What Is Digital Marketing?

By Catherine Brock – Updated Feb 26, 2025 at 2:31 PM EST

Key Points

Digital marketing uses online platforms to promote products; key types include SEO and email marketing.
Challenges for digital marketers include high competition and increasing privacy regulations.
Marketers must adapt to third-party cookie phaseouts by focusing on direct user data collection.

Digital marketing is the promotion of goods and services via the internet and mobile apps. It's the online counterpart to traditional marketing programs that use television, radio, and print to distribute information to prospective customers. This article explores digital marketing, including the types of programs available, the challenges digital marketers face, and the privacy issues associated with online campaigns.

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Lead Generation

The process of finding potential customers who may be interested in a product or service.

The analysis can be more complex if the business's typical customer makes repeat purchases. In that case, the marketer might look at the average cost of acquiring a new customer relative to the average profit generated by a customer over time.

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Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing pays commissions to online publishers who refer customers and prospects. The publisher promotes a link with an encrypted code so the referrals can be tracked.
Social media marketing. Social media marketing is a subset of content marketing. It involves sharing content on Meta's (META +0.23%) Facebook and Instagram, on TikTok, and on other social media platforms.
Influencer marketing. Influencer marketing compensates people with large social media followings and/or relevant website traffic to promote products and services.
Mobile marketing. Mobile marketing sends promotional messages and content to customers and prospects via text messages. As with email marketing, message recipients must opt into this service.

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Social Media

Social media are internet platforms that facilitate the creation, sharing, and discovery of user-generated content.

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Many platform options

Marketers can place ads on Google, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest (PINS +9.27%), LinkedIn, Snap's (SNAP -0.19%) Snapchat, X, mobile apps, and more. They can also pay for email and mobile messaging platforms, content creators, SEO analysts, and developers.

Understanding how to create an effective marketing strategy that allocates funds across these options is challenging. It typically requires experimentation and subsequent data analysis, which can be cost-prohibitive for smaller marketing organizations. The growing field of marketing analytics seeks to address this challenge.

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Marketing Strategy

A plan that a business uses to reach potential customers and promote products or services that might be interesting to them.

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However, tracking for the purposes of advertising is increasingly controversial. Several web browsers already restrict this activity.

The holdout has been the Google Chrome browser, which has a 64% market share. After several delays to its stated schedule, Chrome started testing the phaseout of third-party cookies in January 2024. Google's parent company, Alphabet, has said it would complete the transition by year-end.

Digital marketers will have to adjust to that phaseout. Alternative strategies include collecting user data directly through opt-ins and targeting ads to relevant website content rather than user activity.

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About the Author

Catherine grew up in Southern California wearing a lot of black and trying to perfect the art of sarcasm. Prior to joining The Fool as a contract writer, Catherine was climbing the corporate ladder in marketing roles and dabbling in too many side hustles. When she's not writing, she can be found riding a horse in the country or shopping online for clothes.

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@catherinejbrock

Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Catherine Brock has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Meta Platforms, and Pinterest. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.