You are probably familiar with what is Digital Marketing by now. Most companies have turned their efforts to the digital environment to pitch new clients and maintain relationships with the ones they already have.
That gives them an idea of the importance of Digital Marketing and what to expect when promoting products or deals on the internet.
But have you ever tried to put together why this tool is so great at helping businesses reach more people and achieve their goals?
In this post you will understand:
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What is Digital Marketing?
First, let’s brush up on the important concepts you need to understand this material. We will start with the definition of Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing is a strategic tool for businesses and it consists of every single marketing effort a company makes in the digital environment. By that, we mean, of course, all of the company’s online presence.
Digital Marketing is one of the most exciting tools a marketer can use to increase its presence online. Inbound Marketing, Interactive Marketing, and online Customer Relationships are all efforts that fall under the umbrella term “Digital Marketing”.
The internet has brought to marketers’ hands tools such as videos, podcasts and email campaigns to help them reach more people. Right now, most American companies already invest in Digital Marketing, with the bigger part of them focusing on channels such as social media (81%) or a website (78%).
Today, not having an online presence is a bad deal for businesses. A company can lose a lot of opportunities that are only available in the online world.
Understanding that will help you grasp the importance of Digital Marketing in a business strategy.
Importance of Digital Marketing: 6 of the best benefits
For all the fuzz about Digital Marketing, you might expect it to bring outstanding results for companies, right?
The truth is: it does.
As a strategy, Digital Marketing is known to be one of the most successful. Just look at the numbers polled from companies all around the US:
- 82% of consumers look up a product online before buying.
- 79% of Americans do at least part of their shopping online.
- US Digital Marketing spend will rise to about $332 billion in 2021.
But what are consumers and companies gaining for shifting their relationship to the internet? Understand the importance of Digital Marketing below.
1. It is a cost-effective marketing strategy
Promoting a business using traditional channels, like TV or newspapers, is very expensive. That makes it harder for companies to get a good ROI from their marketing efforts.
The use of a Digital Marketing strategy is cost-effective for businesses and brings long-lasting results.
Evergreen content, for instance, can keep reaching new potential clients for many years to come.
2. It is easy to measure
Have a hard time keeping track of your company’s marketing efforts? With offline marketing, it can be hard to understand how many people engaged with your promotional material. But we can thank the internet for changing that.
Every single time you visit a website, click a link or engage with any media, you leave breadcrumbs that indicate what you liked and what you didn’t care for.
Online, marketers can easily collect that data and use it to create more engaging ways to promote their brands.
Even tracking KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is a much more precise process this way.
Because of that, companies are more likely to learn from their mistakes and get better with Digital Marketing as time goes by.
3. It helps build a reputation for your brand
Another reason to invest in Digital Marketing is to build a reputation. When was the last time you bought from a business without researching a bit about them on the internet?
The behavior of consumers changed and so did the marketing strategies used to reach the client. Building a rapport with your consumers on the internet and a solid image for your company will help make those undecided customers close deals quicker.
Content Marketing is a great tool for brands that need to start building their reputation online.
It generates three times more leads than other more costly tools, like paid advertising.
4. It allows you to reach more people than ever
Even with a good offline marketing strategy, companies face a big challenge: there are limits to how many people a newspaper, commercial or flyer will reach.
The internet makes it easier to scale your marketing efforts and reach way more people in your area.
Trying to expand? Then you better get yourself a Digital Marketing strategy.
5. It is adjustable at any time
Many campaigns come out of the oven too soon or could be made better if companies could use customer feedback as they go. But offline campaigns do not allow for that.
Their production costs too much for it to be worth replacing every single promotional item because of a minor change.
Digital Marketing, however, allows for much more control of the quality of campaigns.
Feedbacks can be used at any time to improve the results of the strategy and it doesn’t make a campaign any more or less expensive.
6. It ensures your business survival
Opening a business is hard, but maintaining it open throughout the years is even harder.
Technology has been changing our lives for the better, but the price is a business needs to adapt to survive.
Because the internet will ensure you reach a new generation of consumers it will also help you to be more likely to succeed in the long run.
- 59% of adults (18 to 29) use Instagram frequently.
- An average person spends at least 20 minutes on Facebook a day.
- 86% of women reach out to social media opinions before deciding to make a purchase.
How to use Digital Marketing to get ahead?
So, where are the success stories of companies that have used Digital Marketing to bring more focus to their business and get more strategic as time goes by?
We have selected a case every marketer should know before pitching Digital Marketing to their peers.
Fieldwire’s data-driven SEO
We have mentioned SEO as one of the most cost-effective and interesting tools a marketer can use to reach more customers online. But the case of Fieldwire’s data-driven search is a great example of how this works in the real world.
Fieldwork is a web and mobile collaborative platform for commercial construction and they also started their journey with Digital Marketing with a problem.
How to rank better and increase their authority with Content Marketing? Shifting from conversions to traffic generation. That got them to the top 3 search results for their main keywords in a short time.
To do so, they focused on indicating what people wanted to see when researching those keywords. The analysis helped them build well-crafted content that attracted a lot of traffic.
According to the team, that paid off well, as they were able to save over $10,000.00 in Google AdWords for the period.
Wrap Up
With all those benefits and case studies it isn’t hard to understand the importance of Digital Marketing to businesses: it drives growth and is great to help build lifelong relationships with customers.
That makes the efforts in the digital environment by big and small companies alike a must if they want to succeed in business.
How are your Digital Marketing efforts panning out? Don’t have a strategy yet? The time to start is now!
And when you start to plan your strategy, don’t forget to research the most important Digital Marketing metrics, to align which ones your business will follow. Check our content about it!