What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is marketing that happens on a screen connected to the internet. The umbrella covers search engine optimization and paid search, social media organic and paid, display and video advertising, email, content and SEO-driven publishing, affiliate and influencer programs, connected television, and the websites, apps and landing pages all of that points to. What unites the list is not the technology but the feedback: every digital channel reports, in hours rather than months, who saw the work and what they did next.
The word digital once marked a department. It now describes most of marketing, because most of the attention a brand can buy or earn lives on a phone. The distinction that still matters is between brand-building work, which builds preference over time, and performance work, which drives an action now. Digital marketing has to do both, and the mistake of treating it as only the second is where most budgets go wrong.
Why it matters
Why digital marketing matters
Because it is where the audience is, and because it can be measured. A beauty brand can launch a product, see which creative stops the scroll by the afternoon and move its budget by the evening. A sports team can reach the fans who were in the stadium with the film of what they saw. A luxury house can find the person who searched for exactly its product and be the first result. None of that was possible when marketing meant a media schedule set in January.
It matters for creative work too. Digital channels tell the creative team what worked, in detail, which is how the next piece gets better. And they reward craft in specific ways: the first second of a video, the clarity of a headline, the speed of a page. A brand that takes digital seriously makes its work sharper, because the feedback is immediate and honest.
In practice
How digital marketing works in practice
- 01
A digital program starts with objectives tied to the business (awareness, leads, sales, retention) and an audience defined by behavior as well as demographics. A channel plan follows: which channels, in what mix, with what budget, doing what job in the customer's journey. Search catches intent; social and video build awareness and desire; email and retargeting bring people back; the site converts. Each channel gets creative built for it and tracking that connects it to the others.
- 02
Then it runs as a loop. Campaigns launch, data comes in, creative and budget are adjusted, and the learning is written down. Tools stitch it together: analytics, a tag manager, ad platforms, an email system, a CRM. Teams are organized by channel or by function, and agencies typically run the creative, the media or both. The rhythm is weekly for optimization and quarterly for strategy, and the brands that do it well hold the brand work steady while the performance work iterates underneath it.
At RIOT
Digital marketing at RIOT
Much of our work ends up on a screen someone is holding. The Meta ad engine we ran for Homebase from February to April 2025 was digital marketing in its purest form: creative made for the platform, launched, read and remade in a weekly loop. The e.l.f. Mirror Mix launch film reached about five million views because it was built for the feed. The two months of social product films for Gantri were a steady program for the channels where the products are bought, and the CTV spot "Real Life, Worry Free" for Bogg Bags took the same thinking to the largest screen in the house.
Watch out
What people get wrong about digital marketing
Treating it as only performance. A brand that spends everything on the bottom of the funnel converts the people who already wanted it and never creates new ones; the film that made them want it was marketing too. The second mistake is channel thinking. The customer does not know they moved from a video to a search to an email; they experienced one brand, and the work should feel like one brand across all of it.
The third is trusting the dashboards without question. Every platform reports in its own favor, and a brand that adds them up believes it sold more than it did. The fourth is forgetting that digital channels run on creative. A perfectly targeted campaign with a dull film is a precise way to be ignored.
