Digital marketing is the new way businesses are reaching their audience. Think SEO, organic search, local search, Google Adwords, social media, targeted ads, and blogs — those are all aspects of digital marketing.
One of the reasons digital marketing has grown in popularity is that it allows businesses to reach more people than ever before at a cheap cost. With the world growing more digital by the day, it is imperative for all businesses to jump on the train.
In case you’re still second-guessing, here are 8 reasons why you should start marketing your business online:
Digital marketing is less expensive than traditional advertising
Traditional advertising with Television, newspapers, and flyers tend to be more expensive for business owners and more boring for the intended audience. People are always on the move and the only way to reach them consistently is through the only devices they carry about with them—their digital devices. YouTube, Podcasts, and social media have gradually replaced the television, radio, and flyers in more ways than one and the best part is most of these online platforms are free or dirt cheap; and that’s a good thing for businesses, especially a start-up business. All you need is a competent brand manager coupled with a great social media handler and industry-leading digital marketing strategy to be on your way to selling like crazy.
Digital marketing allows businesses to monitor their brand
Bad news spreads faster than good news, but with social media, all news spreads like wildfire. Whether it is criticism or a good review, social media puts it out there; however, this also means that you are in the know of things too. This allows your brand to curb the spread of negative news in time while also enabling you to effectively put out all the good stuff your business is doing out there for public consumption.
Digital marketing improves interaction with customers:
With digital marketing, it is way easier to keep an eye on people’s perceptions of your brand. Since you cannot personally reach out to your customers to get a personal feed on the service or product that you sell, the web and social media creates a platform for customers to communicate and air their opinion. Interacting and engaging with your customers can give you an insight into what your targeted audiences want. This vital information will help you make the right set of moves geared towards providing your customers with an even better experience, develop good relationships with them and gain the loyalty and trust that you will need for your business to grow. Remember happy customers means more customers.
Digital marketing levels the playground with competitors
Everyone is online now, even your competitors and especially the big boys; so why not? A good online presence puts your business out there and makes your brand noticeable, thereby bringing you up to par digitally with competing businesses that have been in existence before yours. Also, since your competitors are doing the same to bring more traffic to their site, it allows you to check on what they are doing and take note of it to create a better strategy to drive more customers to your website than your competitors.
Digital marketing creates additional sales channels for more revenue
Besides selling your products and services, you can sell knowledge and make a business out of it. Tips and tricks, DIYs, daily know-hows, and other things can be put up on the business page to increase traffic or put up on another page to create another avenue to promote your business.
Digital marketing allows the brand to share its uniqueness
By sharing your unique business experience, you create a personal relationship with your audience. Through this, you have a better avenue to educate your customers and share information that makes their lives better. One of the greatest reasons to use digital marketing is the potential that it has to improve others’ lives. Businesses can make the world a better place by sharing expertise and positive lifestyle changes that are useful to their audience.
Digital marketing ensures business survival
The global Coronavirus pandemic outbreak in 2020 saw the deaths of many businesses as they had no contingency plan in case of a pandemic that necessitated lockdown measures leading to the downsizing of many brick and mortar stores. If anything, it has taught other businesses about the importance of an effective digital marketing strategy. In the event of a global pandemic such as Covid-19, when physical advertisements are impossible, digital marketing ensures that your business stays afloat. By creating interesting content- videos and texts, your brand stays relevant in your customers’ minds. Hence, in case you have to relaunch when the lockdown eases, you will not appear alien to them, and it would be easy to connect.
Digital marketing provide metrics
As the father of Management Thinking; Peter Drucker said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” and this is one area digital marketing excels in terms of the plethora of tools available to you to know and see who exactly is seeing your digital marketing ads and what is working. Meaning you can double down on that while cutting costs on more strategies that are low performance, ultimately giving you more value for your spend unlike in traditional advertising. For example, there is no way of accurately measuring exactly how many people view your ads on a physical billboard or how many people listened to your new radio jingle. Digital marketing tools provide you with a dashboard where you can not only see all of these metrics but as well as suggestions on how you can get more value for your advertising dollars.
Conclusion
The internet has opened up a whole new frontier for marketing. Digital marketing is now the norm and almost a prerequisite for running a successful modern-day business. You had better jump on this train because it is moving fast. With an estimated 4.66 billion active internet users globally, digital marketing is the most effective and efficient way of reaching your target audience! Find out more about how digital marketing can help your brand by looking through these case studies.
