a few years ago, its closest relative in traditional marketing would be ambassador marketing, where brands would have brand ambassadors endorse their products. Influencer marketing is similar, but often is self-built individual brands on social media platforms such as Instagram.

An common example of influencer marketing and how it began was often through fashion and beauty brands that would send products to bloggers and vloggers to review and post about to their followers. These days influencer marketing has grown exponentially and can be used to market almost anything. I’ve seen influencers sent on holidays to post about hotels, influencers who have had their homes renovated by companies who want to display what they do to their followers.

Where affiliate marketing fits in here is a lot of influencers use affiliate marketing to generate income from their followers buying things they recommend. They will generate an affiliate link which they share and once a follower buys they earn a percentage of that sale.

TV advertising

TV advertising is one of the first forms of digital marketing and one of the ways we link with traditional advertising alongside print and radio. We are all familiar with TV advertising which can often be costly for newer brands and companies to utilise. Today digital TV is experimenting with new ways to target consumers by including personal information in the ad, such as those found on All 4 where you have to be logged in. TV ads still have their place but I would argue they aren’t as effective as they once were and aren’t accessible for the vast majority of companies.

Radio advertising

With radio now being digital radio ads are also classed as a form of digital marketing. Having an advertisement on radio is a lot more accessible than TV, with many regional stations offering affordable options for local businesses. Other digital radio options such as Spotify also have a place for ads, enabling advertisers to better target different audiences and locations.

That concludes our introduction to digital marketing, stay tuned where we will explore some of these areas in more detail 👀