Digital marketing, also known as Internet marketing, is a broad term that uses online, mobile, and in-app techniques to reach customers. It's considered more targeted, measurable, and interactive than traditional marketing methods.
Do you have a digital marketing strategy? If not, you could be keeping a large number of your target customers from reaching your brand, products and services.
Digital marketing is critical for operating a successful business. Here are five reasons why.
1. Exposure to Your Target Audience
The marketplace has consistently become more and more competitive. With 73 percent of adults using some form of social networking, businesses are engaging digitally to attract more customers. In digital marketing, using various digital display ads and social media marketing platforms to communicate and advertise is meeting customers where they already are.
Better yet, with today's technology, we can reach a target audience across multiple devices (computers, tablets, phones, etc) and even serve ads while they're using apps or playing games on their phones.
Think of a target audience like an empty auditorium that you can fill with just the right people. Digital marketing makes finding and reaching your target audience easier than ever before. Online advertising platforms like Facebook or Google, for instance, have access to a slew of demographic and psychographic information about users and searchers alike.
Want to reach people looking to purchase a home soon? There's an audience for that.
Want to reach people interested in history? There's an audience for that.
Want to reach the top 25 percent income bracket? There's an audience for that.
If you'd rather keep it general and just reach an age range, gender, or location, there's an audience for that as well.
Digital marketing allows advertisers reach hyper-specific audiences by mixing and matching any combination of user groups into a single audience, like wealthy men, age 35–65, history buffs interested in buying a home near Sandusky, Ohio.
While that example is rather tongue-in-cheek, it helps make a key point: the more specific the audience, the more expensive it'll be to reach. Which may be perfectly fine in some cases.
If you want some help building out a perfect digital target audience, we can do that too! With our sister company, Leighton Engage. They're experts at building the perfect digital audience to meet just about any campaign goal.
2. Measuring For Success
With most traditional methods of advertising, it often takes months to analyze how an advertising campaign performed. With digital advertising, campaigns can be analyzed within days or even hours. Add in a variety of social media and web analytics tools, and you can quickly access your customer’s demographics and understand how they’re engaging with your website and with your Internet advertising campaign.
This is also why knowing what you want to achieve through digital marketing is important.
Without a goal to reach, you'll never know if you've hit it.
Example Goals
Goals don't have to be complex or confusing. Here are some examples, and what digital marketing metrics to monitor to ensure they're on track and working.
- Brand Awareness - Keep an eye on impressions and work to keep the cost per thousand (CPM) impressions as low as possible to get as much reach as possible.
- Generating More Leads - Keep an eye on click-through-rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CVR). Maximize both of these as best as possible.
- Online Sales - For this goal, you'll want to monitor e-commerce sales and cart abandonment rate.
Those are just a few examples, but the best way to set a goal is to start with the end in mind. What do you ultimate want to happen as a result of the campaign? Take that and work backwards.
I'd like to point out quick that it's not feasible for the same campaign to have multiple goals. This is because optimizing one set of metrics can have an adverse effect on others. For example, to increase click-through rates, you'll need to lower the number of impressions the ads deliver, which is the opposite of what a brand awareness goal should do.
3. Competing as a Small Fish in a Big Pond
Few advertising methods can level the playing field like digital marketing. If you own a small business, or are just starting up, you might have limited resources and a limited budget. Digital efforts can help you create a cost-effective, buzz-worthy campaign that competes with the big dogs. And because you can easily measure your success, determining your return on investment is possible.
These low-costs campaigns can be successful with just a few dollars per day, hyper-targeted at the perfect audience.
As results start rolling in, increase the budget to accommodate and the snowball effect will kick in.
4. Building Your Relationships and Your Reputation
Through monitoring of your digital advertising and social sites, you have a direct connection to your customer’s interactions and reactions to your business. By monitoring, you can proactively share customer accolades, respond to complaints, solve problems, answer questions, manage crisis, and discover trends; all while developing a voice for your brand.
As the interaction between you and your customers increase, your reputation builds with it. Customers will begin to trust your perspective. They’ll feel their issues are being heard, and their problems are being addressed. That trust can turn into referrals as they share their delight with friends and family.
5. It Can Generate Better Revenue
According to Google:
Companies using digital strategies have 2.8 times better revenue growth expectancy than those who don’t.
Higher conversion rates by effective marketing and advertising techniques deliver lots of profitable leads. And more leads mean higher revenue.
A complete digital strategy - in conjunction with radio marketing - can turn casual listeners into customers ready to engage with your brand. Talk to one of our Digital Marketing Specialists to create your own unique strategy that will set you apart from the competition.
