What is Digital Marketing?

Business owners often assume digital marketing is just a cheap sandwich. They picture a basic website, a slice of SEO, some quick graphics slapped in the middle, and a piece of AI-generated content as the spread. However, building a solid marketing machine is more complicated than that.

Contractors deal with similar remarks when a client asks why pouring muddy water into squares for a driveway costs $10,000.

Before we get into the nerdy stuff, we need to acknowledge that digital marketing is merely a part of the broader field of Marketing. It does not represent a complete marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing Explained

That said, digital marketing is the practice of promoting your business using digital channels. To make a tasty digital sandwich, you must understand the six specialization areas of digital marketing:

• Content Marketing: Creating material that genuinely educates your audience instead of just pitching them. (Ahem. Ahem…Like what you are reading now.)
• Social Media Marketing: Leveraging platforms to build community and maintain top-of-mind awareness.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Structuring your presence so local customers can actually find you.
• Digital Advertising: Strategically buying targeted visibility to accelerate growth.
• Web Development & Analysis: Creating your digital storefront and meticulously measuring the visitor data.
• Marketing Automation: Putting repetitive lead-nurturing tasks on autopilot so you can sleep.

Push vs. Pull: Putting the Tools to Work

Having those six disciplines in your toolkit is great, but you have to know how to actually deploy them. In the real world of digital marketing, these tools are split into two categories: Push and Pull.

Push Marketing

This is exactly what it sounds like. You are actively pushing your message out into the world, hoping to grab someone’s attention while they are doing something else. Think about your Social Media presence or running Digital Ads. You are essentially setting up a billboard alongside their digital highway. Push marketing is great for building rapid brand awareness, but the audience isn’t necessarily looking to buy right at that second.

Pull Marketing

Instead of interrupting people, pull marketing is about becoming the answer they are actively searching for. This is where disciplines like SEO and Content Marketing do the heavy lifting. When a potential customer goes to Google to solve a very specific problem, and your website pops up as the solution, you have successfully pulled them in. It takes longer to build this kind of momentum, but the leads are usually significantly warmer because they initiated the search.

A legitimate digital strategy doesn’t just pick one method. It uses push tactics to introduce your brand to the neighborhood, and pull tactics to catch the people who are ready to buy today.

Now that you have a better grasp of the digital foundation, you have a choice to make. Are you excited to start/continue your DIY marketing journey, or would you prefer to have me build you something that works? If you fall into the latter category, you know where to find me.

For a deeper understanding of Marketing as a whole, you can check out my What is Marketing, Actually? post here.