YOU are in a business and you really want to reach and engage your customers. You want to do it but in this new normal, trends are changing. Take it from the State of Marketing report from Hubspot and Salesforce Research. Each marketing campaign must have an online element.
Marketing online is the most efficient way to succeed in most businesses. With it, you can improve empathy towards clients and engage them better. You can increase your reach without paying much. Therefore, you should harness the power of technology at the tip of your fingertips.
What Digital Marketing Is
While you depend on your own unique selling point (what makes your product or service unique in order to stand out among competitors), you still need digital marketing as a tool.
So what is digital marketing? It refers to all marketing activities that use the internet or an electronic device, as Lucy Alexander defines in her article at hubspot.com.
You can make use of what best suits your business from a spectrum of tactics under the umbrella of “digital marketing” – from social media marketing to email marketing and online brochures, and beyond.
But why should you need any of these digital tools?
Role of digital marketing
Innovating is a marketer’s top priority according to Salesforce Research. We have heard how businesses resort to this during this pandemic where adapting to change is critical. The rapid change that companies must deal makes real-time engagement with customers on the priority list.
Innovating and dealing with customers in real-time are both challenging; so tools and technologies round out the top marketing priorities since 2020.
These top concerns drive marketing agenda. To be competitive in your business, you need to embrace some or all aspects of digital marketing.
Why Prioritize Digital Marketing
After giving you a glimpse of digital marketing’s role, I would like to dig deeper. Why invest in digital technology?
I would like to focus on four major benefits it brings to you:
- You can hit the specific prospect buyers you are after.
You can’t waste your resources on mass marketing to do this. A marketer needs to send highly personalized and empathetic messages as mentioned earlier. This is the new normal.
But how can you do this?
You cannot simply just rely on billboards, TV ads or other forms of traditional marketing campaigns. These strategies can only reach a broad audience. With these alone, you cannot tailor-fit your message.
These methods cannot call the client by name and write to him or her like one talking to a friend, anchoring on his painpoints and the benefits desired. But a marketer can do these by using email marketing which can be sequenced automatically based on where the prospect customer is in the sales funnel.
- Digital marketing campaigns move the lever with lesser cost.
Gone are the days when companies usually rely on TV ads using celebrities costing thousands of dollars. Such campaigns could not tell you what is the return on advertising.
This is because you cannot measure the outcomes of your campaigns. Whereas, using digital marketing, you have ways to measure the performance of a single campaign. Examples include the ability of an online campaign to measure the number of sales leads generated by an email or the number of clients it led to purchase decisions.
With this advantage, you can immediately pinpoint which methods work – whether a landing page, email campaign or a website. You do not gamble on hit-and-miss guesses using your hard-earned money.
In digital marketing, you can readily choose your strategies then evolve continually according to the feedback of your campaigns. For instance, you don’t need to spend on e-newsletters if video campaigns work better for your audience and product.
You can easily pivot using the technology.
- You can slay the giants of your niche using digital marketing strategies
Several decades ago, a small player in a business industry can hardly challenge the big shots. For one who does not have a national broadsheet budget or national TV channel ads, there is no chance to go in the mainstream.
These days, however, the playbook has changed. You can slay goliaths if you figure out the most appropriate strategies suited for your business. For instance, you can become a trendsetter using search engine optimization. This strategy increases your online visibility so you attract more clients without spending much. If you identify long-tail keywords related to your product and frequently create high-quality content that resonates well with your audience, you will rank higher in the search engine. Later, you will be the go-to of such an audience in your niche.
Moreover, by using influencers to market your products, you can hasten the process of multiplying the demand of your products. The online technology can go for a bang. Many have heard of Youtube influencers who have earned a million or more each day. Anyone should replicate their methods.
- You can quantify your performance using digital marketing
Measuring your marketing performance in real-time works for your business. The saying is true: what you cannot measure, you cannot improve. If you rely on newspaper articles to promote your product, you cannot tell how many people read only the headline or the whole article. You have no idea how many of your readers liked it or not. But this does not happen if you employ digital marketing.
Using this technology, you can use metrics like impressions, views, shares, clicks and time on page.
Digital marketing allows you to measure web traffic using digital analytics software. This tells you what device readers are using, the number of pages visited, and where they come from, among others. Using data analytics, you can get the data you need to know the next step.
You can quantify the achievement of your marketing goal if you employ digital marketing. Suppose you created an online brochure for your clients. Using the technology, you can determine how many opened it or downloaded it.
The days of traditional marketing already waned away. Now you decide. It is time to level up your game. Take professional advice from businesses which succeeded through digital marketing.
