What is digital marketing? Its evolution and channels

The term digital marketing generally refers to using websites, apps, mobile devices, social media, search engines and other digital means to promote and sell products and services. We can treat it as a synonym for online marketing, although if we looked closely at the words themselves, we would find a few small differences.

The term digital marketing became popular with the widespread adoption of the internet in the 1990s. The invention of the internet and its mass adoption is the most essential condition for the development of digital marketing. After 2005, marketers working in digital marketing wanted to set themselves apart from the old advertising agencies of the 1990s and show that they were doing something a little different.

The idea behind online / digital marketing

So what actually is digital marketing? Digital marketing involves many of the same principles as traditional marketing and is often seen as another way for companies (brands) to reach consumers, distribute their message and understand their behaviour. Human nature has barely changed over the last 50 years. Evolution simply needs more time. So the principle stays the same. A company still needs to build a meaningful brand and a story, and have a damn catchy and memorable slogan.

Companies often combine traditional and digital marketing techniques in their strategies. But equally, a whole e-commerce sector has emerged that depends almost entirely on digital marketing. Digital marketing has, however, brought a number of new professions and channels with it. Let’s take a look.

Before we do, it is worth remembering that digital marketing content should have a clearly defined communication strategy, something that is often forgotten in digital marketing. People simply jump on trends without any broader concept.

So it is unwise to skip the basics, such as defining what, how and why it should interest anyone. Your communication should reflect you, your story, your research and your customers.

It means delivering the best message through the right marketing channels to the right people at the right time, and using feedback from this process to stay focused on achieving your goals. So if digital marketing only gets you using the right channels but everything else is missing, it simply will not work. The essence of marketing does not change. Story and brand still sell. Cognitive biases and buying habits still work on customers.

Book tip: Thinking, Fast and Slow

New digital marketing channels

Marketing covers a wide range of techniques and media that companies can use to apply the marketing mix to consumers and to grow their market share. To succeed, it requires setting a marketing strategy, choosing suitable channels and the execution itself. Professional marketers take on these tasks either in-house at individual companies or externally at digital marketing agencies or as freelancers.

Companies once focused on marketing through print, television, billboards and radio because nothing else was available to them. Although these options still exist, the internet gave companies another way to reach consumers and gave rise to digital marketing. This is the split I described in the introduction. Marketing strategy was important both before and after digital marketing arrived. The channels, however, have evolved significantly over time. Today most companies allocate more resources to digital forms of advertising than to traditional ones. The new form of digital advertising also gives smaller players room to compete.

The spread of digital marketing

New technologies and trends forced companies to change their marketing strategies and rethink their budgets. It simply paid off more for companies to pour money into Google ads than into putting up posters and buying magazine ads. Television advertising, which dominated in the 1990s, began losing its position with the rise of digital and became fragmented itself. In the 1990s we had four television stations in the Czech Republic, the main one being TV Nova, which reached almost the whole of society. Large companies therefore had a clear main distribution channel. Today dozens of television channels, YouTube and several fast-growing streaming services compete for that same attention in this type of media alone.

Looked at from the broadest perspective, there is a huge number of media today, and people can choose more and also shut themselves away in their bubbles more.

In the early days of digital marketing, email became a popular marketing tool, and after a slight decline it has been enjoying a new wave of interest since 2020. Attention then shifted to search engines such as Seznam (Czech search engine) and Google, which allowed companies to tag items and use keywords to get noticed. Until 2012, Seznam was the dominant search engine, much loved by Czechs. It still holds a certain position in the search market today. I even remember that when I was starting out with marketing and websites, I used to say that Seznam had a bigger share but Google would soon overtake it. But let’s get back to the story.

Search engines created the role of the SEO specialist and, soon after, the even more widespread role of the PPC specialist.

Two completely new marketing roles. The first aimed to win as much traffic as possible from organic search results, and the second focused on setting up ads, which soon began to creep into search results. Today this advertising is Google’s most profitable component, and the number of paid positions in search engines has grown significantly. SEO and PPC have been moving side by side for more than two decades. The development of the so-called SERP was further shaped by the arrival of Google My Business and shopping.

The digital environment is dynamic, so the rise of social platforms soon followed. Facebook, for example, allowed companies to track user data and deliver their messages to very specific audiences. Facebook started as an innocent platform for acquaintances and friends, but this company also soon discovered that user data is very valuable and that advertising can easily be added to the app and scaled.

Smartphones and other portable devices now make it easier for companies to offer their products and services to consumers wherever they are. Back in 2023, most Czechs had ordered from an online shop on their phone at least once (for example, on the way home from work).

Types of digital marketing

What are the most common digital marketing channels?

Website

The web soon turned from a pastime for geeks into a great presentation channel and then a sales channel. Companies often use their own websites as the central point of their digital marketing activities. This has one main advantage. Everything is under your control. The most effective websites present the brand and its products in a clear and memorable way. They also convert, thanks to a clear funnel and well-crafted landing pages.

Today websites have to load quickly, be mobile-friendly, be user-friendly and convert, and users must be able to find their way around them easily.

Thanks to many off-the-shelf solutions, after 2010 the web became accessible to a really large number of people, and they seized the opportunity. Within a few years, the Czech Republic became an e-commerce powerhouse with almost 50,000 online shops. Alza, with its alien mascot, came to dominate e-commerce, but it certainly does not control the whole market the way Amazon does in the USA or Germany. Here you can see the most successful online shops in the Czech Republic. For smaller websites such as blogs or magazines, WordPress became number one, and for online shops in the Czech Republic, Shoptet won.

Email marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing channels with the highest return on investment, although many people associate it with spam and treat such messages accordingly. In 1978, Gary Thuerk (marketing director of something) sent one of the first spam messages to 400 addresses on the Arpanet network. This blind spam worked brilliantly. Orders worth several million came in, but times have changed. Today, spamming addresses you do not have consent for is illegal and also very ineffective.

Many digital marketers use other digital marketing channels to collect names for their email lists. Through email marketing, they then try to turn these prospects into loyal customers. Emailing is used for customer retention, where you try to keep your database active.

An active email database is gold for any online business. Emailing has not stood still either, and today, besides classic newsletters, you will come across dozens of sophisticated automations that respond to your behaviour. The best known is the so-called abandoned cart, where you receive an email after adding something to your cart but not completing the order. Targeting the same message as in your newsletter on social media via your uploaded database also works very well.

Paid advertising

Advertising, often still called pay-per-click (PPC), lets marketers reach audiences on search engines, news sites, other websites and digital platforms through paid ads. You do not have to pay per click. You can also pay, for example, per 1,000 impressions. Marketers can set up PPC campaigns on Google, Seznam (Czech search engine), TikTok, Instagram, Bing, LinkedIn, X, Pinterest and Facebook. They can show their ads to people searching for terms related to their products or services. Some platforms are excellent for targeting by interest or for retargeting people who have visited your website.

These campaigns can segment users by demographic characteristics (such as age or gender) or by specific interests or location. The most widely used PPC services are Google Ads and Meta Business Manager. In the Czech Republic, Sklik still holds a certain position, but the mass-market platforms from the USA dominate.

Paid campaigns have also changed enormously. Setting up the platforms has become much less technically demanding over time, and automation now dominates. What you feed into the black boxes matters more and more than how you configure them.

As a result, paid campaign specialists have moved from being technical, routine-focused people towards being more well-rounded marketing consultants, because the nature of the work has changed so significantly.

SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It is the process of optimising a website’s technical configuration, content creation and link acquisition so that its pages become easier to find, more relevant and more popular for users’ search queries, and as a result search engines rank them higher. The goal of an SEO specialist is to gather all the keywords and terms in the field, categorise them, create the best possible website structure and then work on getting the website as much relevant traffic as possible, traffic that brings in money. Simple as that. Projects need an SEO consultant to build a bridge between the product (the company) and the search engine, so that what the company offers is served to users through search engines as effectively as possible. The result is happier users and higher revenue for companies.

Search engines recommend optimisation that primarily benefits users’ searches as well as page rankings, through content that meets users’ search needs. A long-standing hack of organic search is link building, where link builders try to collect relevant links from other websites and thereby increase their client’s authority. Among other things, this includes using relevant keywords in titles and headings (H1). Search engines have evolved significantly over the past 20 years, and the work of SEO specialists has to reflect this. Whereas in the past it was enough to spam keywords and links all over the place, today you need to think like a user and try to deliver genuinely the best, properly structured results. SEO is also no longer just about websites. There is also local SEO, which often works without the user visiting a website at all. And then there is SEO for various social networks, from Pinterest and TikTok to YouTube.

Video

After 2015, video began to overtake text content. Before making a purchase decision, many internet users turn to sites such as YouTube to learn how to do something, watch a review or simply relax. Marketers can use one of several video marketing platforms to run a video marketing campaign, including video on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The most successful companies integrate video with SEO and content marketing, create viral marketing and combine it with wider social media marketing campaigns. They also use influencers. As the last few sentences probably make clear, success in digital marketing comes from connecting all available channels and putting honest work into each of them.

Some people are addicted to these short videos. The algorithm has got under their skin. This means that purchasing decisions are also heavily influenced by these videos. People no longer actively search for what they want, but buy what they see on these platforms. Some people spend an average of twelve hours a day on their phones, of which six are on social networks. That is an enormous amount of attention, and unfortunately it often has a negative effect on their quality of life.

Influencers

Influencers are an important part of the content on social networks and in video marketing, but their role has multiplied significantly since 2015. In the Czech Republic alone, there are now thousands of paid influencers. Of course, some of them are really small and only earn a little on the side, but they are part of this trend. Thanks to high-quality smartphones, almost anyone can film today and start building their own small dream. Once these influencers build up a base of followers, brands soon start approaching them. The advantage of this field is that it ranges from mini influencers working for barter to influencers with millions of followers, such as Anna Šulcová or Nikol Leitgeb.

Book tip: Nadčasový produkt

Social media

The main goal of a social media marketing campaign is to build relationships, brand awareness and trust. When you go deeper into social media marketing, you can use it to generate leads and as a direct marketing or sales channel. If you create good content marketing and win over your followers, you will soon be able to sell to them effectively. The rule on social networks is that people want to be educated or entertained. A big advantage of social media marketing is that the barrier to entry is very low. Accounts are free, and anyone can start building their community. The main social networks suitable for marketing in the Czech Republic, roughly in order of popularity, include:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• X
• Snapchat 

Sometimes also:

• YouTube
• Facebook Messenger
• WhatsApp
• Telegram
• Reddit
• Twitch

Book tip: Jak na sítě by Eliška Vyhnánková and Michelle Losekoot. I personally was not that impressed by it, but it is often recommended.

Content marketing

With the arrival of digital, content marketing simply took on a new form. The aim of content marketing is to reach potential customers with written, visual or video content that interests them and offers value. This content is usually published on a website and then promoted through social media, email marketing, search engine optimisation or even paid campaigns. The format can vary: podcasts, blogs, e-books, newsletters or TikTok videos. Content marketing tries to be less intrusive than product advertising. A company tries to own a topic or a need and build contact with consumers through education or free materials. Put simply, it is about what content you give your messages. You should not just shout product, product, product. It is better to be helpful and build long-term relationships with customers.

Book tip: This Is Marketing by Seth Godin.

Brand building

Digital marketing has changed a lot, but the rules and effects of brand building have not changed much since Kotler’s time. The problem with digital marketing is often that its tools want everything immediately and measure nothing but performance. Companies, however, need to tell stories and build authentic relationships with customers. Performance advertising is not very good at that. It is therefore essential for a company to build its brand, have a clear idea of where it is going and pursue it consistently. You can read more about branding here.

Whether we talk about digital or online marketing, we can say that it is a transformation driven by technological progress. Digital marketing is a relatively young field, but the techniques and channels within it are evolving dramatically. It is therefore important to keep learning, follow trends and take new courses so that you can keep up. Digital marketing is also highly specialised, and the ideal marketing team includes several specialists in individual channels and sub-fields.