Would you believe me if I told you that the number of individuals who use the internet every day is still rising, given how widely accessible it is today?
It is. In fact, according to Pew Research, “continuous” internet usage has climbed among adults by 5% just in the last three years. Although we often mention it, the way people browse and make purchases has also evolved, so offline marketing isn’t as effective as it once was.
Although there are a few subtle differences, an experienced inbound marketer may claim that inbound marketing and digital marketing are essentially the same thing. I’ve also learned a lot from my talks with marketers and business owners in the United States, the United Kingdom, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand about how those minor variations are seen in other countries.
What does a company mean by “digital marketing”?
Digital marketing is essential for your brand exposure and business at this point. Every other company seems to have a website. If not, they at least have a digital ad plan or a presence on social media. Consumers now anticipate and rely on digital content and marketing as a way to learn about brands. You can get inventive and test out different marketing methods on a budget because digital marketing has so many possibilities and ideas available to it.
Digital marketing is defined as the process of connecting with customers online, where they spend a large portion of their time. The most effective digital marketers have a clear understanding of how each campaign supports their main objectives. Marketers can support a broader campaign through the available free and paid channels, based on the objectives of their marketing plan.
For instance, a content marketer can write a series of blog posts based on a new ebook the company just produced to generate leads. The social media marketer for the company could then assist in promoting these blog pieces via paid and unpaid posts on the company’s social media pages. If people read the ebook, the email marketer might create an email campaign to provide them with more details about the business. In a moment, we’ll go into more detail about these specific digital marketers.
A few of the main advantages of digital marketing are:
- Only the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service should receive your attention.
- It is more affordable than outbound marketing strategies.
- By leveling the playing field within your sector, digital marketing enables you to compete with more established brands.
- Digital advertising may be measured.
- A digital marketing plan may be modified and adjusted more easily.
- Your conversion rate and the caliber of your leads can both be increased through digital marketing.
- With digital marketing, you can involve audiences at every level.
Only the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service should receive your attention.
You have a limited amount of control over who sees an advertisement that you place on television, in a magazine, or on a billboard. Of course, you can measure some demographics, such as the normal readership of the magazine or the demographic of a particular neighborhood, but it’s still mostly a guess.
On the other hand, digital marketing enables you to locate and target a very precise audience, as well as give that audience customized, very effective marketing communications.
Use social media’s targeting options, for instance, to display social media advertising to a specific audience based on factors like age, gender, location, interests, networks, or habits. To offer advertising to customers who have expressed interest in your product or service or who have looked up specific keywords related to your sector, you might also employ PPC Advertising or SEO marketing techniques.
With the help of digital marketing, you can carry out the essential research to create your buyer persona and iteratively improve your marketing plan to target customers most likely to make a purchase. The best part about digital marketing is that it enables you to promote to smaller segments of your main target market. This is especially useful if you sell several goods or services to various customer personas.
It is more affordable than outbound marketing strategies
With digital marketing, you can monitor campaigns on a daily basis and cut back on your expenditure on a particular channel if it isn’t providing a good return on investment. Traditional types of advertising cannot be claimed to be the same. Whether your billboard converts for you, it still costs the same regardless of how it performs.
Additionally, you have total control over where you choose to spend your money with digital marketing. Perhaps instead of spending money on PPC advertisements, you decide to get design tools to produce Instagram content marketing with a high conversion rate. You may continuously pivot with a digital marketing plan, avoiding wasting money on ineffective channels.
By leveling the playing field within your sector, digital marketing enables you to compete with more established brands
If you work for a small company, it will probably be challenging for you to compete with the major companies in your sector, many of whom have millions of dollars to spend on national advertising campaigns or television ads. Fortunately, there are many chances for effective digital marketing activities to outrank the major firms.
To increase your ranking on search engines for certain long-tail keywords related to your product or service, for example, you may find those keywords and then produce high-quality content. The most popular content with the target demographic will be given precedence by search engines, not the largest brand.
Digital advertising may be measured
The metrics that might be important to your business, such as impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page, can all be seen in detail from beginning to end with the help of digital marketing. One of the main advantages of digital marketing is this. Traditional advertising has several limitations, although it can be effective for some objectives.
Digital marketing, in contrast to the majority of offline marketing strategies, enables marketers to view precise outcomes in real time. If you’ve ever placed an advertisement in a newspaper, you are aware of how challenging it is to gauge the number of readers who really turned to that page and focused on your advertisement. There is no definite way to determine whether that advertisement contributed to any sales at all.
The ROI of virtually every facet of your marketing activities can be measured, however, with digital marketing.
Here are a few instances:
Website Visits
With digital marketing, you may use digital analytics software, which is available in marketing platforms, to see the precise amount of visitors who have visited the homepage of your website in real time.
In addition to other digital analytics information, you can see how many pages they viewed, what device they were using, and where they came from.
Based on the quantity of visitors those marketing channels are bringing to your website, this knowledge enables you to decide which marketing channels to spend more or less time on. For instance, if just 10% of your traffic originates from organic search, you are aware that you likely need to invest some time on SEO to raise that figure.
Before a customer interacts with a salesperson or makes a purchase, it can be quite challenging to determine how they are connecting with your brand when using offline marketing. With the help of digital marketing, you may spot behavioral trends and patterns in customers before they complete the buying process, allowing you to make better-informed choices about how to get them to your website at the very top of the sales funnel.
Performance of Content and Lead Generation
Consider creating a product brochure and mailing it through people’s letterboxes. Although offline, that brochure is still a form of content. The issue is that you don’t know how many people looked at your brochure or how many people dumped it in the garbage without even opening it.
Imagine that brochure was instead available on your website. By employing forms, you can track the precise number of visitors to the website where it is hosted as well as gather contact information from those that download it. When consumers download your content, you’re not only creating qualified leads, but you can also track how many people are engaging with it.
Modeling by Attribution
You may track all of your sales back to a customer’s initial digital interaction with your company when you use a successful digital marketing strategy along with the appropriate tools and technologies.
This process, known as attribution modeling, enables you to spot patterns in how consumers learn about and purchase your product, allowing you to make more informed choices about which aspects of your marketing strategy require additional focus and which phases of your sales cycle require improvement.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is crucial because, according to Aberdeen Group, businesses with excellent sales and marketing alignment expand at a pace of 20% annually while those with weak alignment see their revenue fall by 4%. Using digital technology to enhance your customers’ buying cycle experience is likely to have a favorable impact on your company’s bottom line.
A digital marketing plan may be modified and adjusted more easily
The process of creating a marketing strategy is laborious. Typically, you will carry out that plan to completion, give it time to work, and then evaluate the results. But not everything always goes as expected. Halfway through, you can realize that a calculation, an assumption, or an audience response did not go as planned. Because you don’t have to start from scratch, being able to pivot or modify the plan along the road is really advantageous.
One major advantage of digital marketing is the simplicity of changing your plan. Comparatively speaking, changing a digital marketing plan is far simpler than changing a more conventional marketing strategy like mailers or billboard advertising. For instance, you can immediately modify or pause an online advertisement if it isn’t producing the desired results.
Your conversion rate and the caliber of your leads can both be increased through digital marketing.
Using digital marketing also makes it easier to increase your conversion rate because it makes it easier to measure your marketing efforts. You can create more successful tactics by being able to evaluate the performance of each technique. Your conversion rate will increase if you keep improving your techniques. Putting money into web marketing makes sure that everything is optimized for the most conversions possible.
Additionally, not every lead offers the same value to your company. You have the chance to target a particular audience with digital marketing, which will result in higher-quality leads that are more likely to convert to consumers. Your conversion rate will increase directly as a result of connecting your company with the most valuable leads.
With digital marketing, you can involve audiences at every level
It’s crucial to start interacting with your audience as soon as you can. The lead is moved through the customer funnel more quickly when a connection is made at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. You may do that beginning to end and at every stage in between by using digital marketing.
You can track your consumers’ whole purchasing process using online platforms. Converting leads requires an understanding of and analysis of how customers behave and move. You can follow them throughout that journey thanks to digital marketing. And even if they don’t convert right away, it at least ensures that they have established a connection with your company.
