Not having much luck with your traditional marketing campaigns? Struggling to come to terms with how digital marketing works? Either way, perhaps now is the right time to consider an investment into a digital marketing service – the sort of service that will drive optimal results for your business. Before we find out about the benefits of digital marketing, let’s consider what digital marketing is, given that it’s so encompassing in its multiple facets.
What is Digital Marketing?
To put it simply, digital marketing comprises the promotion of a product or a brand through the implementation of the internet. Digital marketing is also inclusive of instant messaging, text messaging, apps, video content, and more.
Digital marketing is reliant upon multiple channels and multiple technologies – channels and technologies that provide organisations with the ability to analyse campaigns, analyse content, and to closely assess strategy. This is key so that the organisation is able to figure out exactly what is working and exactly what is not working.
How Does Digital Marketing Work?
Digital marketing is, of course, mighty important, together with all of its associated channels. But that importance is not to be taken at the exclusion of everything else. Simply knowing about your customers is not enough. Rather, you need to understand them better than your competitors do. This way, your communication can be more effective. If you get to know your customers better, you can then communicate with them wherever, however, and whenever they are going to be more receptive to you. And to achieve this you need to ascertain a consolidated view of the preferences and expectations of your customers as it pertains to different channels – mobile, social media, direct mail, point of sale, and more. To accomplish that, retailers use what is referred to as ‘omnichannel retail analytics’.
Marketers then use this information to establish consistently coordinated customer experiences and provide a seamless service on multiple channels, which encourages customers to move further within the buying cycle and develops a stronger relationship between the consumer and the brand.
With an ever-deeper insight into your customers’ preferences and behaviour, the more likely you will be able to engage with them in a positive way.
What’s required to get digital marketing right? The keys to success can be summed up in three different ways:
- Successfully manage customer relationships across various channels. That can mean blending digital and traditional marketing channels together.
- Initiate and respond to dynamic customer interactions.
- In order to make better-informed and more rapid decisions, extract as much value as you can from big data. Big data refers to extremely large data sets that can be analysed in computational fashion to reveal trends, patterns, and associations, with particular emphasis on the behaviour of and interactions between humans.
What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?
Now that we’ve considered what digital marketing actually is and how digital marketing works we can look at the benefits of digital marketing. While there are, in fact, many more, here are six key benefits that digital marketing can provide to your organisation.
It can be highly cost-effective.
Among the largest benefits of digital marketing is its extreme potential for cost-effectiveness (in comparison to more traditional marketing avenues). Digital marketing, when done right, will help you to save money while at the same time, and again when done right, it will generate more leads for you. With respect to more traditional forms of marketing, for small to mid-sized businesses, it’s far from easy to compete with the conglomerates. Big businesses have the funds available for radio and TV advertising, and any other type of advertising they wish to pursue. Smaller-sized businesses really cannot compete in these channels. However, through digital marketing, the small-sized, the mid-sized, and the multi-conglomerate are more equally positioned. In other words, digital marketing is a far more affordable way to market any size of business very effectively.
Many – most – types of digital marketing and online advertising are far more budget-friendly than traditional marketing ever was and ever could be. As just one example of this: with pay per click (PPC) advertising you can choose your budget. You can invest £200 or you can invest £20,000. It’s up to you to set the amount that works best for your organisation. And, in turn, this is just one unique advantage achieved through digital marketing. For most smaller businesses, the major cost of digital marketing is not so much about the finances. It’s more about the time investment. The time required to learn the required skills. The time required for experimentation. The time required to monitor and measure progress once digital marketing campaigns are underway. For obvious reasons, then, many smaller businesses turn to an expert digital marketing agency to handle their campaigns for them.
Digital marketing can be measured.
When hard-earned money is being invested in marketing campaigns, you’ll certainly want to track results. You’ll want to know if your strategy is driving the kind of results that you want or need. Among the major benefits of digital marketing is that results are measurable. Traditional marketing methods can be very effective, otherwise, companies would not invest. But it’s still very tricky to measure the true effectiveness of traditional marketing methods. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to track lead origins with traditional marketing. Unless you were to ask each individual who was to visit your business premises.
Digital marketing gives you the tools to track campaign results, including the origin of your leads, extremely accurately. For every type of online campaign, there’s a tracking system available. From search engine optimisation through to social media you can easily track campaign results. As an example, you can monitor your SEO campaigns using Google Analytics. You can monitor your Pinterest campaigns via Pinterest’s own analytical system and through Google Analytics. You can monitor your Facebook advertising campaigns through Facebook’s analytics system – Facebook Ads Metrics. So on and so forth. You’re able to track an array of metrics for each different digital marketing campaign you set up, inclusive of the number of impressions, the number of clicks, the number of shares, the number of conversions, and a lot more. This makes life easy – it’s easy to know which of your campaigns is performing and, if any, which of your campaigns require some additional work.
Being able to track campaign results to this degree means it’s easy to improve on what you already have. With so much campaign insight you can determine which improvements to make. This means you get so much more out of your original advertising budget with digital marketing than you ever could with traditional marketing channels. Measuring results equates to better and more successful campaigns, it’s as simple as that.
Through digital marketing, you can target ‘ideal’ customers.
It’s imperative to reach the right people if you wish to have a fruitful marketing campaign. You need to do all that it takes to reach an audience that has an interest in your business – an interest in the products and/ or services that you offer. From every available perk that digital marketing has to offer, the main advantage is the capacity for targeting very specifically. Traditional marketing methods do not make life easy in terms of targeting with any level of specificity. It’s much more a case of throwing ‘mud’ against the wall and because of the sheer numbers that see the ‘mud’ some of it will inevitably stick. Or that’s the hope anyway. Through digital marketing, unless you’re way out with your marketing approach, it’s inevitable that you’ll get through to interested parties. As such, digital marketing offers a level of depth that simply cannot be matched by traditional marketing. If you opt to utilise search engine optimisation or some other form, or forms, of online marketing, you are, in fact, creating buyer personas. These buyer personas essentially are made up to mimic what your ideal customer would look like. Then, you implement these personas as a way of targeting people that are most likely to want or need the products or services that you offer.
Irrespective that you create a PPC ad or a Facebook ad or whatever kind of digital ad, you first must establish your target audience. You establish your audience by assigning attributes such as occupation, income, gender, age, hobbies, interests, etc. When using platforms such as Facebook or Google Ads, you can be particularly specific in terms of the audience you would like to target. And by narrowing down your focus you can reach out to people that have an interest in your wares. What this means is that you can spend your budget more efficiently and more effectively thereby obtaining ever-more valuable leads into the process.
Digital marketing makes it easy to reach people that are at the outset of the buying cycle.
When a shopper begins looking for a product or a service that you offer it’s key to make an early impact. Ideally, you want that shopper to gain familiarity with your business. You want that shopper to buy from your company and not from your competitors. Among the many benefits of digital marketing is the capability you have of reaching people at the outset of their buying journey. These days, most people have a tendency to check the internet when they are at the start of their personal buying journey. They check reviews, they read through product or service feedback and reviews. If your business offerings fit in with their needs, it’s the right time for you to make a positive impact.
When you implement digital marketing you have the ability to direct interested parties to your web pages so that they can glean from you the specific information that is pertinent to their needs. The knock-on effect of this, besides potentially achieving a sale is that you gain, and build, upon brand exposure. Whether that occurs through your website or via your social channels, you are persistently exposing interested parties to your company – to your brand. So, even if these leads fail to convert with immediate effect, chances are decent that they will not forget about your business. Your business has already made some kind of impact early within the buying cycle. Thus, a further advantage of digital marketing is that when executed successfully it will help your business to grow and will help your brand to gain consistent exposure.
You can make constant and real-time alterations to your campaigns with digital marketing.
Among the key benefits of digital marketing – it’s ever so easy to make a large variety of changes on the go. And this is something that is quite unique to digital marketing alone. If you’ve done any traditional marketing you’ll know that once you’ve made the commitment you cannot make changes. Once you’ve printed off your brochures or your flyers, that’s it. There are no alterations that can be made. Not unless you dump the lot and start over. That will take a toll on your budget. Once your traditional marketing campaign is live you can’t change it to drive better results. On the other hand, once your digital marketing campaigns are up and running you can tweak until your heart’s content. You can update any and all of your PPC campaigns. You can play around with your social media ads. You can re-optimise your SEO. Being able to adapt campaigns like this means you are able to drive optimal results, over and over again.
With digital marketing, it’s much easier to improve conversion rates.
A further extremely notable benefit of digital marketing is that you can greatly improve your conversion rates – again, even if your campaigns are already live. In fact, when your campaigns are live it’s the best time to do this. That’s because you can target leads more specifically. Obviously, when you can solely focus on people that have an interest in your products and/ or services, the chances of conversion grow exponentially.
It’s Time to Invest in Digital Marketing
When you invest in a variety of digital marketing strategies – from SEO to PPC on Google Ads, Facebook, or Microsoft Ads – your business can experience multiple advantages in comparison to if you were to simply stick with traditional marketing methods. Online marketing provides an extremely attractive opportunity for business growth in terms of more valuable traffic and additional sales.
Bottom line is, by investing in digital marketing services it can help your organisation to capitalise on more leads, additional conversions, and increased revenue.
Some of the key benefits of digital marketing have been mentioned, if you would like to learn more or even discuss possible options for your business, please get in touch with us and one of our friendly team members will be happy to help.