5 Reasons Why You Need Digital Marketing
As we live in a day and age where most tasks are carried out either digitally or online, you begin to ask yourself if you should be investing in digital marketing for your business. The plain answer is yes. As a business owner you’d like to dominate the online space due to the tonnes of opportunity for growth that it presents.
For instance, if you are looking for a restaurant to have dinner at, you go on Google and search for “restaurants near me”. If you were a restaurant owner you would definitely prefer for your restaurant to appear when somebody makes that query, ultimately driving in more clients.
It is almost safe to say that online marketing is mandatory for the modern day business as it is quite hard to succeed without it, specially for new upcoming businesses. Digital marketing can assist your business through building brand awareness, running ads to promote your products and making it easier for potential customers and clients to find you when they are in need of your services.
Everyday more and more businesses are involving themselves with some sort of digital marketing, therefore a great campaign can dictate the point of difference between you and your competitors. Below are the main 5 reasons why you need digital marketing and how it can boost your businesses’ growth and development.
1. Building Visibility Online
The internet has drastically changed the way we live our day to day lives. Our lifestyles have been made a lot easier as you can purchase clothes, home furniture, groceries and even movie tickets online. Forbes has indicated that around 82% of people conduct online research before purchasing a product or going ahead with a service.
The days of looking through yellow pages for plumber are over as it is much easier to pull your phone out and search for a plumber near you. The truth is that if you are not 100% active online, then you are missing out on a massive audience, meaning that there is a barrier between you and a higher revenue.
Whatever it may be that you are trying to sell, if you have a strong online presence, people can gain more information in regards to your product as well as purchasing and browsing whenever it is convenient for them.
A perfect marketing strategy to grow your business in the online space is Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy that allows you to rank well on search engines, such as Google by ranking for relevant keywords that match consumer intent. SEO efforts improve over time and the more you invest in it, the more visible your business becomes.
2. Cost Effective
Digital marketing is an investment which will not damage your pockets severely. Considering that digital marketing is a lot more affordable than traditional marketing, you cannot go wrong. As it is easier to build a strong campaign, digital marketing allows you to spend less while gaining more. The cost of newspaper and magazine advertisements can run into the thousands and TV and radio can often blow a company’s entire marketing budget.
You are able to continuously measure and check your progress to see what is working and what isn’t, eventually enabling you to target and invest more on the strategies that are bringing in real results. Therefore, no budget is really wasted, which brings us to our next reason as to why digital marketing is a must.
3. Measure Your Success
Digital marketing allows you to pay close attention as to how your campaigns are performing. You can see how many people are clicking on your ads, how much time they spend on your website and what exactly they are looking for. This is a giant bonus as the more information that you gain on your performance means you can restructure your strategies targeting the techniques that are working and bringing in traffic.
Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to analyse the data campaign, date and time, demographic factors and even age factors. You can easily see how many impressions, reach and clicks your campaigns are receiving. You can also increase or decrease your ad budget at any time as well as placing a cost cap on your ads so you do not blow your budget.
You can track various metrics with each campaign. This includes impressions, clicks, comments, shares, conversions, and more. It is extremely beneficial and easy for you to know how your campaign is performing.
You can regularly communicate with your customers to know their feedback about your products and pricing. This is far easier than collecting your customers’ opinions through surveys.
4. Connect With Your Customers
Building relationships with your customers is crucial so that in future they return. Digital marketing allows you to do this as well as finding out exactly what they’re after so you can target them. For example, using social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, can allow you to keep your customers and prospects updated with new information regarding the latest developments in your company or product offerings.
Connecting with your customers and clients can highly improve your business authenticity, which can attract new clients as your company is valued by others. This is a wonderful opportunity to promote any upcoming products or events you may have, making people excited and aware of your company.
5. Target Audiences
Online marketing campaigns allow you to target specific audiences of your choosing. For instance, a Google Ads campaign can be optimised so that only selected people see your ads.
You can define your audience by attributes such as age, gender, occupation, interests, hobbies, and more. With platforms like Facebook, you can get extremely specific with the audience you target.
This is an extremely valuable factor as it helps you not waste your budget on people that may not be interested.
Traditional marketing can be difficult when it comes to selecting a specific audience, it is more of a hit and miss, hoping that whoever sees your advertisement will follow through with your offering. With digital marketing, you reach people interested in your business. You can specifically target consumers with interest in your company, services, or products. It’s a level of depth that traditional marketing can’t match.