What is Digital Marketing?
First, let’s brush up on the important concepts you need to understand this material. We will start with the definition of Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing is a strategic tool for businesses and it consists of every single marketing effort a company makes in the digital environment. By that, we mean, of course, all of the company’s online presence.
Digital Marketing is one of the most exciting tools a marketer can use to increase its presence online. Inbound Marketing, Interactive Marketing, and online Customer Relationships are all efforts that fall under the umbrella term “Digital Marketing”.
The internet has brought to marketers’ hands tools such as videos, podcasts and email campaigns to help them reach more people. Right now, most American companies already invest in Digital Marketing, with the bigger part of them focusing on channels such as social media (81%) or a website (78%).
Today, not having an online presence is a bad deal for businesses. A company can lose a lot of opportunities that are only available in the online world.
Importance of Digital Marketing: 6 of the best benefits
For all the fuzz about Digital Marketing, you might expect it to bring outstanding results for companies, right?
The truth is: it does.
As a strategy, Digital Marketing is known to be one of the most successful. Just look at the numbers polled from companies all around the US:
- 82% of consumers look up a product online before buying.
- 79% of Americans do at least part of their shopping online.
- US Digital Marketing spend will rise to about $332 billion in 2021.
But what are consumers and companies gaining for shifting their relationship to the internet? Understand the importance of Digital Marketing below.
1. It is a cost-effective marketing strategy
Promoting a business using traditional channels, like TV or newspapers, is very expensive. That makes it harder for companies to get a good ROI from their marketing efforts.
The use of a digital marketing strategy is cost-effective for businesses and brings long-lasting results.
Evergreen content, for instance, can keep reaching new potential clients for many years to come.
2. It is easy to measure
Have a hard time keeping track of your company’s marketing efforts? With offline marketing, it can be hard to understand how many people engaged with your promotional material. But we can thank the internet for changing that.
Every single time you visit a website, click a link or engage with any media, you leave breadcrumbs that indicate what you liked and what you didn’t care for.
Online, marketers can easily collect that data and use it to create more engaging ways to promote their brands.
Even tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is a much more precise process this way.
Because of that, companies are more likely to learn from their mistakes and get better with Digital Marketing as time goes by.
3. It helps build a reputation for your brand
Another reason to invest in Digital Marketing is to build a reputation. When was the last time you bought from a business without researching a bit about them on the internet?
The behavior of consumers changed and so did the marketing strategies used to reach the client. Building a rapport with your consumers on the internet and a solid image for your company will help make those undecided customers close deals quicker.
Content Marketing is a great tool for brands that need to start building their reputation online.
It generates three times more leads than other more costly tools, like paid advertising.
4. It allows you to reach more people than ever
Even with a good offline marketing strategy, companies face a big challenge: there are limits to how many people a newspaper, commercial or flyer will reach.
The internet makes it easier to scale your marketing efforts and reach way more people in your area.
Trying to expand? Then you better get yourself a Digital Marketing strategy.
5. It is adjustable at any time
Many campaigns come out of the oven too soon or could be made better if companies could use customer feedback as they go. But offline campaigns do not allow for that.
Their production costs too much for it to be worth replacing every single promotional item because of a minor change.
Digital Marketing, however, allows for much more control of the quality of campaigns.
Feedbacks can be used at any time to improve the results of the strategy and it doesn’t make a campaign any more or less expensive.
6. It ensures your business survival
Opening a business is hard, but maintaining it open throughout the years is even harder.
Technology has been changing our lives for the better, but the price is a business needs to adapt to survive.
Because the internet will ensure you reach a new generation of consumers it will also help you to be more likely to succeed in the long run.
- 59% of adults (18 to 29) use Instagram frequently.
- An average person spends at least 20 minutes on Facebook a day.
- 86% of women reach out to social media opinions before deciding to make a purchase.
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