Digital marketing, or online marketing, is the practice of promoting brands, products, or services through digital channels. It uses the internet and various online platforms to reach customers, boost brand visibility, and support business growth. For example, when you see an advertisement while watching a YouTube video, that is digital marketing in action. These ads are a form of video marketing, a powerful strategy used by businesses to reach potential customers through engaging and targeted video content. Such advertisements can be tailored to the viewer's interests and behavior, making them a highly effective component of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING ? HOW ITS WORK Digital marketing is so ubiquitous now that it may as well be called simply “marketing.” Nearly every business needs an online presence to reach its audience. Digital marketing refers to any form of marketing for your business online, from social media and email to paid advertising and SEO. If you’re a small business owner thinking about where to begin, this guide breaks down the main types of digital marketing, key strategies and best practices to help you succeed. The best digital marketers have a clear understanding of how each digital marketing campaign contributes to their overarching goals. Depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through both free and paid channels available to them. A content marketer, for example, could create a series of blog posts that generate leads from an ebook. Why is digital marketing important? Digital marketing helps you reach a larger audience than you could through traditional methods and target the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service. Additionally, it’s often more cost-effective than traditional advertising and enables you to measure success on a daily basis and pivot as you see fit. There are a few major benefits of digital marketing: It’s more cost-effective than marketing methods. 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. 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. 3 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.