From the course: Digital Marketing Foundations

The building blocks of digital marketing

From the course: Digital Marketing Foundations

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The building blocks of digital marketing

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- The foundations of digital marketing start with taking a look at the three types of media that you'll leverage in your marketing efforts: paid, owned, and earned. I'll break these down for you. When we talk about paid media, this is everything that you, well, pay for. And this includes channels like pay per click ads, affiliate marketing, and display marketing. Owned media will encompass channels that you directly control, like your website, the list of customers that you use to send out emails, and even a blog that you host. Earned media is the world of organic mentions, posts by others on social media, mentions in videos, and even articles written about you. Now, all of these channels can overlap. Social media, for example, can be a paid channel if you're promoting your content, an owned channel if you're publishing a post, and an earned channel if you're receiving interactions and mentions from others. Together, these make up the foundation of digital marketing. And while these media types also exist in non-digital marketing, we gain a huge advantage in the digital space, personalization. Imagine you're selling mattresses. If you used paid media in a traditional sense, you might put an ad in the local newspaper. And it's possible that someone reading the paper needs a new mattress, but most aren't shopping for it. So you'll run this ad for a long time, and it's rather inefficient. Most eyes that land on that ad, the eyes that you're paying for, are uninterested. In digital marketing, you can identify people who are actively shopping for a mattress right now. You can pay to deliver an ad specifically to them. And this is an incredibly efficient advertisement. Now, there's always exceptions in marketing, but for the most part, as you evaluate where to market digitally, you'll be evaluating how to distribute your message across all three of these marketing channels.

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