What is Digital Marketing?
Updated: 5 days ago
Marketing 101, Part Two
Somebody has told you that you need digital marketing.
Maybe it was an agency. Maybe it was an ad for a course. Maybe it was your nephew. And the way it was said made it sound like a separate thing you're missing — a specialty, a department, a discipline you never got trained in and now you're behind.
Let me save you some money.
Digital marketing is not a separate kind of marketing. It's marketing that happens on a screen.
That's the whole reveal. You can keep reading, but that's it.
The four decisions don't change
Last time we established that marketing is four decisions: what you sell, what you charge, where people can get it, and what you say about it.
Screens don't add a fifth one.
A boutique deciding to sell online is a place decision — the same category as deciding to open a second location or do the fall festival pop-up. A restaurant putting a $14 lunch prix fixe on its website is the same $14 prix fixe. Instagram doesn't change your price. Google doesn't change your product.
The channel is new. The job is not.
What actually is different (and it's real)
I'm not going to pretend the internet changed nothing. Three things genuinely changed, and they're worth understanding.
You can measure. A chalkboard out front works or it doesn't and you'll never know which. An email tells you exactly how many people opened it and how many clicked. That's a real advantage — and it comes with a real trap, which we'll get to.
You can aim. Print an ad in the local paper and it goes to everyone. Run the same ad online and you can put it in front of women within eight miles who've searched for wedding dresses. That's not a small difference. For a business with a small budget, it's the difference between affordable and impossible.
You can move fast. A sign takes a week to print. A post takes four minutes. You can test a message on Tuesday, find out it doesn't land, and try a different one by Thursday. Nobody had that before.
Measurement, aim, speed. Real advantages, all three. Notice that not one of them is a decision. They're conditions you now execute under.
The trap
Here's what happened when those three things arrived.
An entire industry realized it could sell you the execution and let you assume you were buying the strategy.
So you get a proposal for social media management. Or SEO. Or a paid ads retainer. And it's full of numbers — impressions, reach, engagement, click-through rate — which feel like proof, because they're measurable and nobody's ever handed you a number for the chalkboard out front.
But nobody in that meeting asked what you sell, what you charge, or why someone should pick you over the place down the street. They asked what your monthly budget is.
That's the trap. Measurement makes activity look like strategy. You can run a beautifully measured campaign for an offer nobody wants, and get a report full of green arrows, and be no better off than you were in March.
If your marketing isn't working, more channel almost never fixes it. The four decisions underneath are what's broken.
In plain terms: what to actually do
Assume you're a small business with limited time and less patience. Here's the order. Start at the top.
Google Business Profile. Claimed, accurate hours, real photos, and you actively ask happy customers for reviews. When someone three miles away searches for what you sell, this is the fight. Costs nothing.
A website that answers the four questions — what you sell, what it costs, where you are, how to buy. You'd be amazed how many don't.
An email list. You own it. Instagram can change its algorithm on Thursday and delete your reach; nobody can delete your list.
One social channel, done consistently — the one your actual customer uses, not all of them badly.
Paid ads. Last. Ads make an existing engine run faster. They do not build the engine.
Most people start at five. That's why most people think digital marketing doesn't work.
The test
Same three questions as last time. Add one more:
Am I making a decision here, or just buying a channel?
If the answer is "buying a channel," stop and go back to the four decisions. The screen can wait.
If you're at number five and you skipped one through four, that's what the diagnostic is for.
Next in the series: Who Is Your Customer, Actually? Every decision in this post depends on knowing who's on the other end — and "everyone" is not an answer, it's an expense. Next time we go through what that costs you and how to find the real one.
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