If you started a growing business and have begun to expand, you may wonder how to find more customers. Or maybe you have been in business for a while, and you want to increase your reach and let more people know about the services you offer. Or perhaps you are just sick of the inconsistent patterns of traditional marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Odds are you have an inkling of what digital marketing is. You see it all over the place. If you log in to any online service, you more than likely see some form of digital marketing.
- Doing some Google research on why you can’t get a stain out of the couch? At the top of the search page are ads a company has paid to show you.
- Watching a Youtube video on how to get your dog to stop chewing on every new pair of shoes or boots you get (always the left one)? The short ad at the beginning (and middle and end) of the video you are watching is a form of digital marketing.
You can hardly escape it, just like you can’t avoid billboards on the highway that desperately want you to buy a burger. Knowing you can’t avoid it, what is one to do? We all know the old saying, “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
Why is Digital Marketing Effective?
Marketing at its core is just trying to get the right message in front of the right people at the most opportune time. If you plan to grow your business, then utilizing digital marketing should be a priority for you in the near future. But what makes it such an effective tool? And what are some advantages it has over traditional marketing? Here are four advantages of digital marketing which make it so effective.
1. Affordability
Let’s be real. When it really comes down to it, return on investment (ROI) is the real thing we care about when it comes to our marketing efforts. We want to make sure the money spent is worth it. If done well, digital marketing is often more efficient in its ability to reach the people you want to interact with your business. This efficiency helps guide your money to the most appropriate channels for marketing.
Depending on your goals, your funds are directed towards different digital marketing channels. There are many different avenues you can go through in marketing, and knowing the goals of your business will help you find a focus. This will also help you to understand what strategies to spend money on.
You should know how much your product or service is worth and the percentage of it you are willing to spend on marketing. Digital marketing is easily scalable to your needs, but you still need to know how much you are ready to pay before starting.
Say you have a $100 suit with superb stitching. Start with knowing how much profit are you making off those suits. If you advertise the product and spend ten dollars per suit sold, you are spending 10% on marketing those suits.
2. Tracking
Digital marketing has a clear advantage over traditional marketing when tracking information. With traditional marketing, you plaster your ads everywhere you can and hope the right people see and respond to them. On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can see some of the characteristics of who saw your ad and where. This gives you a vast amount of information to better understand your marketing performance.
Online tracking is ever-evolving and changing. As we try to understand where the line is regarding people’s privacy and a business’s ability to market to those people, we see many challenges. Even with the changing terrain of online tracking, there is still an opportunity to understand your customer’s online journey. Given the tools we have at our disposal, we can gather a lot of information about our customers. We collect this information to better understand our customers and where we need to focus our money. We also use this information to make informed decisions on who we are targeting.
3. Targeting
With the data you gain from the tracking of information on the internet, you can target your ads to very specific audiences. One group you can reach out to is those who have already interacted with your business. If they’ve provided an email or visited your website, you can then retarget them with specific ads which have a clear call to action. This type of targeting is tied chiefly to email marketing and PPC advertising since you can tailor them to reach a specific kind of person. It is an effective way of showing a customized message to potential customers who have interacted with your marketing before.
Other ways to target is through:
- Interests
- Browsing habits
- Other information people have consented to share
We use the information we have gathered through our tracking to know who we should be marketing towards. As mentioned above, the way we track data is changing, so staying abreast of best practices is critical. One thing which won’t change is one of the reasons why marketing exists: Getting the right message in front of the right people at the right time.
4. Flexibility
What happens when you have done all the work of funding your marketing campaigns, tracking the data, honing in on the targeted audience, and everything falls apart? Well, if you were focusing primarily on traditional marketing efforts, you might be out of luck and would have to try something else. With digital marketing, you can track the data and shift your campaign quicker than if you need to swap out a billboard. Making informed decisions like this has many benefits and enables you to adjust as needed.
An added benefit to the flexibility of digital marketing is if you have a new product or service you want to advertise. It is a simple matter to move funds, take the data you have collected, and target the people who want to buy from your company. You can even use your email list of past customers and retarget them with ads or emails for a new product or service which could benefit them!
Summary
Knowing what you now know about digital marketing, you see some of its advantages over traditional marketing. The affordability of digital marketing makes it easier to begin reaching out to people. The tracking capabilities allow you to gather massive amounts of data and information. The targeting uses the collected data and helps you get your message to the right potential customers. The flexibility allows you to shift gears rapidly if necessary to respond quickly to customers’ needs and behaviors.
If you have wanted to begin promoting your business online more but are unsure where to start, reach out to us! We would love to connect with you about how we can help.