Digital marketing has become one of the most popular buzzwords in recent years. Everyone talks about digital marketing, and professionals admire it as the most effective way to grow your business.
If you type “digital marketing” in Google trends, you will find that there is massive growth in search results about it
What is Digital Marketing?
But what is Digital Marketing? Digital marketing is a broad term that covers all the online marketing channels and strategies that you can use to promote products or services. Also, electronic devices such as televisions, mobile phones, and electronics.
Digital Marketing is essential for business promotion and very useful for new companies.
Different digital channels such as social networks, email, and websites are used to interact with current and potential consumers.
Digital marketing is essential for modern businesses because the Internet plays a critical role in today’s buyers’ purchase decisions. If you think about it, when was the last time you bought it from a brochure? On the other hand, when was the last time you saw an ad on Instagram, 10 minutes ago?. The Internet affects how people buy. Making imperative to companies not only to be online but increase their visibility as much as possible.
Consumers now use the Internet to acquire the information they need to make an informed purchase. Does not matter if they visit the physical store to make the purchase.
Why Should you Get Into Digital Marketing
1: Digital Marketing evens the Playing Field
Digital marketing really levels the playing field. In other words, it gives small and medium businesses the opportunity to compete against the big ones.
Everyone can attract traffic because everyone has access to the same tools. Nowadays not only huge corporations have enough resources to launch an online marketing campaign.
With digital marketing, small businesses now have the resources to conduct sales and marketing processes that were previously only available to large corporations. Without a call center, small businesses can effectively interact with multiple customers, even customers from anywhere in the world, even if they do not have physical stores or branches in these locations. Actually this is in part the reason why I got motivated to give it a try, I explain a little bit more in my story.
2: More Profit over Traditional Marketing
Small businesses have very few resources and even capitalization. That’s why digital marketing provides them with a better and much more profitable marketing channel that delivers results. The Gartner Digital Marketing Expense Report noted that up to 40% of respondents claimed to make significant savings by using digital marketing promotion methods for their products and services.
That’s why 28% of surveyed business owners will change the marketing cost distribution of traditional media channels and invest them in online digital marketing tools and techniques. According to a Gartner survey,
3: Easy to Scale
As with any marketing, an initial investment is required for traffic to flow. But the importance of digital marketing for small businesses becomes very clear when you see how easy it is to scale and adapt as your business grows. The importance of digital marketing lies in the reality that you can get juncture results. Analyze data and make changes quickly to reduce wasted ad spending and lost revenue. This leads us to see how profitable digital marketing is for a small business.
4: Potential Income
The higher conversion rates generated by effective digital marketing methods will provide many solvent benefits for you and your business in terms of income
With a better assumption of income growth, small and medium-sized businesses that use digital marketing methods will be 3.3 times more probable to extend their manpower and businesses, opening their doors to better, bigger and bigger markets.
5: Interaction with your Audience
One of the reasons why digital marketing is grabbing over traditional marketing channels is the power of internet marketing tools to connect with specific audiences in real-time. Participation in any form is what your customers expect to receive when interacting with your brand or business. Interacting and providing your customers with suitable engagement points can give you an idea of what your target audiences want.
Imagine the possibilities when you drill down your target down to, for example, 18-year-old males, that live in Kansas, love skateboards, and speaks Spanish.
This information will provide your customers with an even better experience, and build great relationships. Building loyalty and trust, you will need when your business begins to grow.
6: Mobile Consumers
Mobile Internet is the present and future of communications. Why? the rapid proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other Internet-enabled devices.
Mobile devices have become a central part of our lives. Now is the best time to have digital marketing campaigns targeting mobile consumers, paving the way for better growth and faster expansion for your business.
More people are selecting their smartphones as their personal computer every day, I have to be honest. I can spend days without turning on my laptop and still be profitable and work from my mobile. The screen size would be the main concern, not my mobile capabilities
7: Business Evolution
It is usual for advertisement brick and mortar stores to meet visitors who come into their store, probe and visit products, and then leave without buying anything. Many types of people like these come and go, but a few of them will make a purchase and, if pleased, will return for more at a later date. If you get less of the latest and more of the few, sooner or later your brick and mortar business will cease to exist.
8: Establish your Brand and Influence
You are in an industry with many other competitors. Standing out from them in a way that builds trust is key to winning more business. With digital marketing, you can do this by communicating with your target audience. Social media platforms connect your brand with prospective customers in a personal way. If you can deliver value that your competitors can’t, you can easily lead up to the top as a leader in your industry.
9: Improve Relationships
Digital Marketing helps you build better customer relationships while traditional marketing techniques provide one-way communication with your target audience digital marketing enables two-way communication with consumers.
Companies can learn more about consumer issues and concerns trough Digital Marketing, which also helps companies build better brand relationships.
10: Increase your Range of Operation
Traditional marketing techniques can be quite useful in reaching a target audience in a specific geographic area. However, these methods cannot reach a wider audience spread over a larger geographic area. This is where digital marketing can come in handy since nowadays, most places in the world have internet connectivity, which potentializes the reach of digital marketing by a long shot. Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing has a reach potential on steroids.
Digital marketing allows you to market your products and services worldwide whit a few clicks. In other words, anyone who has an electronic device with a screen and Internet can learn about your products and services.
11: Growing Digital Trend
With the growth of digital methods, the modern consumer is also moving towards a more digital experience. Generally, people tend to use search engines to find information about specific products or services, and also to search for specific brands.
Companies must be available on the Internet and in various search engines so that they can attract and influence their target customers to buy their products or services. Having a good website and a good search engine ranking also helps your business grow and also allows your brand value to grow and make it accessible to a wider audience.
12: Calls to Action and Influence
While social signals and testimonials help gain the trust of specific audiences. Digital Marketing makes use of effective strategies that will prompt people to take favorable steps that your brand or company intends them to take. Conversion to leads or sales is still underway and under the full control of the website visitor. They don’t have to, but digital marketers can use smart and innovative ways to drive conversion through Calls to Action.
13: Return on Investment (ROI)
This is a project, so as a project, you need to guarantee a ROI (Return of investments) to be successful.
With better income and a better brand, digital marketing can provide a better return on investment (ROI) than traditional media and marketing channels.
With conventional means, the cost is too high for small and medium-sized companies to take advantage of, and the results received are somewhat vague and really hard to measure.
However, the key to this type of marketing is to generate a stream of traffic that turns into leads and sales. The more traffic, the faster you can get your ROI.
14: Future
If you use the Internet, you must have heard the “Internet of Things.” The IoT is a global network of interconnected devices (tablets, smartphones, gadgets, machines, etc.) that can interact with each other over the Internet.
In short, this is the future in our hands. It sounds like something from a movie. However, it’s projected that the 30 billion devices would be connected to IoT in 2020 and 75 by 2025. Mindblowing
This type of marketing will prepare your business for this ecosystem that will penetrate all aspects of people’s lives. For example, my smartwatch automatically updates my computer, phone, and cloud storage with the data it collects about my fitness, all this without my intervention.
Someone that targets me as an audience has many ways of reaching me trough digital means.
15: Interactivity
Digital marketing is here, now, and evolving daily.
With digital marketing campaigns like social media marketing, blogging, improved search results, texting, online ads, etc. You can provide your customers with a more personal experience.
Things like images, infographics, short videos, customer stories keep your audience informed, entertain them, and attract ideal customers.
16: Ease to Monitor
Do you want to know the reach and impact of your campaigns?
Digital marketing it’s your answer.
Every campaign you run online comes with enough amount of information for you to understand your campaign on the go.
Using the analytics tool, marketers can verify different advertising content and manage how the public reacts to each campaign. Check the number of visitors to your website, number of page views, the average time a user spends on your website, bounce rates, conversion, and analyze growth over time. By analyzing all these facets, you can work to optimize your marketing plans and get the best results.
17: Affordability.
Even big companies with big marketing budgets need to be aware of how they spend their marketing dollars.
One of the benefits of digital marketing is that it is affordable and effective.
Businesses can market via email or social media for a fraction of the cost of producing and distributing printed ads.
18: Complementation with Traditional Marketing
Many companies suppose that once they go digital, they cannot do paper marketing. However, using both together allows “the best of both worlds” engaging more customers. The key to finding success with an integrated marketing strategy is to harness their individual benefits and maximize results.
19: Social Media
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat are some of the most used social networks today.
Approximately 80% of the U.S. population is on social media, that’s about 223 million Americans and potential people to reach.
Unless you have a unique group of customers who don’t use social media, chances are you need to implement these platforms in your marketing plan.
20: Everyone is Doing it
For your business to be successful, you must pay attention to what your competitors are doing and learn. Think of your competitors as people who have something to teach you.
How do they communicate their customers, and what makes them unique? How well do they engage with the audience? Do you think you can do better? You cannot if you do not participate in the competition in the digital world.
Bottom Line
It’s clear. Businesses today need digital marketing to compete. Without actual marketing, your business cannot have a high impact.
Marketing gets the word out about your business. It allows you to connect with people and inform them of all the services you offer. Online is where the customers are, so it is where you should be.