Digital marketing is the use of online channels, devices and data to reach buyers and persuade them to act. It covers search, social media, email, content, display and video advertising, and the websites those channels send people to. Digital marketing is one part of marketing, not the whole of it.

The difference matters because many marketers today learned the job through digital channels. 53.8 per cent of marketers had no marketing qualification in Marketing Week's 2019 Career and Salary Survey of 4,415 marketers. Plenty of them are skilled channel specialists. What most were never taught is how a business decides who to sell to, what to offer and at what price, before any channel is switched on.

What Digital Marketing Covers

Digital marketing is usually described as a list of channels. Each channel reaches buyers at a different point, and each one is good at a different job.

• Search engine optimisation (SEO) improves your website so it appears in unpaid search results and, increasingly, in AI-generated answers.
• Paid search shows ads against the words people type into a search engine, and you pay when someone clicks. It captures demand that already exists. More in paid search in B2B.
• Paid social places ads on social platforms, targeted by job, company, interest or behaviour. It reaches people who aren't searching yet. More in paid social in B2B.
• Display and programmatic advertising buys banner and native ads automatically across many websites.
• Online video runs ads before or within video content.
• Email marketing sends messages to people who have given you their address, usually customers and prospects already in your database.
• Content marketing publishes articles, guides, research and video that help buyers understand a problem.
• Influencer and affiliate marketing pays people or partner websites to recommend your product.

B2B marketers use two more. Review sites and marketplaces are where buyers compare suppliers before they shortlist. Account-based advertising shows ads to people who work at a named list of target companies. How each channel works, and what it can't do, is covered in How B2B Media Actually Works.

Where Digital Marketing Sits Inside Marketing

Kotler and Armstrong define marketing as engaging customers and managing profitable customer relationships. They describe the work as a sequence: understand the market and what customers need, design a marketing strategy, build a marketing programme, build relationships with customers, and capture value from those customers as profit.

The strategy step is where a business chooses which customers to serve and how it will stand apart from competitors. That work is segmentation, targeting, differentiation and positioning. The programme step comes after the strategy step. The programme is the marketing mix, often called the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.

Digital marketing sits mostly inside promotion, which is how a business communicates with buyers. Some digital marketing sits inside place, which is where and how buyers can buy, such as an online store or a free trial sign-up page. Digital marketing doesn't cover the strategy decisions that come before the marketing mix.

Digital marketing also doesn't cover product or price decisions, even when the product itself is digital, such as software, an app or an online course. Deciding what the software includes, and what it costs, is a product and pricing decision, whoever makes it. A digital marketer may run tests on a pricing page or a free trial sign-up flow, and the results are useful evidence for the business stakeholder who sets the price. The business stakeholder still makes the pricing decision, based on the value customers see in the product, what competitors charge and what the business needs to earn.

These marketing decisions sit outside digital marketing altogether:

• which market segments exist, and how buyers in each segment differ
• which segments the business will serve, and which it won't
• what the business wants buyers to think of it, compared with competitors
• what the product includes, and what it leaves out
• what the product costs, and how the pricing is structured

Each of these decisions limits what a digital campaign can achieve. Paid search can't fix a price buyers think is too high. A well-run social campaign can't make up for a position that sounds the same as every competitor's. The decisions themselves are explained in Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning.

What Digital Marketing Promises, and What the Evidence Shows

Introductions to digital marketing usually claim it gives you exact measurement, precise targeting and lower costs, because you only pay to reach the people who matter. Each claim is partly true. Each claim also has a limit that should change how you spend the budget.

Is digital marketing more measurable?

Digital channels record clicks, visits, form fills and sales. They don't record whether the ad caused any of them. When eBay switched off paid search ads on searches for its own brand name, almost all of that traffic arrived through the unpaid search results instead. The ads had been taking credit for sales that would have happened anyway. Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko and Steven Tadelis published the experiment in Econometrica in 2015.

A digital report tells you what happened after someone saw an ad. Only a test, where you switch an ad off for some people and compare the results, tells you what the ad added. The difference is explained in attribution vs incrementality.

Is digital targeting precise?

Ad platforms let you choose an audience by age, gender, job title, industry or interest. The data behind those audiences is less accurate than the menu suggests. Audience segments sold as male identified men correctly only about half the time in field studies of third-party data, which is close to a random guess. Nico Neumann, Catherine Tucker and Timothy Whitfield published the research in Marketing Science in 2019.

The job title and company data used in B2B targeting is also inferred, and it can be out of date. Narrow targeting settings don't guarantee you reach the people you selected.

Is narrow targeting cheaper than broad reach?

Narrow targeting looks efficient because every impression goes to someone who seems likely to buy soon. In B2B, most of the companies that will buy from you in the next few years aren't in the market today. If your budget only reaches buyers who are ready now, the rest won't know your name when they start looking. The research behind this is set out in the 95:5 rule in B2B marketing.

Can you change campaigns in real time?

Yes, and it's useful. You can pause an ad, change a bid or test new copy within an hour. The risk is that quick changes chase the numbers you can see this week, such as clicks and form fills, at the expense of results that take months, such as pipeline and revenue. A B2B sales cycle can run for many months, so this week's numbers rarely tell you whether a campaign is working.

Digital Marketing vs Marketing: Two Answers to the Same Problem

For example, a company that sells scheduling software to hospitals and clinics sees free trial sign-ups fall by a third in one quarter. The paid search specialist is asked to fix it.

The digital marketing answer is to work on the channels. The specialist raises bids on the best keywords, writes new ads, adds retargeting for people who visited the pricing page, and tests a shorter sign-up form. Each change is sensible, and together they may lift sign-ups for a few weeks.

The marketing answer starts by asking what changed. The specialist looks at who is signing up and finds the fall comes almost entirely from small clinics. A competitor launched a cheaper plan for small clinics the quarter before. The problem is now price and positioning, not bids. The business stakeholder has to decide whether small clinics are a segment worth keeping. If they are, the business has to choose whether to change the price, the product, or the way it explains its value to small clinics. Once that decision is made, the paid search account has a clear job.

A digital specialist who can find the real cause, and take it to the business stakeholder, is worth more to the business than one who can only tune the account.

How Digital Marketers Can Learn the Rest of Marketing

Learn the marketing process, not only the channels. Understand segmentation, targeting, positioning and the marketing mix, and the order they come in. Marketing strategy vs marketing plan vs tactics explains where each decision belongs.

Ask which segment and position each campaign supports. If nobody can tell you, the campaign started without a strategy. Raise it with the business stakeholder who asked for the campaign before you build it. A strategic business brief sets out the questions to ask.

Report channel numbers next to business numbers. Put clicks, cost per lead and conversion rates beside pipeline, revenue and customer retention, so you can see whether the channel numbers move the business numbers. Paid media metrics shows how to connect them.

Test whether your channels cause results. Switch a channel off in some regions or for some audiences, keep it on elsewhere, and compare. A test like this, called a holdout test, shows what the channel adds.

Get a grounding in marketing fundamentals. A marketing qualification or a fundamentals course teaches the decisions that digital training leaves out. Those decisions are what senior marketing roles are judged on. For paid media specialists, the PPC career path sets out what to learn next. For every channel specialist, how to move from digital marketing into marketing strategy sets out the decisions to learn and the roles that lead there.

FAQ

Is digital marketing the same as marketing? No. Digital marketing is the use of online channels and data to reach and persuade buyers. Marketing also covers understanding the market, choosing which customers to serve, deciding the position, and setting the product and the price.

What are the main types of digital marketing? Search engine optimisation, paid search, paid social, display and programmatic advertising, online video, email marketing, content marketing, and influencer and affiliate marketing. B2B marketers also use review sites and account-based advertising.

Is digital marketing part of the marketing mix? Yes. Most digital marketing sits inside promotion. Online stores and sign-up pages sit inside place. Digital marketing doesn't cover product or price decisions, even when the product is digital.

Do I need a marketing qualification to work in digital marketing? Many digital marketers work without one. A qualification or a fundamentals course is the quickest way to learn the strategy decisions that come before the channels, and those decisions matter more as you move into senior roles.

Learn the Decisions That Come Before the Channels

Digital marketing is how a business reaches buyers online. Marketing decides which buyers to reach, what to offer them, at what price, and what the business should stand for. If you learned the channels first, the next step is the decisions that come before them. B2B Marketing Fundamentals covers those decisions in order, and ends with a one-page growth strategy for your own business.

Sources

• Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, Principles of Marketing. Source of the definition of marketing, the marketing process from understanding the market through to capturing value, and the marketing mix.
• Marketing Week, Career and Salary Survey 2019, 4,415 marketers. Source of the 53.8 per cent with no marketing-related academic or professional qualification. marketingweek.com
• Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko and Steven Tadelis, "Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large-Scale Field Experiment", Econometrica, 2015. Source of the eBay brand search experiment. doi.org/10.3982/ECTA12423
• Nico Neumann, Catherine Tucker and Timothy Whitfield, "How Effective Is Third-Party Consumer Profiling and Audience Delivery? Evidence from Field Studies", Marketing Science, 2019. Source of the finding on the accuracy of gender audience segments. papers.ssrn.com