What is digital marketing? A visual summary of 18 key techniques.

 

Dr. Dave Chaffey, author of Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice explains a process to achieve success by focusing on the 18 most important digital marketing techniques

Simply put, our definition of digital marketing, or online marketing, is:

"Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology."

Within this broad digital marketing definition, there are many vital channels and platforms that we will introduce and share strategies and tactics for in this article, as well as the key digital marketing KPIs and metrics for success.

Our globally acclaimed RACE Framework is a digital marketing structure that enables marketers to plan, manage, and optimize all aspects of their customers' online and offline brand experiences.

For businesses to compete effectively today, it’s essential that they use digital marketing to support their business and marketing strategies. Each one of us now spends several hours each day using digital media, whether we’re looking for entertainment, social interaction or seeking new products.

Businesses and brands that don’t have the right digital tactics shown in the visual within their marketing communications programs miss out on opportunities to influence consumers at key online touchpoints.

 Growth in the use of digital media and technology has led to new customer journeys or paths to purchase that are highly complex as purchase decisions are potentially influenced by many touchpoints which can be used by digital marketing.

Our customer lifecycle visual summarizes how the potential paid, owned, and earned digital media channels or communications tools offline may influence purchases across the customer lifecycle.

Note that TOFU, MOFU, MOFU refers to Top, middle and bottom-of-funnel content where content is used to support nurturing through the customer lifecycle.

This visual is aimed at helping businesses audit their use of digital marketing as part of a 'situation gap analysis' where they can review whether they are using, or are investing sufficiently, in the most appropriate 'always-on' digital communications to achieve their goals across the RACE planning framework created by Smart Insights.

It highlights some of the many online marketing channels businesses can integrate to get the best results from digital marketing today. While some channels such as social media and SEO are well known, in our experience, we find that some potential always-on marketing techniques such as ad and email retargeting and influencer outreach shown in the visual are used less widely.

What is digital marketing?

In my book, I simply define digital marketing as:

Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data and technology.

This short definition helps remind us that it is the results delivered by technology that should determine investment in digital marketing, not the adoption of the technology! We also need to remember that despite the popularity of digital devices for product selection, entertainment, and work, we still spend a lot of time in the real world, so integration with traditional media remains important in many sectors.

In practice, digital marketing focuses on managing different forms of online company presence, such as company websites, mobile apps and social media company pages, integrated with different online communications techniques introduced later in this explainer. These include search engine marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, online advertising, email marketing and partnership arrangements with other websites.

The fundamentals of digital marketing we explain in this article remain fully applicable in 2023, but there are always new innovations that give opportunities. Read my recent blog post on 2023 digital marketing trends to learn about the latest innovations.

For the past 15 years, Smart Insights has specialized in helping marketers learn a more structured, strategic, data-driven approach to digital marketing.

Online marketing can be considered to be equivalent to Internet marketing and Digital Marketing. Most in the industry would look at it this way.

However, digital marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope than online marketing since it refers to digital media such as web, e-mail and wireless media, but also includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management systems (E-CRM systems).

Read more in our Essential guide to Online Marketing Strategy.

18 key types of digital marketing techniques across 6 media channels

There are many online communications techniques that marketers must prioritize to include as part of their communications strategy. Marketers often use paid, owned and earned media to describe investments at a high-level, but it’s more common to refer to six specific digital media channels when selecting specific always-on and campaign investments.

To simplify prioritization, we recommend considering the paid, owned and earned techniques available within six digital media channels or communications tools shown in the next visual. Combining the techniques in this way gives 18 digital communications techniques for businesses to consider. Companies with limited budget for paid media can focus on Owned and Earned techniques.

6 digital marketing media channels

The six main digital channels available to any business and paid, owned and earned media options within these are:

1 Search engine marketing

Gaining visibility on a search engine to encourage click-through to a website when the user types a specific keyword phrase. Two key search marketing techniques are paid placements using pay-per-click via Google Ads or Bing, and placements in the natural or organic listings using search engine optimisation (SEO) where no charge is made for clicks from the search engine.

SEO can be considered owned media since it involves on-page optimisation by improving the relevance of content and technical improvements to the website to improve crawlability monitored through Google Search Console. SEO also has an Earned media component where visibility in the search engines can be improved by getting relevant ‘backlinks’ from websites which effectively count as a citation or vote.

2 Social media marketing

This includes both paid advertising on social networks and organic social media amplification where companies aim to gain visibility through content shared by social media feeds and pages which are owned media. Earned social media is where a brand or social update is shared by a publisher or partner.

Social media marketing is an important category of digital marketing that involves encouraging customer communications on a company’s own site, or social presences such as Facebook or Twitter or in specialist publisher sites, blogs and forums. It can be applied as a traditional broadcast medium – for example, companies can use Facebook or Twitter to send messages to customers or partners who have opted in.

3 Display advertising

Use of online ad formats such as banners and videos on publisher sites to achieve brand awareness and encourage click-through to a target site. These are usually considered as separate investments from paid search and paid social ads since ads are typically displayed on publisher sites.

Programmatic display refers to where media and target audiences are selected by trading or bidding against other advertisers. Whereas native advertising involves paying to publish content that appears on a media site rather than a banner ad. It’s similar to when companies pay for features on pages in newspapers.

Display advertising is similar to sponsorship and in both cases, there may be a long-term relationship where a brand pays for its name to be associated with a publisher or event.

4 Digital PR

Involves maximizing favourable ‘offsite’ mentions of your company, brands, and products by other organizations and people, especially media sites or influencers such as celebrities.

Mentions may create name awareness, but have the benefit that they can also drive visits through links and support SEO through backlinks. These mentions may occur on publisher websites, blogs or social networks, and podcasts accessed by your target audience.

Guest-blogging involves writing an article for which no fee is typically charged on another business's website. It’s often a reciprocal arrangement.

Influencer outreach is used in both B2B and B2C communications. It usually refers to working with individuals rather than publishers to gain mentions through their social media, blogs or podcasts.

Digital PR also includes responding to negative or positive online brand mentions and conducting public relations via a site through a social media news centre or blog, for example.

5 Digital partnerships

Creating and managing long-term arrangements to promote your online services on third-party websites or through website content and messaging. Affiliate marketing involves a commission-based arrangement where the advertiser only pays when a sale occurs. It’s most applicable to the retail, travel, and financial services sector where an affiliate website will get paid for traffic when an online sale occurs.

Co-branding is a paid or owned media technique where two brands are featured within email marketing or native advertising. Co-marketing is similar, but it is a ‘contra’ arrangement for which no fee is usually paid when companies collaborate to share content with the aim of raising awareness and leads amongst the pooled audiences.

For example, we set up a co-marketing arrangement for publisher Smart Insights with martech vendor HubSpot where joint research reports were created to raise awareness and generate leads for both brands. HubSpot has dedicated co-marketing managers in different regions to manage this activity since they see it as important.

See their post The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing if you're not familiar with them.

6 Digital messaging

Traditionally digital messaging to individuals who have subscribed to updates has focused on Email marketing, which is still a commonly used digital media channel since it is cost-effective. However, email is used less by younger audiences who are more likely to subscribe to mobile push notifications from websites and apps.

Digital messaging options include placing ads in third-party e-newsletters (paid media) or most commonly the use of an in-house list for customer activation and retention (owned media) or co-marketing techniques using other companies newsletters. Buying or renting lists of email addresses is considered as a spamming technique and not permitted under the privacy legislation described.

The benefits of digital marketing

Success in digital marketing requires you to choose a good set of digital marketing goals covering a range of different measures to help set, review and control performance across all digital marketing activities.

We recommend you consider these 5S goals and specific SMART objectives to ensure your digital marketing investments give you the returns you need. The 5Ss of digital marketing were devised by PR Smith and are explained in our Digital Marketing Excellence book.