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The marketing of products or services using digital channels to reach consumers. The key objective is to promote brands through various forms of digital media.

Digital marketing extends beyond internet marketing to include channels that do not require the use of the internet. It includes mobile phones (both SMS and MMS), social media marketing, display advertising, search engine marketing, and any other form of digital media.

Most experts believe that 'digital' is not just yet another channel for marketing. It requires a new approach to marketing and a new understanding of customer behaviour. For example, it requires companies to analyse and quantify the value of downloads of apps on mobile devices, tweets on Twitter, likes on Facebook and so on.

Example

One successful digital media campaign was by Pizza Hut, which created an app that allowed customers to create their own pizza by dragging their chosen toppings onto a graphical pizza base. The iPhone would then determine which of the chain's thousands of locations the customer happened to be nearest. The company advertised the new app online, in print, and on television - even winning a placement in Apple's own iPhone commercial.

Within two weeks, the Pizza Hut app was downloaded 100,000 times and within three months iPhone users ordered $1m worth of pizza. The app now has millions of users across the iPhone, iPad, and Android platforms. [1]