Many businesses still rely on traditional forms of marketing and advertising, such as print ads and mailers, to attract customers and clients. While traditional marketing has its place, we live in a digital world. Therefore, more businesses should combine their traditional marketing efforts with digital marketing. Here's how digital marketing can take your business to the next level.
1. Saves Money
It can be difficult to understand that spending money can save you money, but digital marketing is most cost-effective and faster than traditional marketing. If you have limited budgets, digital marketing can help you spend your money more wisely to save more. For example, social media marketing is completely free for businesses; it only costs money when you choose to advertise. The good news is that even advertising on social media is affordable, no matter how small your budget may be.
Other types of digital marketing are also cost-effective, including Google Ads, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and content marketing.
2. Marketing at Any Time or Place
With digital marketing, you aren't limited to one location or timezone. Instead, you can market your business in many different places and even around the world. For example, suppose you decide to start selling products online. In that case, you can celebrate Small Business Saturday by advertising a sale on social media and posting it multiple times per day to ensure you're reaching your entire audience, no matter where they live.
3. Offers Competitor Comparisons
You may not know which types of traditional marketing or advertising your competitors are using, but you can easily find out how they market their businesses online. Your competitors are already using digital marketing techniques to increase their profits, which means they likely have a larger share of voice online than you do if you haven't invested in a quality digital marketing strategy.
By checking out your competitors online, you can find out the types of strategies they're using and use them for your business to help more customers find you online. Many digital marketing tools can help you spy on your competitors' ads, but the easiest thing to do is visit their websites and social media pages to find out what they're up to.
4. Improves Customer Engagement
Customer needs have changed over the past decade; now more than ever, customers need to engage with brands on a more personal level. Digital marketing allows you to reach out to your customers and let them reach back out to you much easier. If you're only investing in traditional advertising, your customers likely have to call you to get a response. However, your customers can contact you via your website, Google, social media, and even email with digital marketing.
Digital marketing can help you build relationships with your customers without taking too much time out of your day to help you build trust and increase the number of return customers you have.
5. Provides Access to Mobile Phone Users
Few people use their laptops or desktop computers to search for business and products online; they'd prefer a much more convenient device such as their cell phone. With so many people using their cell phones to find answers to questions on search engines and look for products to purchase and businesses nearby, mobile marketing has become a necessity.
6. Data Enhances Business Decisions
Digital marketing offers you tons of data to use to make your marketing efforts even better. With traditional marketing, such as billboards, you'll have a difficult time collecting data on the people who have seen them and decided to take action. On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can track everything from website visitors to form submissions, allowing you to learn about ways to improve your marketing efforts and overall customer journey.
Not only that, but with the use of data, you can learn about which marketing efforts have the biggest returns. For example, you can learn the average cost per click (CPC) on Google Ads, then compare that to Facebook Ads to determine which CPC strategy works best for your business.
Using that same data, you can experiment to find ways to decrease the total costs and costs per click for each campaign. While it might take a little trial and error, something as simple as changing ad copy can help you decrease the amount you're spending on ads while increasing conversions.
7. Integrations Increase Efficiency
Many digital marketing tools integrate with other tools to ensure consistency across all of your campaigns. Additionally, you can integrate some digital marketing tools with communication tools to better collaborate with your team. For example, if you're running an influencer marketing campaign, you can integrate your software with Gmail to keep your communications in one spot.
8. Easy Communication Adjustment
With digital marketing, you can find out which types of ads perform better than others to take advantage of high performers and increase your ROI. For example, you may find that you're not having any success with a landing page that you're using for your Google Ads. In that case, you could change something about the landing page, such as the copy, images, call to action, videos, and test the new page against the old version to see what customers engage with most.
Unfortunately, you can't A/B test as easily in traditional marketing. Sure, you could swap out an ad in a magazine every few months and compare the data, but that might cost you even more money if you've already signed an agreement for one ad with the publication.
9. Automation Saves Time
Automating crucial business tasks can help you spend more time increasing revenue, gaining new partners, and providing your customers with a better customer service experience. With digital marketing, you can automate tasks such as posting on social media, sending out emails, and creating workflows to reduce your time on marketing while increasing your customer satisfaction rate.
10. Offers Better Reputation Management
Before digital marketing, you may not have known everything your customers felt about your business. Not only that, but unless you had a great public relations team, you might not be able to control how the public viewed your business.
Thanks to digital marketing, your customers can now share their feelings about your business online in the form of reviews. Then, you can respond to those reviews to clear up any customer service problems or use them to help your business grow by improving customer satisfaction.
Is Digital Marketing Right for Your Business?
All businesses of all sizes should invest in digital marketing. If you're already doing traditional marketing, digital marketing can help take your business to the next level by ensuring it's found where your customers and clients spend most of their time —online.
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