What Is Digital Marketing? Types and Examples (2026)

Types and Examples (2026)" guide, I don't read it as Marketing 101. I read it as a temperature check on where end-user demand is heading — and that directly shapes how I think about my own portfolio.

The piece pulls together a few numbers worth sitting with. Per IBISWorld data cited in the guide, 27.2% of US business activity happened online in 2025. A Clutch survey of marketing professionals found that 60% of small businesses plan to increase their marketing and advertising budgets in 2026. And eMarketer's May 2026 forecast has global digital advertising spending closing in on $1 trillion. Those three data points aren't just nice headlines — they're the demand backdrop for every domain you might sell this year.

Why marketing budgets matter for your flips

More spend on digital advertising and SEO means more businesses competing for attention online, which means more businesses needing a real address to send that traffic to. That's the basic equation I run when I'm deciding whether to renew a name or let it drop.

But the Shopify guide also surfaces something I want every flipper to notice. In the Shopify Survey of Store Owners from Q4 2025, 37% of respondents named marketing as their top Year 1 challenge, and a separate 36% tied "finding customers" with marketing for the same spot. If nearly four in ten new merchants are already sweating marketing before they've sold a thing, they're not thinking about a premium domain. They're thinking about survival. That gap — between stated budget intent and execution reality — is exactly where a lot of "nice" names die on the vine. Hold your pricing accordingly.

Channel shifts and what they mean for name selection

The guide walks through the usual channel mix — SEO, social, paid search, email — and emphasizes what I think is the most underrated point: digital campaigns can be adjusted while they're running, but your domain choice is fixed once you launch. That asymmetry is exactly why certain keyword-rich or category-specific names keep their liquidity while generic brandables do not.

If you're building or refreshing a portfolio, I'd weight names that match how new businesses are actually being marketed today. B2B campaigns lean on email, professional social, and automated personalization; B2C ecommerce leans on social ads, paid social, and search-driven content. The names that work as anchors for those campaigns are the ones with clean search intent baked in — not the clever wordplay names that looked great in 2014.

What I'd be tracking from here

A few things I'll be watching in the back half of 2026: whether the projected $1 trillion in ad spend actually translates into more inbound inquiries on commercial-keyword names, and whether the 60% budget-increase figure holds up once SMBs get their first quarterly marketing bill. Intent is loud at the planning stage and quiet at the renewal stage.

If you're a flipper, treat primers like this one less as education and more as a survey of where buyer attention is focused. Your job is to be three steps ahead of where they're going to need a name — not where they needed one last cycle.