Not so long ago, online marketing was seen as a novel way of marketing. Over the past few years, and digital marketing has significantly risen in importance. Today, digital marketing is an integral part of business and what business represents to its customers. No longer is it enough to put up a website or to run ad campaigns that have little focus. If you don’t yet have integrated digital marketing strategies up and running time is not working in your favour.
Let’s consider why it is that to grow and to thrive, your business must use digital marketing.
Why Digital Marketing is Right for Your Business
For small business digital marketing levels the playing field
It’s happened all too often. A large company such as Tesco builds a supermarket in town, and local speciality shops are quick to vanish from the high street. Starbucks moves in, and the little corner coffee shops that have been there for decades, suddenly disappear. This is where digital marketing has clear benefits above and beyond traditional marketing, in terms of offering small businesses a beacon of hope. With digital marketing as a smaller business, you can achieve a top-ranking position, be that in the search engines or with paid ads.
Digital marketing enables small businesses to compete with big companies, even with a far smaller advertising budget.
More targeted
If you’re intent on running an ad in a magazine, you will be targeting a particular segment of the market. You’ll know who tends to read the magazine. You’ll have control over ad size and placement. And with some publisher guidelines, you’ll control the message. Your magazine ad may reach over 1 million readers. How many within this million-plus are in your target market?
With online marketing, you can dissect even huge demographics like this. You can get super-targeted groups. Targeting at this level means you can create ads that are incredibly relevant to the segment of the market you wish to target. With PPC ads in Google, you can achieve this by positioning your ad at or near the top of the ad results in Google search. With SEO, you can achieve this by increasing your ranking of the organic search engine results page. By advertising on Facebook, you can be very specific about who your ad is shown to on the Facebook platform – as is the case with pay per click ads in the Google search results. It’s not a case of spending thousands on a single ad and not knowing who has seen it.
You can also run your ad campaigns indefinitely. This means you can modify your ads as and when you wish.
Analytics is very advanced
Do you ever really know how an ad on TV has performed? If you carry out some testing, you can figure out the best frequency and best times for your ad to air.
Generally, though, you can only find out your TV ad’s reach depending on what the agency tells you.
When you use digital marketing, you’ll find out the following:
- How many users have visited your website.
- How many users have seen your ad.
- How users have got onto your website.
- If your ad converted users into a sale.
- If your ad prompted a different action, such as contacting your business.
You can also find out much more about who’s interacting with your ad. You have access to:
- Who finds your website most interesting.
- What demographic these people belong to.
- Which page is the most popular on your website.
- What keywords/ phrases these people use to find you.
- Which pages these users have visited on your site, in order.
Using Google Analytics, all of this is possible to track. Then, you can make changes by using what you learn from Analytics. And you can increase your efforts and your spend where you see the best results.
Easily scaled and adapted
An initial investment is required, as with any form of marketing, to get initial traffic flowing to your website. But for any size of business, it’s straightforward to scale and adapt marketing as your business grows. As an example, with PPC, you can select a daily budget. You are in control of the total cost of the campaign. Even when results are amazing, there’s no requirement to renegotiate with Google to keep your ads running. As traffic converts more and more, you can increase your daily ad spend to keep the ad running uninterrupted.
With digital marketing, you can enjoy instantaneous results. Review your data to analyse the performance of the ads and you can then make rapid changes to reduce waste on ad spend.
Digital marketing is in alignment with how people shop
Most consumers prefer to find a product, a service, or anything else that they want or need online. Many consumers demonstrate little patience online. They will not venture past the first page of the search results, for example. This means you have to get ahead and remain ahead of your competition. That’s how SEO works. If you optimise your website, which can be achieved in a variety of ways, then your site will be discovered by anyone that is using the search engines and entering keywords that are relevant to your business’ brand.
Anything from doctors to restaurants, to commodities through to accountants, the modern-day sales process mostly starts and ends online. To be relevant to almost all of your customers, you sincerely need to have an online presence. Digital marketing is what provides you with that presence. Modern SEO strategy is always being updated, but the principles are somewhat constant.
Your Business Likely Cannot Thrive Without Digital Marketing
In the modern economy, it’s clear that businesses need digital marketing so they can compete. Your customers are online. And online is where your customers prefer you to reach them.
You understand the importance of digital marketing for your business. But that’s not to say that implementing strategies that will deliver a good ROI is an easily achieved process.
In order to be successful in business, you often need expertise. As an award-winning digital marketing agency, we have lots of it.
To find out how a digital marketing agency can help to grow your business or to find out more about digital marketing, please get in touch!