What Is Digital Media? Strategy Tips For Small Businesses

If you’re trying to build brand awareness, you’ve probably heard the steep cost of buying a 30-second commercial spot during the biggest football event of the year. In 2025, buying a Super Bowl ad cost nearly $8 million.

Outside of the Super Bowl, studies show the average cost of a 30-second commercial is more than $100,000, and a billboard can cost as much as $14,000 a month in a midsize or large city. All of this to say, traditional media like TV, radio, or print can be quite expensive to place—not to mention the time and money needed for production and post-production.

That’s where the power of digital media comes into play, helping level the playing field between huge brands with big budgets and the millions of small businesses in the US. Digital media empowers small to medium businesses to launch targeted digital marketing campaigns and get the word out with content creators, in a short amount of time for a fraction of the cost.

What is digital media?

There are many ways to define digital media, but it often refers to content (like videos, images, podcasts) and advertisements distributed through electronic devices and digital platforms (like mobile devices, tablets, social media platforms, and emails).

While devices like mobile phones transmit digital media, you can create it using a variety of mediums. For example, photos taken with a film camera turned into social media content can be considered digital media.

With a strategic mix of digital media types, you can build an online presence for your brand that results in awareness and (ideally) sales.

Types of digital media

• Owned media
• Paid media
• Earned media

The digital media sphere consists of owned media, paid media, and earned media. Understanding the difference between each can help you refine your marketing strategy and ensure you’re leveraging the most effective channels to reach your target audience:

Owned media

Owned media is any digital media content a brand creates and hosts on its own websites or platforms. This includes website and blog copy, email marketing, newsletters, and social media content on owned accounts.

You can use owned media channels to create promotional content. Sharing a particular message or non-promotional content delivers value to your customers without overtly advertising the brand.

For example, an at-home gym equipment company might promote a sale with social media posts and emails. The brand’s blog and YouTube channel share educational articles and videos on how to get the best workout with their equipment.

Dieux Skin, a skin care company, regularly posts TikTok videos highlighting ways customers can use the brand’s eye masks, serums, and moisturizers. In the example above, a content creator gives a quick tutorial on how to do a winged eyeliner look with the help of Dieux eye masks. This is an example of owned media offering both education and entertainment rather than a transactional message.

Paid media

Paid media includes paid ads or exposure. Paid digital media encompasses ads you pay to display on other websites, social media platforms like Meta and YouTube, and streaming services like Hulu and Netflix.

Paid media can increase your brand awareness by boosting the number of people who see your content. You can make paid media more effective by targeting ads to specific audiences and embedding links leading back to your ecommerce store.

Paid media tends to be more polished and sales-focused than owned media assets. If you’re buying display advertising on a website (like a banner ad), you may want to hire graphic designers to create a professional ad. A partnership with a content creator, on the other hand, might have an organic look but deliver more product-centered information than your owned media content.

For example, in a sponsored Instagram post, the apparel brand Outdoor Voices zeros in its RecTrek 3" Skort. Social media users can tell the post is sponsored thanks to the sponsored tag just below the account handle and the “Shop now” call-to-action link embedded in the photo. This piece of paid media has a clear, transactional message that can work well when targeted to audiences looking for this kind of apparel.

Earned media

Earned media is the exposure your brand receives organically that you didn’t pay for or create yourself. This includes published articles from news or lifestyle websites, customer reviews, social media shares, influencer shoutouts, backlinks to your store from other publications, and other user-generated content (UGC).

Earned media is particularly powerful for earning trust with your customers because it’s an external validation of the value of your products and services. Almost 90% of potential customers trust recommendations from people they know, according to Nielsen’s 2021 Trust in Advertising Study.

While you don’t have to buy or spend resources creating earned media, it does call for building and maintaining strong relationships with influencers, journalists, and customers. You also need to make your earned media easy to find—you can link to it on your website or social media channels, share reviews below products, and have a web page for news coverage.

For example, Ugmonk, designer of stationery and desk accessories, has a section of its homepage dedicated to user reviews. These showcase customer videos demonstrating how one of Ugmonk’s signature products, The Analog, helps optimize customers’ work days.

Digital media vs. traditional media: What’s the difference?

How you approach creating digital media and traditional media differs in a few key ways:

• Format. While digital media refers to everything that lives online and is accessed via digital devices, traditional media includes print media (newspapers, magazines), radio, broadcast TV, and billboards.

• Interactivity. Digital media allows for direct user engagement through clicks, comments, and shares. By contrast, traditional media is usually a one-way communication channel.

• Cost. Digital campaigns are often more cost-effective because you can produce them quickly, cheaply, and with a small team. A broadcast TV commercial requires a higher quality than a TikTok video, for example.

• Editability. You can update social media posts and banner ads in real time if they’re performing poorly. This is not the case with a radio, print, or TV ad.

• Tracking. Digital campaigns offer real-time performance tracking through metrics like impressions and click-through rates (CTR), which can give businesses a better idea of how their ad spend translates to revenue. This can help businesses optimize their budget to execute their marketing strategy.

• Reach. You can reach a targeted audience with digital media, but traditional media can be more effective for reaching broader audiences and those who aren’t perennially online.

Deciding which makes more sense for your business comes down to your budget, who your audience is, and what the best way to reach them is. Many times, an effective marketing strategy has a mix of both digital and traditional marketing materials.

How to develop a digital media strategy

1. Define clear, measurable goals
2. Understand your target audience
3. Choose your platforms
4. Plan your budget

Building an effective digital media strategy can have a lot of moving parts, so it’s smart to take it one step at a time. The great thing about digital media is you can test what’s working as you go and adapt your messaging once you have some data:

1. Define clear, measurable goals

One common approach to setting business goals is to use the SMART structure, which stands for “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-based.” This makes it more likely for a business to succeed because the results are quantifiable, and you can adjust the path to achieving the goal.

Examples of SMART goals for digital marketing can include:

• Increase engagement on Instagram from 2% to over 3% in the next six months

• Improve click-through rate (CTR) from 3% to 4% by Q3

• Reduce customer churn from 5% to 3% over the next year

2. Understand your target audience

To create effective content for the target audience you’re trying to reach. You can leverage audience insights from your social media, conduct focus groups, and read reports about customer behavior, like from the Pew Research Center.

3. Choose your platforms

Once you have a good understanding of your audience, it’s time to dig into where they like to spend their time online. Platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social often have social media and digital reports that provide insights on which demographics use what platforms.

4. Plan your budget

Setting a marketing budget will help you determine how to allocate your resources between channels. A survey of chief marketing officers found close to 8% of a company’s revenue is devoted to marketing; using it efficiently can significantly boost the profile of your business.

Shopify has analytics tools that can help you determine revenue from marketing channels like email campaigns or social media so you can calculate your marketing return on investment (ROI).

Resources to refine your digital media skills

Often, to develop a full-fledged digital media strategy and produce the assets necessary to launch it, you need a team of digital media professionals. These include graphic designers, digital media specialists, web developers, and social media strategists.

When you’re starting out, you may not have the budget to hire a full marketing and digital media department. Luckily, there are plenty of resources you can use to refine your digital media skills:

• Online courses. You can explore classes across various subjects, like graphic design, digital advertising, and digital media design, on platforms like Coursera or LinkedIn Learning. Both offer free trials before turning into a subscription-based plan.

• Digital creative tools. Apps like Canva or Adobe Express allow anyone to easily create media without a graphic design background. Learning how to use these drag-and-drop tools can allow you to create content like newsletters, banners, and infographics.

• Industry trend reports. For the latest on digital strategy, you can explore reports generated by digital media companies and social media apps. For example, TikTok releases an annual trends report that can give you a better idea of how to shape your social media content.