Digital Marketing: What It Is, Strategies & How to Start

Digital marketing is the set of strategies and actions used to promote a brand, product, or service through the internet and digital channels, like websites, social media, email, search, and paid ads. In other words, it’s about making sure the right person finds what you offer exactly when they’re searching for it, and measuring every result in real time, something traditional TV, radio, and billboard marketing simply can’t do.

What’s changed in recent years is the weight of artificial intelligence. More and more marketing professionals now use AI in their daily work, and some of the searches that used to go to Google now happen inside assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini. Digital marketing is still the most accessible way to promote a business, it’s just that now there’s a new layer: showing up in AI answers too.

If you create content, want to work in digital marketing, or you’re thinking about selling a digital product, this guide covers what digital marketing is, the strategies that actually work, how to start from scratch, and what AI has changed in the game.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing covers every action that uses the internet or connected devices to win over potential customers and lead them to a purchase. That ranges from an Instagram post to a Google ad, an email to your list, or a blog article that shows up in search.

Digital marketing isn’t just having a social media profile, boosting a post, or a synonym for invasive advertising. It’s the strategy behind those actions, with a clear goal, a defined audience, and a measured outcome. Without strategy, a viral post is just noise.

The logic is simple: the consumer has changed. Most people today make at least one online purchase a month. Anyone who wants to sell needs to be where those people search, compare, and decide, and that place is the internet.

The history of digital marketing

Digital marketing was born in the 1990s, alongside the rise of the internet, the first search engines, and email, and it evolved into the main promotional channel for brands today.

In the beginning, in the 1990s, the internet was what’s known as Web 1.0: simple pages, one-way communication, and the first email marketing campaigns. Search engines like Yahoo showed up, followed later by Google.

Around the 2000s came Web 2.0, more participatory, with the rise of social media and an explosion of user-generated content. Communication stopped being one-directional: the audience started interacting, sharing opinions, and sharing content.

The most recent leap is artificial intelligence moving to the center of the process. If Web 2.0 gave the audience a voice, the current phase hands AI the tasks of creation, targeting, and support. It’s the same logic as always, connecting the right person at the right moment, just with much faster tools.

How does digital marketing work?

Digital marketing works by attracting the right person, building a relationship, and guiding that person toward a purchase, all through online channels and backed by data. There’s no single recipe. There are dozens of tactics that combine depending on the goal: building awareness, attracting visitors, capturing contacts, or closing sales.

In practice, most strategies follow three movements:

Attract: bring the person to your content or offer, through search, social media, or ads.

Nurture: stay in touch and build trust with people who haven’t bought yet, usually through email and content.

Convert: turn interest into action, whether that’s a signup, a quote request, or a sale.

The biggest difference from traditional marketing is measurement. You know exactly how many people saw, clicked, and bought, and you can adjust course along the way. That’s why even someone just starting out, with a small budget, can test and figure out what gets a return before investing more.

What are the advantages of digital marketing?

The main advantages of digital marketing are the ability to measure results, target your audience, control spending more precisely, and build a closer relationship with customers. On top of that, digital strategies can be adjusted quickly based on campaign performance, which helps businesses and creators make data-driven decisions.

In practice, digital marketing offers advantages like:

• Measuring results: lets you track metrics and understand how your actions are performing.
• Precise targeting: helps direct campaigns toward audiences with specific characteristics and interests.
• More flexible cost: lets you start at different investment levels and adjust your budget.
• Relationship and interactivity: makes direct communication between brands, creators, and audiences easier.

Real-time measurement

One of the main advantages of digital marketing is being able to track how your actions are performing through data and metrics. Depending on the channel, you can analyze information like views, reach, clicks, leads, conversions, sales, and customer acquisition cost.

Imagine, for example, that a creator invests in two campaigns to promote an online course. If one generates a lot of clicks but few sales, while the other shows a higher conversion rate, that data helps identify which strategy is bringing better results.

Precise targeting

Another advantage of digital marketing is being able to direct certain campaigns toward more specific audiences. Depending on the platform and strategy, targeting can take into account factors like location, age, interests, behavior, and previous interactions with the brand.

For example, a creator selling a baking course doesn’t necessarily need to promote their offer to everyone using the internet. In a paid media campaign, they can aim to reach users with characteristics or interests related to the product’s topic.

Accessible, democratic cost

Digital marketing also offers more investment flexibility, since there are strategies for every budget level. While some channels require spending on media, other actions can be built mainly with content production, knowledge, and time.

A creator who’s just starting out, for example, can produce content for social media, work on SEO for a blog, or build a contact list. As the business grows, they can also invest in ads, automation tools, and other strategies to expand their reach.

Relationship and interactivity

Digital marketing makes more direct communication possible between businesses, creators, and consumers. On channels like social media, email, and online communities, the audience can comment, ask questions, share experiences, and interact with published content.

These interactions are also an important source of information. Comments, frequently asked questions, and feedback can reveal what the audience wants to learn, what problems they face, and even what objections come up before a purchase.

Main digital marketing strategies

The main digital marketing strategies include content marketing, SEO, paid traffic, email marketing, social media, affiliate marketing, and CRO. Each strategy acts at a different stage of the customer journey and can help attract an audience, build relationships, win customers, or increase conversions.

There’s no single digital marketing strategy that works best for every business. The right choice depends on factors like your goal, target audience, budget, the product you’re offering, and the channels your audience uses.

• Content marketing: attracts and educates the audience through relevant content.
• SEO and organic traffic: increase the chances that pages and content get found in search engines.
• Paid traffic: uses ads to reach specific audiences and generate visits, leads, or sales.
• Email marketing: keeps direct, segmented communication with contacts and customers.
• Social media: helps build an audience, relationships, and digital presence.
• Affiliate marketing: lets other people promote products in exchange for a commission.
• CRO: aims to increase the percentage of visitors who take a desired action.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy based on creating and distributing relevant content to attract, inform, and build a relationship with an audience. Instead of talking only about products and offers, the brand or creator produces material that answers questions, teaches something, or helps solve the audience’s problems.

This content can take different formats, like blog articles, videos and tutorials, ebooks and guides, newsletters, social media posts, podcasts, webinars, and free classes.

A finance creator, for example, might publish a guide on how to organize a household budget. Beyond helping the audience, that material can bring in potential customers and, later on, introduce a related personal finance course.

SEO and organic traffic

SEO is the set of techniques used to improve how visible pages and content are in organic search results. The strategy aims to make content easier for search engines to understand, and easier for searchers to use.

In practice, SEO work can include researching keywords and understanding search intent, producing useful, complete content, organizing titles and subheadings correctly, optimizing technical page elements, improving user experience and navigation, and building authority around specific topics.

Imagine a creator who teaches digital product creation. They could write a full article to answer the search “how to make an ebook,” using SEO techniques to increase the chances of that content being found by people interested in the topic.

Unlike paid traffic, organic traffic doesn’t depend on paying for every click or impression. That said, SEO also requires an investment of time and knowledge, and in many cases resources for content production and optimization.

Paid traffic

Paid traffic is a digital marketing strategy that uses ad spend to drive people to pages, profiles, stores, or offers. Those ads can run on search engines, social media, and other digital platforms.

Depending on the campaign’s goal, paid traffic can be used to increase brand awareness, attract visitors to a site or page, generate leads and signups, promote products and services, and drive sales and other conversions.

One advantage of paid traffic is being able to test audiences, creatives, and offers, and adjust campaigns based on the data. That said, running ads doesn’t guarantee sales: results also depend on the quality of the offer, targeting, the ads themselves, and the experience after the click.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a communication strategy that uses email to maintain relationships with leads and customers, distribute content, and present offers. Since communication happens with a contact base, you can create different messages based on each person’s interests and where they are in the journey.

An email marketing strategy can include newsletters with content and updates, welcome sequences, educational material, product and launch announcements, reminders and post-purchase communication, and re-engagement campaigns.

The most important thing is not to treat email marketing as just a channel for sending offers. Relevant content, targeting, and the right frequency help build relationships and make communication more useful for the audience.

Social media

Social media marketing uses digital platforms to produce content, expand brand presence, and build a relationship with an audience. These channels enable closer communication through posts, videos, comments, messages, and other forms of interaction.

A creator might, for example, post short videos answering their audience’s most common questions and use deeper content to demonstrate knowledge on a topic. At strategic moments, they can also present their products and services.

Choosing a social platform should mainly consider where your audience actually is and which formats make sense for your strategy, instead of trying to keep a presence on every platform at once.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a strategy where someone promotes other people’s or businesses’ products or services and earns a commission on sales or other conversions attributed to their referral. This model connects producers, affiliates, and consumers in a performance-based strategy.

In practice, the producer makes a product available and sets the terms for their affiliate program. The affiliate chooses offers that fit their strategy and uses channels like social media, blogs, videos, email marketing, or ads to promote them.

To get results with affiliate marketing, sharing links isn’t enough. It’s important to know your audience, choose relevant products, and build a promotional strategy that builds trust and helps the potential customer make a buying decision.

CRO (conversion rate optimization)

CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is the process of optimizing pages and digital experiences to increase the percentage of visitors who take a desired action. That conversion could be a purchase, a signup, filling out a form, or another action that matters to the business.

CRO work can involve improvements to elements like page titles and copy, calls to action, forms, how information is organized, checkout and the buying process, and navigation experience.

Imagine a sales page gets a thousand visitors and generates 20 purchases. Instead of just thinking about attracting more traffic, the business can investigate why some visitors abandon the page and test changes that make the buying decision easier.

That’s why CRO and traffic acquisition are complementary strategies in digital marketing. While SEO, content, and paid media help bring people in, conversion optimization aims to get more out of the traffic the business already has.

Digital marketing and artificial intelligence today

Artificial intelligence stopped being a trend and became part of the daily reality of digital marketing, from content creation to data analysis and automated support. More and more marketing professionals already use AI, and most plan to increase their investment in the coming months.

In practice, AI already shows up on four fronts of digital marketing: content creation (AI speeds up the draft, the person edits and adds the final touch), data analysis (AI identifies behavior patterns and flags which contacts are more likely to buy), support (chatbots answer questions and qualify contacts around the clock), and personalization (each person gets communication tailored to their history, at scale).

What about people just starting out? This scenario can feel like something only big companies can afford, but most companies still haven’t fully integrated AI. Most are still figuring it out too. Anyone starting now, even on their own, with free AI tools, is at the same starting point as a lot of people, and ahead of anyone who hasn’t tried it yet.

GEO and AEO: how do you show up in AI answers?

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the strategies for getting your content cited in AI answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews. It’s the natural evolution of SEO for a world where part of search no longer ends on a blue link, but in a ready-made answer.

This shift is significant. Analysts project a meaningful drop in traditional search volume over the coming years, with part of that search behavior moving to AI assistants. That doesn’t mean less opportunity. It means there’s a new place to show up, and that well-structured content has a better chance of being cited by AI.

In practice, optimizing for GEO and AEO involves answering questions directly early in the text, organizing information clearly, citing data from reliable sources, and building authority on the topic.

Digital marketing for beginners: where to start

To start in digital marketing from scratch, pick a niche, define your audience, create useful content on one channel, and measure results before spending money. You don’t need a college degree or a big budget for the first steps.

A simple path for beginners:

Pick a niche and a goal: define what you’ll talk about and what you want to achieve (audience, contacts, or sales).

Get to know your audience: create a persona, the profile of your ideal customer, so you speak the right language.

Start with one channel: instead of trying to do everything, pick one (blog, Instagram, or email) and do it well.

Produce useful content: solve a real problem your audience has. Good content is what attracts people without you having to pay for it.

Measure and adjust: see what’s working, repeat what succeeds, and fix the rest. That cycle is the heart of digital marketing.

Digital marketing for anyone creating and selling a digital product

For anyone who creates and sells a digital product, digital marketing is what connects your knowledge to the audience that wants to buy it. The same work of attracting an audience and guiding them to a purchase applies whether you’re selling a course, an ebook, or a mentorship.

This is where digital marketing meets Hotmart, the all-in-one platform for creators. After attracting and building a relationship with your audience, you need a place to host, sell, and deliver the product securely. We take care of that part: product creation, conversion-optimized checkout, and payments in over 180 countries.

Anyone who’d rather promote other people’s products also has a path: an affiliate program lets you earn a commission on every sale, without needing to create your own product. Both models run on digital marketing as their engine.

Digital marketing tools

Digital marketing tools help you plan, execute, and measure every strategy, and most now come with built-in artificial intelligence features.

The rule for beginners is don’t drown in tools. Start with the free ones, master one at a time, and add new ones as the need comes up.

Frequently asked questions