Do you want to discover some of the main reasons why you should invest in digital marketing? Continue reading to learn more!
Are you a brick-and-mortar business owner looking to take your business online? Or maybe you are new to business and are torn between plying your trade online or offline?
Whatever the case, whether you’re a local restaurant owner or a small-town home cleaning service provider, your business can benefit from the near-limitless world of opportunities open to businesses with digital presence.
Don’t believe us? Okay, check out the following stats before we proceed:
- As of April 2022, there were five billion internet users worldwide, which is 63 percent of the global population. Of this total, 4.65 billion were social media users. (Statista)
- In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 4.9 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, reaching about 7.4 trillion dollars by 2025. (Statista)
- Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than 2.89 billion monthly active users. (Statista)
- On average, Americans spend 2 hours, 54 minutes on their phones each day. The average American will spend nearly a month and a half (44 days) on their phones in 2022. (Reviews.org)
- The current number of smartphone users in the world today is 6.648 billion, and this means 83.72% of the world’s population owns a smartphone. (Statista).
- Google has 4.3 billion users worldwide. Based on 4.72 billion internet users worldwide and a market share of 92.24%. Back in April 2021, Google had estimated unique visitors of 3.5 billion in the US. (Semrush)
- There are 246 million unique Google users in the US. Google usage statistics show Google Photos has over one billion active users. YouTube has over 1.9 billion active users each month (Review42).
Global digital population as of April 2022 (in billions). Source: statista.com
By now, it is impossible to think of a world without the internet. The Internet connects billions of people globally and is a core building block of the modern information society. The impact has been a huge part of the business world today (as is the case in other industries, of course!).
More and more brands are beginning to take their businesses online. Everyone now realizes that the internet offers a world of opportunities for entrepreneurial success. You cannot afford to be different or complacent about joining the moving train – it’s just too risky not to.
With all that said, let us now look at some of the most convincing reasons why you should invest in digital marketing.
1. More reach – global and local
One of the biggest reasons to invest in digital marketing is the incredible reach that you can achieve with it.
Traditional marketing is limited by geography and creating a marketing campaign (especially international) can be difficult, as well as cost- and labor-intensive. Fortunately, with the world going digital, the sky is really your beginning point when it comes to your ability to reach new audiences.
There are more than one billion active users on Facebook alone – a huge opportunity to grow your business! We haven’t even talked about the other amazing social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, to name a few), search engines (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), and websites with their tremendous reach potential.
Reason #1 to invest in digital marketing: global reach
Digital marketing levels the playing ground in such a way that even a very small local business can reach an international market if it goes digital. This would be near impossible with traditional marketing and/or would cost a lot of money to run. This online accessibility has created many growth opportunities for businesses to explore.
The combo of global reach and visibility that comes from digital marketing has also leveled the playing ground for small and growing businesses.
On another plane, we cannot overlook the role of digital marketing in facilitating reach and brand awareness for local businesses. While global reach is a huge benefit of digital marketing, it also helps improve local visibility – a great plus if your business relies on nearby customers.
Local SEO and locally targeted ads have helped domestically-run businesses bring more customers to their doors. If you’re a local business owner, you might want to consider using a digital business directory services and online crowd-sourced review platforms, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, Foursquare, GMB, AdSense, among others.
The reach you can get to an entire neighborhood with these local ad services is far greater than you would with distributing flyers, for example.
2. Effective targeting
The second reason to invest in digital marketing is the way it allows you to reach your target audience.
Close tie-in to the preceding point, digital marketing offers by far more effective targeting than traditional marketing. Digital mediums such as Google and Facebook are popular for the algorithms they have which offer consumers the best and most personalized online experience.
Facebook and Instagram ads, for example, can help you define and target a demographic, psychographic, and population with pinpoint accuracy, as well as even set your ad metrics according to your preferred time and budget.
There are also different targeting tools such as keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC), which enable you to extract data to see which audiences will work best for you. These tools also help you analyze the changing behavior of your product/service consumers and modify campaigns for these changes.
More so, because it allows consumers to dictate their interests, effective targeting helps businesses avoid disturbing the wrong audience with irrelevant and annoying advertising, which can harm brand reputation and waste marketing resources!
Most of these amazing benefits are not as effective (or even possible) in traditional marketing, which makes them a great reason to invest in digital marketing.
Reason #2 to invest in digital marketing: more refined targeting
3. Multiple strategies
Next on our list of reasons why businesses should invest in digital marketing are the opportunities when it comes to developing successful cross-platform strategies.
Cross-platform strategies are perhaps the biggest win of digital marketing. By launching a strategic and effective marketing campaign across diverse digital and social platforms like Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and email, you meet your clients where they are already spending their time and resources.
Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are great for building brand awareness. You can hire an influencer to build your online community and create credibility for your brand. Google helps you know when your customers and leads are ready to buy, because they are using targeted keywords that highlight a clear intent to buy.
Rekindle interests from old leads through email retargeting and guide them to take action with new news and enticing offers. Create Facebook video ads and engage through the platform’s groups and pages, leverage Instagram’s video options (posts, stories, reels, shorts and TVs), and use YouTube videos to showcase the benefits of an innovative product or to generate new leads.
There are also opportunities to reap amazing benefits from such resources as Google Ads, social media paid ads, and email marketing.
The benefits that businesses have when they invest in digital marketing are huge, the possibilities endless! Understanding and implementing the right digital marketing strategies can spike up your monthly leads and revenue.
4. Increased engagement
Digital marketing makes it easier for you to get to know your customers, much better than with the traditional route.
The interactive nature of the internet has offered brands the chance to gain impactful insights into their target audience, so that they can produce better products and improve their services.
Social media sites offer a chance for business owners to connect and build a strong relationship with their customers. Through these platforms, they can express their opinions via comments, likes and dislikes, so that you can find out exactly what they’re looking for. Don’t overlook this opportunity; take their opinions seriously.
Wondering how to create engagement for your audience?
Here are a few tips:
- Create an email newsletter
- Set up an instant messaging system
- Personalize your communication
- Respond to all interactions (new and old)
- Ask for feedback
- Send out surveys
- Conduct opinion polls
- Host a webinar
- Be active on social media
- Build a community or group and engage across multiple channels
- Be mobile friendly
- Co-create and celebrate together as a community
Reason #4 to invest in digital marketing: more engaged users
However you choose to do it, having a way to interact with customers online allows you to answer their questions, quell their concerns, and solve their problems quicker and more effectively, much unlike with conventional marketing. The result? Your business appears (or actually becomes) more human and accessible.
5. More advanced analytics & resource tools
Undoubtedly, one of the most important reasons to invest in digital marketing today is data.
What can you tell about how an ad performed, say, a TV ad? Well, yes, you can decide the best times for the ad to air and best frequency if you carry out some testing. You might create a focus team to monitor the data. However, there’s generally not much to know from its reach and performance apart from whether it boosted buzz or sales.
Now, how does digital marketing rate, in comparison?
Digital marketing allows you to know the following about your ads and audience:
- If your users actually saw it. TV ads don’t tell you that much. Your targets could have been in the shower or had the TV on mute
- If they interacted with it, liked it, or lingered on it
- If they shared it with other people
- If it triggered another action
- If it converted or lead to sales (super important in deciding where and how to best spend money)
With digital marketing ads, you also learn a lot more about the people who are interacting with your ad. You get to know:
- The people most interested in your ads
- What they are like and what makes them most likely to take action
- Who is most likely to convert
- Who spends more and what they do online
- The websites or platforms through which they found you
- The terms or keywords they used to find you online
- And lots more!
Or even specifically about your competitors and generally the market you’re in.
These are all easy to track with free digital analytics tools like Google Analytics. Alternatively, you can even gain more insights with paid tools. In any case, use your result data to cut costs where you are not impressed with the return on investment.
Concentrate resources and efforts where you get the best results. You may still decide to invest some money in traditional marketing, as a mixture of both online and offline marketing plans helps optimize your campaign results. However, getting valuable data is definitely key for businesses that invest in digital marketing.
6. Better access to feedback
Companies that invest in digital marketing also get the benefit of collecting feedback quickly and easily.
Digital media makes it easy, fast, and cheaper to know the opinions of your customers. All you need to do is engage your audience through surveys, polls, webinars, questions, comment sections, and email subscriptions, among other data collection strategies.
Build a community and engage across several platforms. Be friendly, honest and open-minded, and they will be willing to share and contribute with helpful feedback.
All these can be done through your website, email subscriptions and social media platforms, even in a day without launching an elaborate survey campaign, where online presence is absent.
Reason #6 to invest in digital marketing: feedback
7. Customer service ease
Customer experience is among the most important benefits that companies can experience when they invest in digital marketing.
When it comes to customer care, there is the tested-and-true traditional customer service, then there is online customer service. There’s plenty of intersection, but the latter adopts a more focused perspective and is created to support a business’s digital customers.
With the convenience of digital channels like web, mobile, social media and email, online customers can now maintain a connection with a brand without ever having to visit a physical establishment.
They can communicate with brand representatives through live chat, email, social, text or phone call, thus making it easier and faster to get answers to their problems. Expectations are higher and digital customers are more elusive.
To stay on top of the situation, brands must invest in digital customer service. They must be ready to meet customers in the right place at the right time, if they’re to share in the online market. It can’t be said any better.
8. Mobile audience
Companies that invest in digital marketing also have the incredible opportunity of reaching an immense mobile audience.
The most efficient and effective marketing goes where the customers are, so if you’ve left your house at all in the last decade, you know that everyone is on their mobile. This is a trend that has shown no sign of changing.
In fact, a recent research found that by the year 2025, about three-fourth of internet users will go online through their smartphones only. This means that if you want to reach this audience, you must channel your marketing efforts toward the mobile market.
Mobile marketing, though, is a big concept on its own. To be at the top of your mobile game, you will have to understand and use marketing strategies designed particularly for the platform and the peculiar preferences of mobile users. Below are five of the best mobile marketing strategies you can use to reach your digital customers wherever they are today:
- App-based marketing
- In-game marketing
- Location-based marketing
- Mobile search ads
- QR codes
Reason #8 to invest in digital marketing: reaching a huge mobile audience
9. Affordability
Another underestimated reason to invest in digital marketing is affordability.
Originally, marketing has been financially unattainable to small and medium-scale businesses. The development of digital marketing has redirected that standard. Today, for only $5 per day, a business can reach 1000-plus people with laser-target.
Traditionally, professional marketing has been financially unachievable to everyday small and medium-sized businesses. Businesses can direct searches to their website, lead form, products/services, for as low as $1 – $2 click on Google.
When Google campaigns are properly optimized and keywords are tactically chosen, these searches will all come from not only the right audience but also those who are super ready to buy. As a result, companies that invest in digital marketing find out that it can be significantly cheaper than traditional marketing.
10. Great speed
The speed that digital media offers is unrivaled and its coverage is instantaneous. Barriers are almost non-existent and negotiations happen a lot faster. Results also come much faster, courtesy of the often direct and immediate communication with clients and partners.
With digital marketing, everything also takes place in the same place. Your brand, the users, and the platform you advertise on are all online. And you can analyze the entire process and everything all at once.
These add up to a seamless and pleasant experience, generally speaking.
Reasons to invest in Digital Marketing
If nothing else drives forward the need to invest in digital marketing, the global lockdown due to Covid19 is enough reason to consider establishing an online presence for your business. As we have already mentioned, the best marketing goes where consumers are most easily found; these days, it’s in the digital space.
Most purchases happen via websites and mobile platforms. Your leads are probably already on e-commerce stores, Google, review sites, and social media pages, looking for products and services to order.
Meet them at the point of their needs and help out. Create and market contents, email campaigns, paid ad campaigns, influencer marketing, pay-per-click campaigns and other digital marketing strategies to optimize your success chances.
Build an online community and engage consistently with your audience. Conduct surveys and opinion polls, ask for feedback, answer community questions and queries, send out newsletters, and leverage social media.
And if you need extra help with any of your digital marketing campaigns, we can help you! If you are ready to invest in digital marketing, get in touch with us today.
