Marketing is the summary of all the business efforts to connect with potential clients and sell a product or service. While traditional marketing uses offline communication channels to convince customers, digital marketing, on the other hand, takes things to the internet.
In light of current events the world is changing rapidly. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic even the most traditional offline companies were forced to adapt to make sure they will survive in these difficult times. The global quarantine showed the world that digital marketing is an essential part of any business and the most effective way to boost it at the moment.
Visuals are of great importance nowadays with all the limitations of launching campaigns and producing content offline. Many are turning to stock photography websites like Depositphotos to find appealing images while keeping up their marketing activity. In the age of digital, this is one of the changes the market has undergone recently.
Digital marketing is quick to adapt, and remains the most powerful form of marketing. Even if you are an owner of an offline company and are not used to all the digital stuff, you can easily integrate digital marketing strategy into your business plan. And this article will help you set your spirits up since it lists all the basic benefits of digital marketing and how any business can win with the power of the internet.
Digital marketing is a money saver
It’s not super convenient for many small businesses to invest into offline marketing and ads because they cost too much. Very often it’s too expensive to advertise a product or service with billboards, ads in printed media, or on TV and radio.
Digital marketing on the contrary is way more affordable. Setting a post as promoted on Instagram or Facebook is relatively cheap and cost just a few bucks. Despite small investments, the return on them is solid. Digital ads are no less effective than traditional ones especially because everyone has a phone with internet access and uses it all the time. What’s more is that many are now stuck at home and depend even more on technology to pass the time.
You can also improve your SEO tactics to bring some organic traffic to your website or blog. This is a free and effective tool – without spending a single dollar you can bring a lot of people to your platform in peaking their interest with your content. More traffic always means more potential clients, and content marketing is the way to go.
The targeting is more precise
While you can’t control who sees a traditional ad and whether it hits your target audience, you can be very precise in showing an ad on social media. Having researched on your target market and target audience, you can easily set accurate parameters of your advertisement campaign for better targeting.
For example, platforms like Instagram have smart algorithms that allow you to choose the geography, demographics, psychographics, and preferences of those who will see your ad. In this way, you can target your intended buyers, make sure your product or service reaches those who need it, and increase your sales drastically.
Same goes for email marketing. Most users subscribe to newsletters when they want to learn more about a product or service before they make their final decision. If you have newsletters on your latest updates, sales, and discounts, you have more chances of targeting potential clients at the very beginning of their potential buyer journey. Your email marketing copy and visuals may help you further persuade your potential customers to buy your product.
More engagement with a proper digital marketing strategy
When a customer learns about a product or service they want via traditional ads, it takes some effort for them to further research or Google it before making a final decision whether they need it or not. Nowadays more and more people search through the web for some information before the purchase, so why don’t you make their life easier and put ads online?
Benefits of digital marketing include easier ways to engage your target audience. Think about it: when a person sees an ad on their social media or through a Google search, they are only a few clicks away from your website where they can hopefully find all the details about their potential purchase (if you have a user-friendly and organized platform of course).
Easily measure the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy
With traditional marketing it takes pretty long time to see the effectiveness of your campaign. It can take weeks or even months. It’s also not easy to be precise in measurements as it’s not always obvious how to track the success of the traditional ads.
On the contrary, you can see if your digital marketing strategy is successful almost immediately and make sure your efforts are not in vain. Different software and social media platforms themselves provide measurement tools to see how well an ad is doing, how many views it has, and how many people interacted with it.
There are special tools and apps to measure the effectiveness of email marketing as well. They allow you to see the conversion rate such as how many people clicked on the links. You can also use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to discover how your website or blog are doing in terms of user engagement and interactions.
You can better your brand image
Brand image is an important part of any successful business. Even a small company can have a huge success among its target audience if its social media, website, email marketing, and other channels are well presented and maintained. Other influential factors include friendly customer service that are ready to help with any question. All these things can help form first impressions and long lasting ones of your brand.
With global digitalization and people spending more and more time on social media and the internet in general, it’s getting pretty suspicious when a company doesn’t have a website or even a Facebook page. But when the online presence is good, the user trust is increased dramatically since people intuitively believe that you can trust a company with a website and social media.
It’s easy to scale digital marketing efforts
You can easily adapt a plan on scaling your business with your digital marketing strategy. For example, if you are an individual entrepreneur, you can take on digital marketing yourself. And when your business grows, you can hire a couple of professionals to help you with the basics and reorganize the responsibilities. With digital marketing you can achieve quite a lot even with a small team.
Further growth of your company allows you to hire more professionals specializing in different areas of digital marketing. For example, even a small to medium business will benefit from having a social media manager, customer support managers and web analytics.
The simplicity of scaling in digital marketing allows you to make sure your strategy is effective. Anytime you invest into it (like hiring a new professional), you can expect to make returns from extra digital marketing efforts.
Focus on your digital marketing strategy to succeed in 2020
With all the changes the world is going through, in 2020 you just can’t allow yourself to ignore the benefits of digital marketing for your business. A thorough digital marketing strategy, friendly online customer support service, social media with useful information, and a website that’s easy to navigate will surely help you sell more, build your brand awareness and image, and increase your success as a business in general.