Digital Marketing: Definition + Strategies

With the ability to track granular data like media exposures, sales, and geolocation, you can derive actionable insights that can inform decisions and guide marketing efforts in the future. Affiliate marketing has proved so effective for attracting customers and increasing sales that during a survey, 90% of businesses who run an affiliate program stated it was a key part of their digital marketing strategy. Pay-per-click is a form of paid advertising that allows marketing teams to essentially purchase traffic to their website. Marketers place ads on websites or search engines such as Google and Microsoft Bing, and pay a fee each time their ad is clicked on.

Yarilet Perez is an experienced multimedia journalist and fact-checker with a Master of Science in Journalism. She has worked in multiple cities covering breaking news, politics, education, and more. Her expertise is in personal finance and investing, and real estate. There are also the back-end metrics like return on investment , return on ad spend , first- and multi-touch attribution, and lifetime customer value . Read more about mistakes to avoid when creating PPC advertising campaigns. Many companies don't get to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don't always get complete results.

Review metrics regularly, so you know where you are excelling and where you need work to become a leader in this high-impact, high-demand space. With B2B marketing, a business may have to convince several stakeholders — you could be selling building materials directly to large construction companies and in competition with similar providers. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand's story.

Target your messages based on people's purchase behavior, app activity, and more. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision. Great for lead generation as they're generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy. On top of connecting social accounts for posting purposes, you can also integrate your social media inboxes into HubSpot, so you can get your direct messages in one place.

A recent report by Hootsuite estimated there were more than 3.4 billion active users on social media platforms, a 9% increase from 2018. A 2019 survey by The Manifest states that 74% of social media users follow brands on social sites, and 96% of people who follow Digtal Marketinf businesses also engage with those brands on social platforms. According to Deloitte, one in three U.S. consumers are influenced by social media when buying a product, while 47% of millennials factor their interaction with a brand on social when making a purchase.

Digital marketing was popularized in the early 2000s, but digital marketing has been around much longer. Maybe you think you have a local store, so you don’t need to worry about digital marketing. We operate in 135+ countries and work with the global marketing teams of blue-chip brands and with the world's leading education brands. Investopedia requires writers to use primary sources to support their work.

There are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage. Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you've ever put an advertisement in a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad.