What Digital Marketing Is

Digital marketing is marketing that reaches people through digital channels: websites, search engines, social media, email, online advertising and mobile apps. It has the same purpose as all marketing — to understand customers and to create, communicate and deliver value to them — but it uses the tools that people now use every day to look for information and to buy.

This course is for people who are new to digital marketing: small business owners, marketing assistants, sales staff who now look after a website or social account, and managers who need to understand what their digital team does. It assumes you know the basic ideas of marketing. Segmentation, targeting, positioning and the marketing mix are taught in the Marketing Fundamentals course, and here they appear only as a short recap.

Owned, earned and paid media

A useful way to sort the channels is by who controls them.

• Owned media is what the organisation controls: its website, its email list, its own social media pages and its blog.
• Earned media is attention that others give freely: a customer review, a share of your post, a link from another website, a mention by a journalist.
• Paid media is attention you buy: search adverts, social media adverts, sponsored posts.

Good digital marketing uses all three together. Paid media can bring people quickly, owned media gives them a place to land and a reason to stay, and earned media builds trust because it comes from someone other than you.

Two short examples

A training centre. It publishes a free guide to workplace safety signs on its website (owned). A trade association links to the guide (earned). The centre runs a small search advert for "first aid course" in its city (paid). All three bring visitors to the same course booking page.

Quorvale Logistics, an invented freight company, wants more enquiries from importers. It improves its website’s service pages, writes short articles about customs paperwork, and sends a monthly email to customers who have opted in. Most of its effort is owned media, because its buyers search carefully before they choose a supplier.