What is digital marketing?

What does digital marketing include?

Most of it falls into six channels. Each does a different job, and few businesses need all of them at once.

• The website. Where every other channel sends people. Getting more of those visitors to enquire is called conversion rate optimisation.
• Search engine optimisation. Being found in the normal search results without paying for each visit.
• Paid search. Adverts beside those results, bought through PPC.
• Social media. Posts and adverts on the platforms your customers use. Keeping that going week after week is social media management.
• Email. Staying in touch with people who already know you. Our guide covers what email marketing is.
• AI search. Being named when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation.

How is digital marketing different from traditional marketing?

A newspaper advert reaches everyone who buys the paper, and you rarely learn who acted on it. A digital campaign can be shown only to the people likely to care, changed the same day, and traced through to the enquiry it produced. The principles are the same, and you find out sooner whether it worked.

Which channel should a business start with?

Usually the website, because every other channel depends on it. After that the answer follows the market. If people already search for what you sell, search comes first. If they do not yet know they need it, social media and email do more.

How is digital marketing measured?

By what it brought in. Visits, clicks and followers are steps along the way. The figures that matter to a business are enquiries, sales and what each one cost to win.

Do the channels work better together?

They do, when one plan decides what each is for. That plan is the marketing strategy, and running the channels against it is integrated marketing.