Digital Marketing Is Legit. The Way Most Companies Do It Is Not.

Digital marketing is legitimate. It has produced measurable revenue for businesses across every sector, from early-stage startups to global enterprises. The question worth asking is not whether digital marketing works, but whether the version your company is running actually does anything useful.

There is a meaningful difference between digital marketing as a discipline and digital marketing as it gets practiced inside most organisations. The discipline is sound. The practice is often a collection of inherited habits, vanity metrics, and channel activity that nobody has seriously questioned in years.

What Does “Legit” Actually Mean Here?

When people ask whether digital marketing is legit, they are usually asking one of two different questions. The first is whether it produces real results, real revenue, real growth, or whether it is mostly theatre. The second is whether it is an honest profession, or whether it is full of people selling services that do not work to clients who do not know better.

Both questions deserve a straight answer.

On the first: yes, digital marketing produces real results. I have seen it happen too many times to doubt it. Early in my career, working in paid search at a time when the channel was still relatively new, I ran a campaign for a music festival and watched six figures of revenue come in within roughly a day. The campaign itself was not complicated. The targeting was straightforward. But the commercial result was immediate and undeniable. That kind of direct feedback loop is one of the things that makes digital marketing genuinely powerful when it is used well.

On the second: the profession has a credibility problem, and some of it is earned. There are agencies that sell activity as if it were strategy. There are practitioners who have learned to talk fluently about metrics that do not connect to anything a finance director would recognise as important. There are platforms with a commercial interest in convincing you that more spend equals more results, and they are very good at making that case. None of that makes digital marketing illegitimate. It makes it an industry that requires more critical thinking than most people apply to it.

Why Digital Marketing Gets a Bad Reputation

The reputation problem comes from a specific pattern I have watched repeat itself across clients, industries, and budget sizes. A business invests in digital marketing. The agency or internal team reports on impressions, click-through rates, and follower growth. The business does not see a corresponding improvement in revenue or customer acquisition. The conclusion drawn is that digital marketing does not work.

The actual problem is almost never the channel. It is the absence of a clear commercial objective sitting above the channel activity. When I was running agency teams, I used to ask new clients a simple question: what does success look like in twelve months, expressed as a business number? Not a marketing number. A business number. Revenue, customer count, market share, retention rate. Something a board would care about. A surprising number of clients struggled to answer it. Not because they were unsophisticated, but because the conversation with their previous agency had always started with channels and tactics, not with commercial outcomes.

That gap between activity and outcome is where digital marketing’s reputation gets damaged. And it is largely self-inflicted by the industry.

If you are thinking about this in the context of broader growth strategy, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks that sit above channel decisions, which is where most of this actually gets resolved.

The Channels Work. The Strategy Around Them Often Does Not.

Paid search works. SEO works. Paid social works. Email works. Programmatic display works, with caveats. Affiliate works in the right categories. None of these channels are broken. They are distribution mechanisms. The question is always what you are distributing, to whom, and whether the economics of doing so make sense for your business.

The strategic failure that sits above most underperforming digital programmes is a confusion between demand capture and demand creation. Paid search is largely a demand capture tool. When someone types a query into Google, they have already formed an intent. Your ad intercepts that intent. This is genuinely valuable, but it is not the same as creating demand that did not previously exist. If the market for your product is small, paid search will find that ceiling quickly. No amount of bid optimisation will manufacture demand that is not there.

Demand creation is harder, slower, and harder to attribute. It involves content, brand, earned media, and the kind of long-term audience building that does not show up cleanly in a last-click attribution report. Many businesses abandon this work because it is difficult to measure precisely, and invest more heavily in demand capture channels where the reporting looks cleaner. This is a rational response to measurement pressure, but it is a strategically poor one. Market penetration over time requires both, and the businesses that understand this tend to compound their growth more effectively than those chasing short-term attribution efficiency.

The growth hacking framing that became popular in the 2010s did not help here. It encouraged a mindset of finding clever shortcuts rather than building durable commercial infrastructure. Some of those shortcuts worked briefly. Most of them degraded as platforms matured and competitors copied the same tactics. The businesses that built genuine audience relationships and clear positioning held their ground. The ones that optimised tactics without building foundations had to keep finding new shortcuts.

The Metrics Problem Is More Serious Than Most Teams Admit

One of the things I noticed when judging the Effie Awards was how sharp the divide was between entries that could demonstrate commercial impact and entries that were built around impressive-sounding marketing metrics. Reach numbers in the hundreds of millions. Engagement rates that looked extraordinary. Brand sentiment shifts measured to two decimal places. And then, when you looked for the connection to revenue or market share or customer behaviour, it was either absent or buried in a footnote.

This is not a small problem. It reflects a structural issue in how many marketing teams are set up and what they are rewarded for. If the KPIs your team is measured against are impressions, engagement, and share of voice, that is what they will optimise for. Those metrics are not worthless. They are useful signals. But they are not outcomes. Treating them as outcomes is how you end up with a marketing function that is busy, credentialed, and commercially invisible.

The most effective digital marketing programmes I have seen share a common characteristic: they are built backwards from a commercial objective. What revenue or customer acquisition target are we trying to hit? What conversion rate and average order value does that imply? What volume of qualified traffic or leads does that require? What channel mix and spend level is needed to generate that volume at an acceptable cost? This is not complicated analysis. It is basic commercial logic. But it is surprisingly rare as a starting point for digital marketing planning.

Tools like growth and analytics platforms can support this kind of planning, but they cannot substitute for it. The tool does not tell you what objective to set. That requires a conversation between marketing and the business, and those conversations are often harder than optimising a campaign dashboard.

What Separates Digital Marketing That Works From Digital Marketing That Does Not

I have managed digital marketing programmes across more than thirty industries over the course of my career, from e-commerce to financial services to B2B technology to consumer goods. The variables differ enormously: different customer journeys, different purchase cycles, different competitive dynamics, different attribution challenges. But the pattern of what works and what does not is remarkably consistent.

Programmes that work are built on a clear understanding of who the customer is, what they need, and where they are in their decision process. They have a defined commercial objective that sits above all channel decisions. They measure what matters, not what is easy to measure. They are willing to invest in channels and activities that build long-term value even when short-term attribution is imperfect. And they treat the relationship between marketing and the rest of the business as a commercial partnership, not a service delivery arrangement.

Programmes that do not work tend to start with channels rather than objectives. They inherit their KPIs from previous years without questioning whether those KPIs connect to anything commercially meaningful. They over-invest in reporting sophistication and under-invest in strategic clarity. They mistake activity for progress. And they often operate in isolation from the commercial conversations happening in the rest of the business.

The difference is not budget. I have seen well-funded programmes that were commercially useless and lean programmes that were punching well above their weight. The difference is almost always the quality of thinking that sits above the execution. BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy makes this point from a different angle: the alignment between marketing, sales, and commercial objectives is a more reliable predictor of growth than any individual channel choice.

The Agency and Platform Incentive Problem

There is something worth naming directly here, because it affects how digital marketing gets bought and sold, and therefore how it gets practiced.

Agencies are typically paid on retainer or on a percentage of media spend. Neither of these commercial models naturally aligns agency incentives with client commercial outcomes. A retainer model rewards scope retention and renewal, not results. A percentage-of-spend model rewards increased spend, not improved efficiency. This does not make agencies dishonest. It means the incentive structure creates pressure in directions that do not always serve the client.

Platforms have a similar problem. Google, Meta, and every other major advertising platform are in the business of selling advertising inventory. Their recommendation engines, their account management teams, and their measurement tools are all, to varying degrees, designed to encourage more spend. The attribution models they provide by default tend to favour their own platforms. The metrics they surface most prominently tend to be the ones that look best. This is not conspiracy. It is commercial logic. But clients who do not understand it make worse decisions as a result.

When I was growing an agency from a loss-making position to one of the top five independents in the country, one of the things that differentiated us was a willingness to tell clients when they were spending in the wrong places. That is a harder conversation to have when your revenue is tied to their spend. But it is the conversation that builds the kind of client relationships that last, and that actually produce the results clients come back for. The agencies that cannot have that conversation are the ones that contribute most to digital marketing’s credibility problem.

Where Digital Marketing Genuinely Excels

It would be a mistake to read this as a cynical view of digital marketing. It is not. The discipline has genuine strengths that no other marketing category can match.

The feedback loop is faster than anything that existed before. You can test a message, a product, a price point, or an audience segment and get meaningful signal within days or weeks rather than months. That speed of learning, when it is applied to real commercial questions rather than optimisation of existing campaigns, is genuinely valuable. It changes how you can approach product development, market entry, and pricing in ways that were not possible in a pre-digital environment.

The targeting precision is real. The ability to reach specific audience segments based on behaviour, intent, and context is something that broadcast media has never been able to offer. When you combine that precision with a clear understanding of your customer and a compelling offer, the efficiency gains are substantial. The problem is that targeting precision is often used to find more people who look like existing customers rather than to reach genuinely new audiences. That is a demand capture instinct applied to a tool that could be doing more.

The scalability is also real. A campaign that works at small scale can often be expanded relatively quickly, which is not true of most other marketing formats. Go-to-market execution is genuinely harder than it used to be, but digital channels still offer a speed and scalability of reach that other formats cannot match. For businesses launching into new markets or testing new propositions, that matters.

The measurability, even with all its limitations, is better than the alternative. The measurement is imperfect. Attribution is a model, not a truth. But having some data about what is working and what is not is better than having none, provided you treat the data as a perspective rather than a verdict.

How to Tell If Your Digital Marketing Programme Is Actually Working

This is the practical question that most of the theoretical debate eventually comes down to. Here is how I would approach it.

Start by asking whether your digital marketing investment is connected to a specific commercial outcome. Not a marketing outcome. A commercial outcome. Revenue, customer acquisition cost, retention rate, market share. If you cannot draw a clear line from your digital activity to a number that a CFO would care about, that is the first problem to solve.

Then ask whether the metrics you are reporting on are proxies or outcomes. Impressions, clicks, and engagement rates are proxies. They are useful signals, but they are not the destination. If your reporting stops at proxies, you are measuring activity, not impact.

Ask whether you are capturing demand that already exists or creating demand that did not. Both are legitimate, but they require different channels, different time horizons, and different measurement approaches. Conflating them leads to unrealistic expectations and poor investment decisions.

Ask whether your agency or internal team can tell you, with honesty, what is not working. A team that can only report good news is a team that is managing your perception rather than your results. The most valuable thing a marketing team can do is identify where spend is not producing returns and redirect it. That requires a culture of honest measurement, which is rarer than it should be.

And ask whether digital marketing is being treated as a commercial function or a production operation. If the primary output of your digital marketing team is content, campaigns, and reports, you have a production operation. If the primary output is commercial decisions informed by market data, you have a commercial function. The second version is more valuable, harder to build, and more likely to produce results that justify the investment.

The Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub has more on building the commercial infrastructure that makes digital marketing programmes actually productive, including how to align channel investment with growth objectives across different stages of business development.

The Honest Summary

Digital marketing is legitimate. It has produced real commercial outcomes for businesses of every size and type, and it will continue to do so. The scepticism around it is not misplaced, but it is usually aimed at the wrong target. The problem is not the channels. It is the absence of commercial rigour in how those channels are used.

The businesses that get the most from digital marketing are the ones that treat it as a commercial discipline rather than a marketing one. They start with objectives, not channels. They measure outcomes, not activity. They are honest about what is working and what is not. And they maintain enough strategic clarity to resist the pressure, from platforms, from agencies, from internal stakeholders, to confuse busyness with progress.

That is not a complicated formula. But it requires a different kind of discipline than most digital marketing programmes are built around. The good news, if you want to call it that, is that most of your competitors are not doing it either. Which means there is still meaningful competitive advantage available to the teams that do.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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