Going into 2019, everything is moving from physical to digital. With the widespread use of mobile devices, marketing and advertising are no exception.
Statistical forecasting predicts that in 2019, 54% of all sales of goods and services will be web-influenced. This number will only rise as smart devices become more ubiquitous.
As a business owner, you may be wondering why you really need a digital marketer when you are already making sales with your website. But the truth is no matter the products and services you provide, you need digital marketing. As things are now, you either get your business advertised online or get run out of business by smarter competitors.
There are endless benefits to having a strong digital brand but I am going to go over the 5 most important ones.
1) Brand Awareness
Stephen King
A product is something made in a factory; a brand is something that is bought by the customer. A product can be copied by a competitor; a brand is unique.
Having an amazing product or service without any customers is akin to winking in the dark. The result being, you are the only one aware of what you are doing.
A customer that lives a mile from your offline store would rather pick up a product from your store instead of ordering from Amazon and waiting for days. But what if the customer is not aware of your physical store? Digital marketing bridges such gaps.
Pew Research found that 83% of Americans over the age of 18 used the internet to find services in their area. As you can see, this is a huge loss of market share if your business does not have an optimized digital presence.
2) Customer Understanding
Even if you’re building the product for yourself, listen to outside users — they’ll tell you how to make a product they’ll pay for.
Sam Altman
It is important for businesses to recognize trends in customer behavior in order to tweak their marketing strategy accordingly. With traditional media, there is relatively no direct customer feedback.
Digital Marketing allows for business to get customer feedback in just a matter of clicks. It allows for direct interaction with customers, especially on social media platforms. With ads and content on these platforms, businesses can see what customers engage with, what they like or what they prefer over the other.
This provides a large scope of the perspective of customers on our campaigns and showcases how we can improve and build on them further. With every adaptation, we can get new insight which in turn helps us create a better product.
3) Measurable
Estee Lauder
If you don’t sell, it’s not the product that’s wrong, it’s you.
This might be the biggest advantage digital marketing has over traditional methods. Businesses can decide what their key performance indicators are, which allows them to see the results of their investment in real time.
Businesses now have the ability to calculate the exact return on their investment whether it’s Click-through rate, conversions, impressions, video plays, user retention, revenue or organic traffic. This quickly optimizes a businesses ability to strategize based on which platform or placement is providing the best results.
With the help of digital platforms, you can make your marketing strategy as specific and targeted as you want. It might involve a lot of number crunching, but you can actually see the results of your strategy in monetary terms.
4) Cost Effective
There can be economy only where there is efficiency.
Benjamin Disraeli
The pay-as-you-go model of digital platforms gives businesses a lot more control over their ad spend. Whether you choose to pay-per-click, pay-per-impression or pay for conversions, you only pay for what you use.
Unlike traditional marketing, where there is little adaptation that can be implemented into a plan. Digital campaigns allow businesses target the exact audience that we wish to get in front of and in a manner that resonates with them. Due to the fact that time slots or channels cannot be readily interchanged. Especially in case the campaign does not fair well or the audience is the wrong target. Whether it be organic posts, video or search ads, if a campaign is not going well, we can update, alter or completely scrap it in real time.
Digital marketing platforms help by optimizing the ads based on the type of people engaging with them and only shows the ad to those people. This is great for small businesses who cannot afford to spend indiscriminately. Digital campaigns afford you the flexibility to pay only in accordance to the clicks and engagements you receive.
5) Time Efficient
Peter Drucker
There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.
A successful digital marketing strategy entails a lot of different facets, but here are a few:
- Market research
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Presence
- Keyword-rich content marketing
- Constant adaptation to algorithms
- Constant adaptation to campaign analytics
All of these are extremely important to ensure staying ahead of your competition. The mistake many business owners make is understanding the importance of digital marketing, but attempting to do it themselves.
Maintaining an effective digital campaign is extremely time consuming. As a business owner, you have a limited amount of time. Every minute you spend trying to learn best practices, research changes in algorithm, analyze market research data, gaining insight from analytics or contemplate digital marketing strategies; is time that you are taking away from developing a better product or service and ensuring customer satisfaction.
There is such a thing as wearing too many hats, and with a hat as heavy as online marketing, It will save you a significant amount of time; which, in turn, saves you money that you can dedicate to hiring a digital marketer.
Focus on your business and allow our team at Unfiltered Marketing do the heavy lifting for you.
