What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing utilizes digital technologies, channels, and strategies to promote or market products, brands, or services and connect with customers.

It covers several digital activities and tactics—you can analyze anything from social media to email and search behaviors to help you better understand your customers and drive business growth.

Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on print, radio, and TV, digital marketing is data-driven and internet-based.

Many businesses still use the classic channels, but digital tactics usually take priority—they offer greater reach, better targeting, and are more measurable.

This may include using elements such as:

• Online ads
• Content campaigns
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Social media
• Email nurtures
• Influencer partnerships
• Mobile apps
• AI-supported strategies.

Digital marketers must also stay aware of emerging formats and platforms. By expanding your toolbox, you can find more effective ways to reach customers and promote your business online.

A well-implemented digital marketing strategy delivers fantastic results.

A solid strategy concentrates on collecting and properly using data so you can clearly see how much impact and value your marketing efforts drive.

Here’s why adopting and prioritizing digital marketing is beneficial.

Reach

A major advantage of digital marketing is expanded reach. By utilizing online channels and social media, you can promote your products and services and make messaging available to a much wider audience, no matter where they are.

This means that even small businesses can cost-effectively connect with targeted niche groups worldwide, opening up unprecedented access to broad audiences.

Targeting

Advanced targeting capabilities enable you to fine-tune your marketing to resonate with specific customer demographics, interests, behaviors, and intent signals.

Digital analytics and user data support more personalized and effective segmentation across different channels. Targeting reduces waste and drives better results by focusing budgets on your highest potential customers.

Measurable results

Digital marketing data and metrics help you clearly track engagement, conversions, and sales impact.

You can measure indicators like click-through rates on ads, time spent on pages, email open rates, changes in sales volume, and more. Then, you can analyze these quantifiable results to optimize future strategies.

Greater ROI

Thanks to expanded reach, precise targeting, and measurability, digital marketing can drive substantial return on investment (ROI) for marketing budgets.

You can allocate your budget toward the platforms, campaigns, and segments that drive the highest conversion value.

Advanced analytics tools also help guide resource allocation by attributing each conversion to a specific interaction and channel.

Continuously analyzing this data and applying predictive modeling helps enhance your digital marketing efforts and improve your ROI over time.

Digital marketing is a broad term. To make it easier to track and analyze, we often divide it into different categories.

Depending on your goals and business, you can then focus your skills on these specialized areas.

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular types.

Growth marketing

Growth marketers specialize in rapidly expanding business revenues by attracting and converting new leads into customers.

Using data and constant testing, you can identify the most effective channels and tactics to fuel growth.

Email, social media ads, SEO, and pay-per-click ads are common tools for refining the funnel from awareness to conversion and retention.

SaaS marketing

SaaS companies use marketing to communicate products’ features, benefits, pricing, and value proposition to prospects. Common tactics include content marketing, free trials, and product demos.

Given the longer sales cycles of SaaS businesses, the main focus is usually on generating qualified leads and pipeline growth. Retention through customer success and expansion is also a key priority.

Ecommerce marketing

Ecommerce marketing relies heavily on SEO and online listings to ensure findability and drive traffic to online stores. Providing a smooth, conversion-optimized website experience is also vital for encouraging shoppers to purchase.

Search ads, product feeds, affiliate programs, and email nurture campaigns are top tactics for motivating orders. Key metrics, including traffic, conversions, and sales, are usually related to direct response.

Product marketing

Product marketers create positioning and messaging to differentiate and promote their products. This requires an in-depth understanding of target users, market landscape, and competitors.

Content, events, and public relations (PR) can help establish your brand as the ‘go-to’ in its field. Product marketers also often work closely with sales teams, product developers, and data analysts.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) improves website visibility in organic search engine results pages through stronger content, site enhancements, backlinks, and authority.

You can attract more searchers by analyzing top search queries and optimizing your content for relevance, usefulness, authority, and trust. Link building and technical improvements are also involved.

Higher-ranking pages lead to increased website traffic and brand visibility. Most marketing strategies depend heavily on SEO for sustainable reach, with 49% of marketers reporting that organic search has the best ROI of any channel.

Pay per Click marketing

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising puts brands directly in front of motivated users when they search for relevant topics or terms. It’s mostly used on search engines and social media, where you can pay for every click or tap your promoted page or ad gets.

Certain tools can optimize paid ad campaigns to drive more conversions at the lowest viable cost-per-click. PPC reportedly brings in $2 for every $1 spent, making it a potentially profitable investment for businesses.

You can measure the success of PPC marketing by click-through rates, cost per conversion, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend.

Social media marketing

Building an engaged community of followers on different social platforms enables you to increase brand awareness, foster loyal fans, and generate peer sharing or influencer partnerships.

Both organic and paid social reach can expand exposure and drive website visits. Content creation, community management, and meaningful conversations are pivotal.

Social media is now a major focus for companies, accounting for a third of all digital ad spending. On average, businesses allocate 14.9% of their marketing budget to social.

Some popular channels include TikTok (currently the fastest-growing social platform), Instagram, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Snapchat. Each has pros and cons and might be more or less relevant for different businesses.

Influencer marketing

Using personalities with a strong social following in a given niche can help amplify your brand messaging to new networks through reviews, creative content, and activation.

Popular arrangements include sponsorships, affiliate promotions, product seeding, and exclusive content partnerships. Micro-influencers (pages with a smaller following but highly targeted reach) often deliver the most relevant value.

We can divide digital marketing types into two overarching categories—inbound and outbound.

Inbound marketing focuses on creating content that attracts customers to your business organically. It includes tactics like SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing.

The idea is to establish your brand as a trusted authority by offering helpful information so customers come to you when they’re ready to buy.

Outbound marketing takes a more direct, interruptive approach by sending marketing messages to potential customers, even if they aren’t actively looking.

Common outbound strategies include email marketing, online advertising, and retargeting to re-engage site visitors who left without converting.

Outbound enables you to get in front of new audiences, but it can be seen as more intrusive. A balance of inbound and outbound is often most effective for digital marketing success.

Digital marketing in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies can vary widely.

You want to ensure your efforts speak to the nuances of these sectors. The two have different sales cycles, decision-makers, price points, and other variants.

Appealing to these audiences means adopting a particular digital marketing strategy. Depending on who you’re trying to reach, you might opt for a specific message style, focus on certain channels, and invest more in either paid or organic marketing.

Here’s a breakdown of the differences between B2B and B2C in digital marketing.

B2C

• Shorter sales cycle: Consumers often make purchase decisions quickly, sometimes impulsively. The sales cycle is typically shorter, as fewer stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process.

• Emotion-driven decisions: Consumers are more likely to make purchases based on emotion, personal preferences, and immediate needs. You can focus on creating emotional connections and appealing to desires.

• Individual decision-making: In most cases, the consumer is the sole decision-maker. Tailor marketing messages to resonate with individual consumers’ needs and wants.

• Lower price points: B2C products and services generally have lower price points compared to B2B offerings. Consumers are more likely to make smaller, more frequent purchases.

• Broader target audience: B2C marketers often target a wider audience, as the pool of potential customers is generally larger than in B2B.

B2B

• Longer sales cycle: The B2B sales cycle is typically longer as the decision-making process involves multiple stakeholders and requires more research and deliberation.

• Logic-driven decisions: B2B buyers make decisions based on rational factors such as return on investment (ROI), product features, and long-term benefits. Focus on demonstrating value and addressing specific business needs.

• Multiple stakeholders: B2B purchasing decisions often involve various stakeholders, such as decision-makers, influencers, and end users. Adapt your messaging to address the concerns and priorities of each stakeholder group.

• Higher price points: Due to their complexity and the value they provide to businesses, B2B products and services often have higher price points. Purchases are less frequent and more substantial.

• Niche target audience: B2B marketers typically target a more specific, niche audience. Concentrate on reaching decision-makers within relevant industries and companies.

• Relationship-building: Building long-term relationships is crucial in B2B marketing. Establish trust, credibility, and thought leadership to foster ongoing business partnerships.

• Content marketing: B2B marketers heavily rely on content marketing to educate, inform, and nurture leads throughout the longer sales cycle. Whitepapers, case studies, and webinars are standard content formats.

Digital marketing KPIs provide essential business, financial, and marketing insights to inform strategies and demonstrate tangible results.

Here are some of the most common digital marketing metrics to help you monitor and optimize for success.

Website traffic

The total number of visitors and impressions for your website and pages correlates to overall reach and visibility. Traffic channels help highlight which digital sources work best for awareness.

More traffic likely means more prospects see your website—the start of the funnel. Converting that traffic into business outcomes is essential, but growing this metric must come first.

Leads

A lead is one of the most important metrics for digital marketers. It expresses a prospect’s first inkling of interest, such as signing up for content, registering interest, or inquiring about your offerings. 20% of businesses say the number of leads generated is how they primarily measure the success of their marketing efforts.

Building quality lead volume helps ensure robust sales and revenue pipelines. Tools can help you quantify leads over time by tracking when prospects fill out forms, take calls, receive emails, and engage in other interactions.

Cost per lead (CPL)

Calculating the investment spent to generate each lead can help you determine the efficiency of your marketing programs.

Comparing cost-per-lead between channels helps guide budget allocation toward the most efficient sources of potential customers.

Conversion rate (CVR)

The percentage of website visitors that convert into leads and sales demonstrates how compelling your messaging, offers, and overall user experience are.

By segmenting traffic sources and customer paths, you can A/B test and optimize your pages and journeys to improve conversion rates.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Your customer acquisition cost sums up the advertising, marketing, and sales costs of each customer you acquire. Reducing this cost improves margins and business health. Comparing acquisition spend to a customer’s lifetime value helps guide efficient and sustainable CAC targets.

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Cost per acquisition measures the cost of acquiring a new customer through marketing by dividing the total campaign cost by the number of conversions (sign-ups, purchases, downloads, etc.). Tracking and optimizing CPA across different channels enables you to identify your most cost-effective acquisition sources.

Customer lifetime value (LTV)

Predicting the potential revenue you expect from a customer enables you to understand how much you should spend on landing and keeping them. Segments with a higher projected lifetime value warrant greater acquisition and retention budgets.

Return on investment (ROI)

Comparing your overall marketing expenses to generated sales revenue provides an ROI metric. ROI helps you evaluate and compare your performance and overcomes one of the significant challenges of digital marketing—how to manage your budget.

You can attribute conversions and values to each campaign and see where to spend more or less to get better profits.

User intelligence drives the best digital marketing efforts—Amplitude enables you to unlock this valuable insight.

You can gain behavioral data and tools to inform strategies, accelerate experiments and optimizations, and drive growth through human understanding.

• Collect and segment customer data: Capture every tap, swipe, and interaction at scale without performance hits. Then, you can easily explore different funnels, cohorts, and behavioral paths.

• Uncover why metrics are changing: Visualize the actual user flows, actions, and drops leading to changes in your key metrics. See what’s responsible, then guide stronger messaging and UX tweaks.

• Compare campaign impact: Compare behavioral metrics across different acquisition sources and ad variants. Determine which has the highest engagement so you can optimize spending.

• Personalize smarter: Use Amplitude’s predictive capabilities to spot likely converters, upsell opportunities, or churn risks. Serve personalized experiences in real-time to influence behaviors.

Make Amplitude the core of your digital marketing stack. Get started today.