In today’s digital age, businesses that rely solely on traditional methods of marketing such as print or direct sales, risk being left behind by the competition. According to Statista, global digital advertising expenditure in 2024 was estimated to be $378 billion, and is forecasted to reach $646 billion by 2024.
Digital marketing is the promotion of goods and services through the internet and other online-based channels such as computers, smartphones and tablets. According to ClickSend, implementing a multi-channel business communications strategy will yield optimal results. By using SMS, email, rich media, and direct mail, you’ll be able to communicate with your customers and staff like never before. These channels will help you get closer to your clients and enable you to stay connected. By employing a digital marketing strategy businesses can promote their goods and services to greater numbers of people thanks to the global reach of the internet.
This article will look at six benefits of introducing a digital marketing strategy to help boost your marketing plan and your business’ success.
Target Your Audience
Rather than marketing to a broad section of people, digital marketing allows you to target specific demographics. By segmenting your audience based on factors such as gender, age, race, interests and lifestyle, you are more likely to reach the audience that will be interested in your offering, making this a more efficient way of advertising.
Target audiences can also be marketed to based on where they are in the sales cycle. This is known as nurturing leads. For example, an email marketing campaign can be set up to personally communicate with users based on their buying behavior. By maintaining a relationship with users in this way you can encourage them to take certain actions such as making a purchase when they are ready. Nowadays, there are tools like Klean Leads that you can use in email scraping where you can find your targets’ email addresses effortlessly.
Grow Your Brand
Two of the most important elements of creating brand credibility are visibility and recognition. The more often your audience sees your brand the greater your brand recognition will be.
Ensuring your business has an online presence will also help ensure it has a global reach. By leveraging digital marketing channels and techniques such as social media, search engine optimization (SEO) and online advertising, you can gain maximum exposure for your business helping to build your brand awareness.
As your brand recognition grows, so does its chance of being the first choice for potential customers by becoming the top-of-mind brand.
Interact and Engage
Advertising online through digital marketing methods allows businesses to reach and engage with larger audiences as compared to traditional marketing methods alone.
With social media platforms, you can keep connected with your customers and prospects and encourage them to engage with your brand through posting videos or photos, asking questions and entering online competitions. Any issues or problems can also be swiftly addressed through online communications which demonstrate to your customer base that you value their feedback and custom. Regular communications, whether through social media, blog posts or email, also help to foster customer loyalty.
With the ability to share content online through likes, reposts and the forwarding of emails there is also the chance of your promotions being sent to others or even going viral; something that is not possible through traditional marketing.
High Conversion Rates
In digital marketing, the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website or social media page that have completed a desired action such as signing up for a newsletter, filling out a contact form or making a purchase.
With many people making their purchases online these days, there is the potential to convert visitors to your website into paying customers. By using SEO to drive more people to your site, you can analyze data and introduce marketing techniques to convert tentative users into paying customers.
Email marketing can also assist with conversions. Utilize your database of email subscribers to create lead nurturing emails thereby increasing the chances of subscribers becoming loyal customers. Businesses can now take advantage of email lookup tools that allow them to find someone’s email address based on their personal data. Click here for one of the email lookup tools on the market.
Optimization
Unlike traditional marketing such as print or radio, digital marketing provides precise data which can be analyzed to optimize your marketing campaigns. Analytics and metrics can provide valuable real-time information on the performance of your campaigns helping you to measure your results and make adjustments where necessary. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic sources, conversation rate and bounce rate can reveal whether your marketing objectives are being met.
Tools such as Google Analytics can help you to understand where your marketing efforts may be failing by indicating issues such as the point at which users are abandoning carts or the rate at which your business loses customers over time. Conversely, by knowing which aspects of your campaign are yielding the most results you can redirect your marketing budget that way.
With all of the data available, most of the guesswork is eliminated. In this way, digital marketing allows you to adjust your campaigns to ensure maximum results ensuring a higher return on investment (ROI).
Split Testing
Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a marketing experiment that compares two or more variations of a piece of marketing to determine which version is performing better.
Visitors are randomly split in two with one group (A) being shown one form of marketing content and the other group (B) being shown another. This could be different versions of a website, email, landing page or app and small changes are made to elements such as background color, font, and position of the call-to-action (CTA) button.
By analyzing user behavior in this way you can know which version of your marketing asset is performing better. This information can be used to inform future decisions and enable you to tweak your promotions to ensure you are optimizing your marketing campaigns, allowing you to also improve your conversion rates.
As this article has shown, digital marketing offers many benefits to businesses that cannot be achieved by relying on traditional marketing methods alone. No matter the size of your business, with a relatively small investment, digital marketing allows you to get your message out to a large audience. With its global reach, cost-effective nature and its ability to measure the performance of marketing efforts, a digital marketing strategy is important for any business owner.