Do you know that around 75% of marketing experts increased the trust and credibility of their company through digital marketing? (Source: Smart Insights)
In today’s era of competition, growing your business isn’t a walk in the park but digital marketing is here to make things simpler for you. Digitalization has certainly changed the whole concept of marketing. Now customers are more active online, therefore, targeting them there is a bigger ideal. Digital marketing includes sets of practices and tactics that help in marketing your business online.
Whether you are a small, medium, or large business – there’s no denying the importance of digital marketing in terms of increasing your customer base/sales, which can be a major goal of every business.
Some Interesting Digital Marketing Stats To Know
Before directly diving into the importance of digital marketing, let’s first look at some statistics that help our point:-
- 70% of marketers invest actively in content marketing. (Source: HubSpot)
- 86% of marketers increased brand awareness with the help of single or multiple digital marketing channels. (Content Marketing Institute)
- 61% of marketers say paid searches have excellent ROI. (Statista)
- 79% of marketers educated their target audience with digital marketing. (Content Marketing Institute)
- 85% of marketers think that customers expect a smooth personalized experience. (Evergage)
- Businesses that work on nurturing leads through inbound marketing tend to make 50% extra sales, compared to those following traditional marketing. (Marketo)
With these statistics, it should be clear that digital marketing is effective for boosting any business growth. It opens your doors to more customers and increased growth opportunities.
Still not sure about following digital marketing strategies? Keep scrolling to discover the top ten reasons why digital marketing is crucial for your business. Let’s get started with the importance of digital marketing now!
10 Benefits of Digital Marketing For Any Business
1) Better Way To Define Your Audience
A great advantage that digital marketing offers is that you can define your audience extremely well. Due to the fact that users leave more and more data online (through Google accounts and social media profiles), marketers can narrow down the target audience very precisely for different marketing types.
Traditional marketing only allows the choice of placement, i.e. on magazines, hoardings, etc. With a well-defined audience, businesses can increase the efficiency of their advertising efforts.
Since it allows you to define your audience, the importance of digital marketing is very high for your business.
2) Helps At Building A Good Relationship With Your Customers
Another reason for the importance of digital marketing is – that it’s great at building relationships with customers, resulting in customer loyalty. Social media marketing in particular being a digital marketing strategy can be very effective. For example, on Facebook, you can comment on reviews, answer questions, and respond to comments.
When you communicate with your customers online, you make your business human. In addition, it also makes your customers feel that your brand cares about the customers and their opinions.
For example, after every purchase, companies can opt to send a thank you email to their customers and can run follow-ups on that email to nurture the relationship which can lead to higher lifetime customer value (LCV).
3) The Cost Of Digital Marketing Is Lower Than Traditional Marketing
Digital marketing can cost significantly less than traditional marketing. No expensive TV ads, newspaper or radio ads, hoardings, etc, which usually cost around thousands of dollars. There’s no cost for printing brochures or flyers. In fact, most digital marketing strategies are free, such as using social media, blogging, and SEO. In most cases, it only costs you time.
To start a blog, it is probably gonna take you less than $100 to start. Although the cost to keep publishing content for SEO can add up but it’s exponentially less than launching traditional marketing campaigns.
Similarly, other digital marketing strategies like social media ads or PPC will cost money. But even if we compare them with traditional marketing costs, the cost of operation comes out to be low in digital marketing. Thus this is why digital marketing is important because it’s a pocket-friendly choice for many businesses today.
4) Convenient To Target Multiple Target Groups Simultaneously
With traditional marketing, it might be difficult to target multiple sets of audiences altogether. However, with a clean digital marketing strategy in play, it’s just a piece of cake. This can include running multiple ad campaigns for multiple sets of audiences and then scaling down on the campaign which gives you results.
In most cases, marketers will usually adopt a brand’s message specifically to their multiple target groups.
Let’s suppose your business deals in cars. So if you target family fathers, your message can point out the safety features in the new model. Whereas for young men without a family, your message can focus on its incredible acceleration. This means sending customized messages across different target audience groups.
Remember that targeted advertising messages are always more efficient than generic advertising messages, hence this is where you realize the importance of digital marketing.
5) Greater Flexibility Than Offline Marketing
Furthermore, one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that you are very flexible as an advertiser and as well as a marketer. Pausing campaigns, changing the budget, or running additional ads is not a problem for you. Any developments (or) changes can be made quickly while running digital marketing campaigns.
Hence, the risk of burning your advertising budget fast is significantly lower.
Especially for every small business that wants to save money one way (or) the other can utilize digital marketing, to make their cost of marketing cheaper and helps them save a lot of money. Hence the control over your campaigns tells us that digital marketing is important.
6) An Element To Influence Target Leads
When someone visits your website, they get to know various information about your products/services. As they spend time on it, your target visitors begin to be influenced by your website content.
The influencing elements (or parts of your website) that do the job can be copywriting, images, pop-ups, videos, or the content itself. These elements can influence customers and encourage them to opt for your products (or) services.
Sticking not just to websites, even if an end-user follows your brand on social media, they can be influenced by your social media messaging, and thus there’s an ease of connectivity.
In general, as we have digitalized ourselves and our lives, the importance of digital marketing clearly makes a pathway for brands and businesses to influence their potential leads across multiple channels.
7) Increase In Eye Balls
Websites and social media profiles are the two main pillars of exposure in the digital marketing realm. Generating revenue for a business only through ads (or) website clicks (or) even through social media engagement is quite possible and in fact, thousands if not millions of businesses around the globe follow the same approach.
Since establishing a digital presence is all about being wherever your leads/customers are online. Irrespective of the platform, your business can have a presence whenever you want and once you establish a following on a couple of channels. Let’s say, on Instagram and search engines.
As your business gets more and more into these channels, your website is bound to have more and more eyeballs each passing quarter and that should positively impact your revenue. Hence this is one of the major reasons why digital marketing is important.
8) The Ease Of Sale
Having a website is an important piece of the puzzle for most digital marketing campaigns. Because having a website ensures that your business runs smoothly.
No matter if you are an online entrepreneur, florist, or restaurant owner, at the end of the day a website will help you:-
- Promote your business
- Build a digital presence
- Resonates with today’s people’s online behaviour
I can carry on with the list, but the importance of digital marketing only matters when the strategies contribute to sales and there’s an increase in revenue numbers.
But to facilitate the sales of your products and services, you must use the appropriate information materials and software to boost your site and increase its visibility on search engines. To do that organically various SEO strategies will help you (or) else you can pay for advertisements either on search engines (or) social media platforms.
Either way, to make sales, it’s all about capturing and attracting your target audience into a funnel and then by filtering and nurturing your prospects over and over, this is where you can form an omnichannel approach where making sales becomes a lot easier once people start converting in the funnel.
9) Reach Is Much Wider
We know that placing ads in local papers is an effective marketing strategy but the problem is that they are entitled to a particular region. The number of addresses a newspaper can reach will be relatively large, but it doesn’t mean that everyone around the corner of the globe can read those magazines (or) local newspapers.
The actual reach with this form of marketing is therefore a lot lower than you might think. However, with digital marketing, the reach is often multiple times higher. Through digital marketing, one can reach a large pool of target groups more easily.
You should know that more than 4.95 billion people use the internet, which is approximately 62.5% of the total world’s population. Surprisingly, the number is increasing with time. Thus, if your business wants to target more and more customers globally, then you need to get started with digital marketing as soon as possible.
The magnitude of reach which you can expect through digital marketing when compared to offline marketing clearly shows us the importance of digital marketing.
10) Campaigns Can Be Adjusted
With online marketing, you undoubtedly pay attention to the results of the campaign. Not only afterwards, but also especially during the campaign. If it appears during a campaign that things are going not as you planned. Then, you can always adjust it. In fact, it’s simple to make adjustments to an advertisement for achieving better results.
This is possible even after the advertisement is already live. It is of course unthinkable with offline marketing. Once that local paper ad is printed (or) that billboard is placed, you can no longer adjust that campaign without re-starting it again. Hence this is another point which is just touching upon the importance of digital marketing.
Above were the top ten points talking about the importance of digital marketing. Other than these benefits, here are some more benefits of digital marketing that aren’t in the spotlight. Go have a look!
- Measurable results: In digital marketing, we have real-time data on every user action. This makes it possible to keep exact control of the most relevant metrics for a business. It helps you measure the return on investment of each of your campaigns.
- Customization: By being able to measure the results in real-time, businesses can customize their campaigns better. This allows you to correct inappropriate things fast and efficiently.
- Expanded scope: With digital marketing, the target range of your business is no longer limited to its immediate environment. You can reach users from anywhere in the world. If we combine this with the possibility of selling online, the growth potential is enormous.
- Loyalty: Digital marketing allows us to develop close relationships with customers and nurture them through repeated impacts, which helps us foster brand loyalty.
- Two-way traffic: Digital marketing provides communication between companies and interested parties. Companies can use people’s reactions to improve themselves and their techniques, making the brand more dynamic and adaptable.
- Multiple relationships: Since everyone can come into contact with everyone on the internet (company, customer, potential customer, expert, etc.), it has become that much easier to build relationships. Hence you can use this ability of the internet to make as many customer-brand relationships as possible.
Final Words
With these benefits mentioned in the article, it clearly depicts the importance of digital marketing for businesses and brands in today’s world. Whether you want to increase your sales, meet your business requirements or fulfil your goals – Digital marketing is something you can rely upon. Whether in terms of effectiveness or budget, digital marketing is better than offline marketing.
Today, your customers are on the internet. Your competitors are on the web, targeting their customers, and increasing their sales. So what are you doing?
In case, if you are new to this understanding of the importance of digital marketing, it’s best to hire an individual expert or marketing agency. They will take care of the marketing job better and more efficiently than you. Plus, it’s not hard to find a marketing specialist these days. Just go on the web and you’ll find a plethora of options to choose from.