Why Your Business NEEDS Digital Marketing
At one-point online marketing was just a new and different way to market. It opened up a new form of media on which to peddle goods and services. But within just the past few years, the importance of digital marketing has become something else.
It’s become an integral part of what a business is to its customers.
Let’s take a look at why your business needs digital marketing to grow and thrive.
1. Reaches People Where They Spend Their Time & Money
The trend right now is the average person spends over 2 hours a day on social media. Teenagers average 9 hours.Social media is integrated into everything they do from school, to work, to entertainment, to hanging out with friends. Social Media is where people are. But do people buy things there?One of the top 10 reasons people say they’re on social media is to buy products advertised to them. They spend around 37% of their social media time interacting with branded content.57% of Millennials say that social media has made the ads they see more relevant to them. 48% of people say they made their last online purchase as the direct result of a Facebookad.
2. Levels the Playing Field for Small Business
You’ve seen it happen before. A huge company like Walmart comes to town and wipes out 100’s of local specialty shops. Starbucks rolls in and mom and pop coffee and bagel shops close down. We’ve seen the online equivalent of this with Amazon. It’s hard to compete with the name recognition or the millions that they put into marketing and reputation management.That’s where the importance of digital marketing shines as a beacon of hope for small businesses. It’s the same for brick & mortar, e-commerce, and personal brands alike. Digital marketing actually allows smaller businesses the ability to hold a top-ranking position.
3. More Targeted
When you run a magazine ad, for example, you definitely do some targeting. You know if your target audience reads that publication. You have some control over placement and size. You control the message within certain publisher guidelines. One of the gifts that digital marketing has given us is the ability to dissect huge demographics. Whittle them down into very targeted groups to get super-focused on a specific kind of person. Who’s that person? It’s the person most likely purchase what you sell.When you target at this level, you create an ad that’s highly relevant to your target market. Because it’s so relevant, it connects on a level that more general advertising can’t. This connection gives it the ability to influence decisions. You do it without annoying traditional advertising techniques. You’re not showing the same ad thousands of times over a month’s period. Or interrupting someone’s program over and over.
4. Can Be Hyper-Personalized
We’ve only just begun to discuss the importance of digital marketing in regards to targeting. With email marketing, yet another important part of digital marketing, you can target almost down to the individual level. We call this "segmentation".In some cases, you actually can get to the individual level. Marketers call this "customization". 72% of consumers prefer that businesses use email to communicate with them. This gives people a sense of control that makes them more comfortable signing up for your emails and buying from you. If they don’t like what you send them, they can just unsubscribe.But when you send them content that is highly relevant, they stay on your list and continue to buy again and again. You can see where in the importance of digital marketing lies in a repeat lifetime
customer.
5. More Advanced Analytics
What do you really know about how a TV ad performed? You can determine best times for the ad to air and best frequency if you do some testing. You might create a focus group to drill down on the data. But generally, you only know its reach according to the agency and whether it increased buzz, sales, or met a similar marketing goal.Now, let’s look at the importance of digital marketing in comparison.With digital marketing you know the following about your ads and users:
1. Whether they actually saw it. With TV ads, you don’t even know that much. They could have been in the kitchen or had the TV on mute.
2. If they interacted with it they interacted with it.
3. If they liked it
4. If they lingered on it
5. If they shared it with a friend
6. If it prompted another action
7. If it led to a sale down the road (this is important when deciding how to best spend money)
You also learn much more about the people interacting with that ad:
1. Who is most interested in your ads?
2. What are they like?
3. What makes them more likely to take an action?
4. Who is easiest to convert?
5. Who spends more?
6. What do they do online?
7. What terms do they use to find you online?
8. Which websites do they visit that lead them to yours?
All of this is pretty easy to track with free analytics software like Google Analytics. Or you can gain even more insight with paid tools. Use what you learn to cut costs where you aren’t seeing a return on investment. Increase spend and efforts where you get the best results.
6. Easy to Scale & Adapt
As with any marketing, there’s initial investment required to get traffic flowing. But the importance of digital marketing to small businesses becomes very clear when you see how easy it is to scale and adapt as your business grows. If something isn’t working in your marketing, you don’t have to wait for the ad contract to run out. You don’t have to start from scratch.You’ve got the power. Just make that small change and re-launch the ad. The importance of digital marketing lies in the fact that you can get instant results. Analyze data and make changes fast to reduce wasted ad spend and lost revenues.
7. Best ROI
Email marketing has the highest ROI (return-on-investment) of any marketing method…period. It can get a whopping 3800% return. That’s $38 in revenue for every $1 you spend. About 20% of companies are seeing an ROI of $70 to $1 spent Content marketing can generate 3X the leads for about 62% less than traditional marketing. Of course, when we say “lead” we’re not just talking about website traffic. These are people who are very likely to buy your product and become loyal customers as you nurture that relationship. Social media’s ROI can be indirect at times. But a Forbes study found that companies using social media outsell 78% of businesses who don’t use social media. IBM found that a lead that comes in through social media is 7X more likely to become a paying customer. More likely to convert also means you’re spending less money trying to convert people who will never become paying customers.
8. Aligns with How People Today Shop
88% of people consider online reviews an important part of the buying decision.23% of people visit your business after reading a good review.47% of millennials and Gen X don’t watch traditional TV. And 22 million people had canceled their cable by the end of last year. Magazine and newspaper sales continue to decline at a rate of about 16% a year. But on the other side of this, over 1 trillion online searches are performed each year. Google holds the monster share with 3.5 billion of these queries. 8 billion videos are watched on Facebook each day, most of them from businesses. From restaurants to doctors to bookkeeping software to commodities, the modern sales process starts online. You need an online presence to be relevant to the vast majority of customers. The importance of digital marketing is that it gives you that presence.
9. How People Prefer that Businesses Reach Them
People are tired of traditional advertising. They learned that they have a choice. 20% of 16 to 34-year old’s use an ad blocker online. Overwhelmingly, people flee websites that pop up annoying invites and ads when they first land on the page. They’re choosing to consume media that doesn’t force them to sit through commercials.It seems cliché. But people want respect. They want someone to provide them with information that helps them make informed decisions. They want to buy from brands that value what they value. They want you to be part of their conversations. The importance of digital marketing is that it allows you to market to people in ways that show you respect them and value them as human beings.
10. Integrates Marketing with Mobile Technology
According to research by IBM, mobile transactions are increasing at the lightning fast speed of 35% year over year. But it’s not just the actual buying and selling happening on mobile.People are increasingly using their mobile phones as a kind of augmented reality layered over a business. They’re looking at reviews and product information while in your store. They may be ordering online or communicating with customer care en route. With it, send more relevant offers. Invite someone to visit the store when geo-location shows that they’re in the area.
The Importance of Digital Marketing for Your Business
It’s clear. Businesses in the modern economy need digital marketing to compete. Online is where the customers are. It’s where they prefer that you reach them. Online is where the modern buying process begins. To begin your journey online and take your business to the next level, book in a discover call with us.