As far as marketing today, the world is adopting an ‘out with the old, in with the new approach. This is understandable given how accessible the internet is presently. What’s more, the number of people using the internet continues to increase every day.
It therefore should not surprise you that digital marketing has played a key role in remodeling businesses and taking them to the top. You see, marketing is and always has been about connecting with the target market at the right place and at the right time. Traditional marketing involves things like banners and signs but such strategies have their limitations including not reaching the target audience.
Here are several reasons.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
Essentially, digital marketing involves advertising your products or services online. Here are some of the reasons you would want to consider it or your business.
Helps you Target Only your Prospects
The problem with traditional marketing methods is that they do not target a particular audience and that is like taking a shot in the dark. Imagine advertising your local moving company in a magazine. You would have no control over who sees the ad unlike when you create a website where people can come looking for that information whenever they need it.
That allows you to target a specific audience and increase your chances of converting visitors to your site into buyers. With digital marketing, you get to target your audience based on variables such as interests, location, gender, and age.
In the end, online marketing allows you to carry out the research required to identify your customer’s persona so that you can adjust your marketing strategies.
It is More Cost-effective Compared to Traditional Methods
With digital marketing, you can keep track of marketing campaigns often and consequently reduce the amount of money you spend on a particular channel in case it doesn’t deliver desired results. The same cannot be said about conventional marketing tactics.
Regardless of whether you get people to give your business cards or whether they call to get your products or services, you will have to pay the business card designers. Another thing about online marketing is that you get to choose where you want to spend your money.
For instance, you can choose to spend on web design to make your business page more user-friendly rather than paying for your ad to run on TV. This approach allows you to grow your business without wasting funds on channels that perform dismally.
It Puts you at the Same Level with Competitors
Marketing doesn’t come cheap. You have to pay for things like business card designs and ad space in newspapers. If you are a small business, it can be hard to compete with bigger brands in your industry. This is mostly because such brands have the finances to invest in nationwide campaigns and bigger ads in the newspaper.
With digital marketing, you can compete with bigger brands on the same level. Think along the lines of, if a bigger company has a website, you can set yours up too, and as long as your target audience is in the market for the products or services you are both providing, they have access to both your websites. After visiting, they can decide for themselves where to buy.
Moreover, you can get into influencer marketing through social media. Most people do not follow big brands on social media platforms, but they do follow personalities who will sporadically showcase services or products they like. This can be a great way to reach potential; customers.
Online Marketing Can Be Measured
With digital marketing, you can get a detailed view of the metrics that matter to your business including clicks, views, and shares. This has to be one of the major benefits when it comes to digital marketing because with traditional marketing strategies, it is almost impossible to measure such.
Digital marketing allows you to view accurate results regarding your business in real-time. Imagine placing your ad in a magazine. You cannot tell how many people will buy the magazine and how many will take their time to check out your ad.
That means you cannot tell if any of the sales you make were driven by the ad. With digital marketing, you can measure all the aspects of your marketing efforts.
It Explains Sales Figures
As a business owner, you probably know what online market share means, but if not, it is simply the percentage of the entire market sales your business accounts for. You get this figure by dividing your total business sales and multiplying the resulting figure by 100.
Why do you need to do this? Because it gives you the sales figure context and allows your company to view its sales and see how it measures up to competing businesses. The best part is that you won’t need an accountant to do it for you. This way, you can make plans to keep up with your competition.
Increases Brand Credibility
Customers value a brand they can rely on to deliver quality services or products and if your business is to gain credibility fast, it would be through the internet. If you are keen, you will realize that digitally active businesses usually end up having more credibility than their counterparts who mostly operate offline.
You see, when your business has an online presence, you can clarify concepts, questions, and address customer complaints in real-time. Doing such things shows that it cares.
You can also tell whether your business is gaining credibility or not by looking at its ranking on search engines like Google. Of course, you are likely to get more customers if your business ranks highly because you have built confidence. You also get to attract stakeholders this way.
After all, it is natural to depend on industry leaders.
Improves Engagement
How many people do you know own desktop computers? You probably don’t know any and if you do, they are not many. Most people are now using their phones to look for products and services as well as shop. That then opens mobile marketing to an entire world of opportunities, which then leads to increased engagement.
With digital marketing, you create a personalized user experience that also allows you to reach a bigger number of new users. That means that prospective clients won’t have to reach out through a call center but engage directly with you. Your business can therefore benefit by having a dedicated app or a strong social media presence as that allows you to easily reach most users in their native environment.
It Helps Improve Business Models
We have already talked about how digital marketing can help you analyze your business. Doing that also helps you make informed decisions about your business as far as improving efficiency and investing resources is concerned.
With conventional marketing, you have to gather numbers manually, which can be quite cumbersome and financially draining. Digital platforms come with in-built analytic dashboards with all the information you need readily available.
All you need to do is to view your business reports on the said dashboards to get easy visuals. This will help you plan the customer journey and gauge performance metrics all the time.
Personalized Attention to Customers
Conventional marketing strategies employ a ‘one size fits all’ approach to advertising which is not only outdated but also not as effective. Digital marketing gives you access to customer behavior so that you are in a better position to fine-tune your strategies and create the perfect customer experience.
The ideal customer experience should involve loyalty and trustworthiness and since digital marketing allows you to interact directly with your customers, you can give them personalized attention and make them feel like they are valued.
This is something that business car designers will not be able to do for you.
Closes Larger B2B Accounts
Digital tools and channels have brought into fruition a new strategy known as account-based marketing. This is just marketing that utilizes personalized messaging to get through to individual prospective customers.
This kind of marketing is extremely targeted and with that, you get to enjoy more significant B2B accounts and more efficient use of resources.
Facilitates Growth
Most of the routine marketing tasks such as reporting can be automated when done digitally by a strong marketing automation platform. This then allows you or your marketing team to focus on coming up with effective strategies and gauging useful analytics.
Such systems allow sales and marketing teams to give more time to their expertise and improve strategies instead of wasting resources on insignificant tasks.
Gives Value for Money
If you have not yet joined digital marketing, you probably think that you need a lot of money to get started which is hardly the case. Digital marketing is usually affordable and more often than not yields desirable results. For instance, your small business can reach potential customers fast and begin to scale right away. It also becomes easier to gauge ROI at different phases of the funnel.
This is because digital marketing is all about creating an online presence and even if you are not able to pay for pay-per-click or SEO advertising, your business can still benefit from connecting with its audience.
As we have previously mentioned, digital marketing is a cost-effective tactic that requires little financial input. PPC is also an affordable digital marketing technique because, with it, you can easily control marketing campaigns and worry less about runaway budgets.
Easy Sharing
With online marketing, it is easy to share details of your business because most online platforms feature sharing capabilities. You can take advantage of that and share your campaigns and articles with a large number of people especially if you have a huge following. It gets better if your followers share with other people as well.
Doing that creates a multiplier effect that can immensely improve your sales.
Helps Position your Business
More than half the population in the US uses search engines like Google. A huge number of B2B purchases begin with a simple web search. Therefore, whether you provide payroll services or sell beauty products search engine optimization (SEO) delivers great results all the time.
As a business, you can use your digital platforms to elevate your brand and reputation. For instance, a well-designed website, a social media channel, and a blog featuring valuable articles can help you push your brand to greater heights and get to ranking highly.
Helps Achieve Business Goals
If you want to succeed in your business and reach your goals, a solid digital marketing strategy will help you do it. Adequate information for better decision-making, customer trust, and cost-effectiveness are some of the benefits that come with digital marketing.
It then goes without saying that digital marketing can help you achieve whatever you want for your business faster and more effectively.
Increases Accessibility
Digital marketing gives businesses an online presence. This improves accessibility, unlike traditional marketing methods where accessibility is limited. For instance, a real estate agent has to place ads on different platforms and cross their fingers that clients will call them.
You also have to consider they may be unreachable through the correspondence they give out in the ad making it hard to communicate. Digital marketing allows real-time communication and engagement hence increasing accessibility.
Marketing doesn’t have to involve guesswork and a lot of work like enlisting audio visual companies to create ads for you. Digital marketing allows you to take control of every aspect of increasing your business visibility.
This is a good thing seeing as you will be able to cut costs and measure how your marketing strategies are performing. That along with all the reasons we have covered, you can be sure that digital marketing is here to stay.
