How does a business define digital marketing?

Digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It seems like every other brand has a website, and if they don’t, they at least have a social media presence or digital ad strategy.

Overall, digital marketing is defined as using numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online.

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The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals.

Depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels they have available.

A content marketer, for example, could create a series of blog posts that generate leads from an ebook.

A social media marketer might help promote those blogs through paid and organic posts on the business’s social media accounts, and the email marketer could create an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company.

Our 2025 State of Marketing Report found that the top five marketing channels that resulted in the biggest ROI in 2024 involved digital marketing. They are:

• Email marketing.
• Paid social media content.
• Social media shopping tools (e.g., Instagram shops).
• Website/blog/SEO.
• Content marketing.

There are a few major benefits of digital marketing:

1. You can focus your efforts on only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service.

Digital marketing allows you to identify and target a highly specific audience with personalized and high-converting marketing messages.

For instance, you might use social media targeting to show ads to a certain audience based on variables like age, gender, location, interests, networks, or behaviors.

Alternatively, you might use PPC or SEO strategies to serve ads to users who’ve shown interest in or searched for specific keywords related to your product, service, or industry.

Ultimately, digital marketing helps you conduct the research necessary to identify your buyer personas and refine your strategy to ensure you’re reaching prospects most likely to buy.

2. It’s more cost-effective than outbound marketing methods.

Digital marketing helps you track campaign performance day to day, so you know which channels are performing well and which aren’t. This information helps you optimize your campaign budgets for high ROI.

A digital marketing strategy allows you to pivot continuously, ensuring you never waste money on channels that don’t perform well.

For instance, if you work for a small business with a limited budget, you might try investing in social media, blogging, or SEO — three strategies that can give you high ROI even with minimal spending.

3. Online marketing evens the playing field within your industry and allows you to compete with bigger brands.

If you work for a small business, it’s likely difficult for you to compete with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of dollars to invest in campaigns.

Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to outrank the big players through strategic digital marketing initiatives.

For instance, you might use long-tail keywords to create high-quality content that ranks on search engines. Search engines don’t care which brand is the biggest, but they do care about prioritizing content that resonates best with target audiences.

Adilo, an online video hosting platform competing against established brands in the space, understood the potential of focusing on search.

“We knew that trying to compete head-on with paid strategies like TV commercials, PPC, and print media would be a disaster, so we went all-in on content marketing … We also invested heavily in creating original and linkable articles to gain exposure and earned media,” says Felix Johnson, Senior SEO and Content Strategist at Adilo.

Today, Johnson notes that over 95% of new signups come from Google Search.

4. Digital marketing is measurable.

One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that it gives a start-to-finish view of all the metrics that matter to your company — including impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on the page.

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 flipped to that page and paid attention to it. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.

You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.

This intelligence helps you prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on based on the number of people those channels drive to your website.

With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people‘s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

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Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you‘ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes — that brochure is a form of offline content. Unfortunately, you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or threw it straight into the trash.

If you have that brochure on your website, you can measure how many people viewed the page it’s on, and you can use a form to collect the contact information of those who downloaded it.

It’s twofold: you measure how many people engage with your content and generate qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business.

We call this attribution modeling.

It allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about which parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention and which parts of your sales cycle need refining.

5. It’s easier to adapt and change an online marketing strategy.

A great benefit of digital marketing is the ease with which you can change your strategy. Adapting a digital marketing strategy is much easier than other, more traditional forms of marketing, like mailers or billboard advertising.

For instance, if an online ad isn’t delivering as expected, you can quickly adjust it or pause it to yield better results.

6. Online marketing can improve your conversion rate and the quality of your leads.

As digital marketing makes it simpler to measure your marketing efforts, improving your conversion rate becomes simpler as well. Being able to measure the effectiveness of each tactic helps you develop better strategies.

Continuously refining your methods improves your conversion rate. Investing in online marketing ensures that everything is optimized for the highest amount of conversions.

Additionally, not all leads offer the same value for your business. Digital marketing allows you to target a specific audience, which will yield higher-quality leads that are more likely to become customers.

Connecting your business with the most valuable leads will directly improve your conversion rate.

7. You can engage audiences at every stage with digital marketing.

Engaging your audience as early as possible is essential. Making a connection at the first stage of the buyer’s journey helps push the lead through the customer funnel.

Using digital marketing allows you to accomplish that from start to finish and at every point in between.

Online channels allow you to follow your customers’ entire buying journey. Understanding and analyzing how customers operate is important for converting leads.

Digital marketing allows you to track them through that process. And, even if they don’t convert in the early stages, it at least helps ensure they have made a connection with your business.

Another way to connect with your customers is to ensure brand content resonates with customer values. Our survey revealed that 37.52% of marketers feel that one of the biggest ways the marketing industry changed in the past twelve months is focusing on the customer, and their experience with the brand became more important.

Additionally, one in five (21.19%) said that one of the top marketing trends they or their teammates are currently exploring is creating content that reflects brand values.

Richard White, content team lead at Omnisend, an ecommerce email marketing and SMS platform, says, “We’re absolutely aligning our content with our brand values because we believe that it’s the only way to make digital marketing work long-term.”

White says his team sticks stick to topics that actively help customers grow their businesses. Then, then listen for to see the response.

“Direct feedback, support conversations, social media — we track all of it to ensure we stay relevant and valuable to our customers,” White says.