The marketing landscape is constantly changing at a very fast pace. The transition is mostly felt due to modern technological advancement. Businesses have been pushed to come up with measurements to keep up or risk being written off in the online marketing platform. In an attempt to grab the attention of a growing and very lucrative online audience, businesses are coming up with interactive digital marketing strategies.
Digital marketing doesn’t only provide you with the best chances for business growth; it also provides you with the best probability to ward off competition and remain pertinent.
In simple words, digital marketing may probably be the missing segment of your overall growth strategy.
Here are 10 reasons why you should embrace digital marketing strategies to help you evolve your business.
1. Digital Marketing Is Absolutely More Affordable Than Traditional Marketing
“Marketing, in any form, is one of the key principles that every brand must partake in, as no organization can survive without effective marketing communication,” says Harnil Oza, Founder at Hyperlink InfoSystem, an app development company.
In the case of running a small business operation, probably, you don’t have the necessary cash flow to pay for business daily expenses. Offline marketing and advertising cost are some of the biggest financial burdens small businesses and startups have to abide by. If they barely have enough funds to pay their employees and freelancers, where will they get extra financial resources for marketing themselves?
“The past year had a tough time for most organizations. The pandemic created slower segments in the economy, and nearly every industry changed how they work. Advertising and promotions weren’t painless to execute. Comprehending how to expand your small business with marketing is a matter of learning what works for your industry,” says Eleanor Hecks, Editor-in-Chief, Designerly.
While large organizations and reputed businesses may not feel trouble doling out ample resources for marketing and advertisement, for small businesses, particularly, this may be outlandish or an agonizing nightmare.
On the other hand, marketing via digital channels offers a more reasonable alternative to the traditional manner. A small business can modify its allocation and run a digital campaign accordingly – whether it is through the use of social media platforms or search engines. You can do this by:
- Setting up SEO configuration and technical optimization is possible when you or your developer is experienced in such stuff. “When it comes to optimizing landing pages and executing technical SEO, I don’t just recommend inserting HTML meta information, heading tags, and uploading XML sitemap. Instead, I suggest everything technical from fixing the structured data to boosting page loading speed, fetching URLs as Google bots, inspecting crawling issues, and the whole nine yards,” said Shyam Bhardwaj, an SEO blogger, and marketing consultant.
- Additionally, you can promote your services or products on branded social media pages like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can easily manage social media pages via using HootSuite, Sprout Social, and other handy tools.
- As a test, with just a little spend, you can use MailChimp or other email marketing tools to send email newsletters to thousands of customers with a single click.
- Writing tools: You can use MarketMuse, Surfer SEO, Grammarly, and Simplified kind of tools to generate content artificially.
Your business can develop its online marketing strategy for very little cost and can potentially replace costly advertising channels such as paid media, video commercials, radio, and magazines.
2. Facilitates Communication With Targeted Audience
Communication is at the core of attempting to develop trust between them and their loyal audience. As long as you are unique and durable with a brand voice, digital marketing will enable your businesses to interact with their customers in no time.
This will enable you to get a better idea of what your customers really want. This, in turn, encourages you to implement the necessary changes in your product to better align with your customer’s needs, leading to increased ROI and customer satisfaction. This way, you gain the necessary trust and loyalty you need as your business grows.
3. It Provides Direction
A digital strategy serves to provide an organization with a clearly defined path. It serves to outline the goals which are necessary for a company to achieve, in order to increase its customer base and strengthen its relationship with existing customers.
Once the goals are defined, resource allocation becomes a lot easier for the company. Furthermore, it leads the company to analyze its performance to see if it is aligned with its goals.
4. Facilitates in Determining the Online Market Share
Nowadays, there is a great demand for online services. Due to the lack of a digital strategy, this importance may be overlooked, leading to misunderstandings regarding the online market of the business. The business will fail to appreciate the difference in the market dynamics and the limitations of traditional marketing techniques.
Furthermore, the company will fail to understand different customer behaviors and profiles, the nature of the competition, and the different available marketing options.
5. Market Share Will Be Lost to Competition
Without a digital marketing strategy, the company will fail to allocate enough resources for this purpose, or the company might take an unplanned approach to digital marketing.
In both cases, the business stands to lose out on its market share.
6. It Helps in Allocating Money and Time Effectively
Many times, the company allocates sufficient resources to different functions; however, these resources are wasted. It is particularly true in large organizations where different components of the marketing functions are often involved in purchasing similar resources in order to operate better. This wastage can be avoided through the use of digital marketing, which serves to integrate all functions.
7. It Moves to Make the Company More Flexible
Being flexible and quick to respond to any type of challenges, are characteristics of many of the successful brands of today, for instance, Google, Tesco, Amazon, Tappos, ProProfs, etc.
These are all dynamic organizations and keep testing with new approaches in order to attract new customers and retain existing ones. This is one of the uses of digital marketing.
8. It Makes You Efficient
All companies which run their own websites make use of analytics. The problem arises when the senior management fails to emphasize the need to address the results on the team. This is where a strategy can help, as it helps businesses in applying the correct basics.
This will lead a business to constantly improve different areas like email and social media marketing, site user experience, and search engine marketing.
9. A New Way of ROI Appreciation
Considering this point of view, and seems to be not so far away from the truth. We may ask ourselves the following question: what does digital marketing bring to the game?
In marketing, ROI is a big deal. Return On investment: those three words sound like the bible to many marketers hear. In traditional marketing, ROI is not easy to compute: we miss some massive parts of data. We know how much we invest in the marketing strategy. We also know the sales before and after, but it is impossible to be certain of the impact of the marketing campaign. Even if sales increase after the campaign, the credit should go to some other criteria that we do not control. When Apple spends billions on transport advertising, they know approximately how many people will see the ads, but they cannot define how many buyers did buy after seeing the ad.
Digital marketing brings a huge answer to that matter, and it stands in one word: tracking. On the Internet, we can track customers’ behavior before purchasing. We can know if he comes from display advertising or a social media campaign. Google even sells ROI on Google AdWords tool: they say invest X get Y transformation.
10. Digital as a Misunderstood Change
We have seen earlier that TV advertising is not over. It is also true for all the traditional non-digital marketing channels as radio and magazine advertising: people are not passing all their time on digital media. Considering this point, it is clear that digital is an addition (‘a plus’) to the game and not a transformation of it. That means digital marketing should not replace traditional marketing but come as an addition to it.
I think brands should apply the same model when defining their marketing strategies: they should stop, bereave, and look at it from far above. What is our target group? What are we selling to them? When was the last time we did discuss our 4 Ps?
Get found online – The aim of a good lead generation and digital strategy is to help your organization get found on Google. They create a blog strategy that is search engine optimized and will help your potential customers find you easily in online marketplaces.
An online presence can increase sales, but only if it is tailored to the specific business. As people start visiting the business websites, the company should look to engage the customers for the purpose of increasing the customer base.