There are billions of global internet users. The way people shop and buy nowadays has changed drastically compared to the times before the invention of the World Wide Web — meaning offline marketing can’t be your only strategy for driving sales. Marketing has always been about connecting with an audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are spending the most time: online.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing, known as online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels, such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with their customers. This also includes communication through text and multimedia messages.
Digital marketing can work for any business in all types of industries. Regardless of what your company sells, digital marketing still involves identifying the audience’s needs and creating valuable online content. However, not all businesses should implement a digital marketing strategy in the same way. It should be adjusted according to the specifics of the particular business area.
Digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It seems like every other brand has a website, and if they don’t, they at least have a social media presence or a digital ad strategy. Digital content and marketing are so common that today’s consumers expect and rely on them as a way to learn about brands and products. Since digital marketing has plenty of possibilities, you can experiment with different marketing tactics. The best digital marketers have a clear, numerically-driven picture of the goals of their marketing strategy.
Why is digital marketing important?
Digital marketing helps brands reach a larger audience compared to traditional methods by targeting the prospects who are most likely to buy the brand’s products or use their services.
If we place an advertisement on linear TV or on a billboard, we have limited control over who sees the ad. Of course, we can measure certain demographics, but it’s still mostly a shot in the dark if the right audience will notice our ad.
Digital marketing allows you to identify and target a highly-specific audience with personalized and high-converting marketing messages. We can use social media targeting to show ads to a specific audience based on variables like age, gender, location, interests or behaviors. Alternatively, we can use pay-per-click (PPC) or search advertising to serve ads to users who’ve shown interest in or searched for specific keywords related to our product or service. Ultimately, digital marketing helps to identify our buyer personas and refine our strategy to ensure that we are reaching those who are most likely to buy.
Digital marketing allows us to track day-to-day campaign performance, so we can know which channels are performing well and which aren’t, thus helping us to optimize our campaign budgets for higher return on investment (ROI). The same can’t be said for traditional forms of advertising. With digital marketing, we have complete control over where to spend our money. You can spend money on social media and create a high-converting Instagram profile rather than paying for PPC campaigns – it all depends on the specifics of your brand.
If you work for a small business, it’s likely very difficult for you to compete with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of dollars to invest in marketing campaigns. If you have a limited budget, you might try investing in social media or PPC – strategies that give ROI with little spending. For instance, you might use long-tail keywords to create high-quality content that ranks on search engines. Search engines don’t care which brand is the biggest, they care about prioritizing content for a target audience.
Digital marketing is measurable.
The biggest limitation of traditional advertising is measurability. This is one of the benefits of digital marketing, as it can give a start-to-finish view of the metrics that matter to your company, such as conversions, impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time spent on a webpage.
Digital marketing allows marketers to access results in real-time. If we have an advertisement in a newspaper, it is impossible to estimate how many people flipped to that page, paid attention to it, and ended up converting on your website. But with digital marketing we can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of our marketing campaign. We can see the exact number of people who have viewed our website in real-time by using digital analytics available in marketing platforms or free tools, such as Google Analytics.
Digital analytics shows important data, such as what device our audience is using and where views are coming from. This helps brands prioritize on which marketing channels to spend more, based on the number of people those channels drive to their websites.
With offline marketing, it is extremely difficult to tell how people interact with a brand before they make a purchase. With digital marketing, we identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, so we can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to complete it.
