Why?
Marketing is an essential part of creating a successful business. It helps you establish your brand in the marketplace, engage with consumers, create brand loyalty, differentiates your business, along with providing many other benefits.
‘Digital’ marketing involves marketing your business via digital technologies including social media, websites, emails, online advertisements, search engines, and mobile phones. These are quite different to traditional marketing and do require the use of some advanced technologies.
To help you understand the importance of digital marketing, this guide will explain what it entails and how it can help your business.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the promotion of products or services using digital technology. It is mostly focussed on Internet-based technologies because they are so widespread, but also includes marketing to mobile phones and other electronic devices.
A successful digital marketing campaign supports an organisation’s business goals. It often will work in conjunction with traditional marketing techniques, helping the business develop its brand, identify leads, become an authority within the market and much more.
Digital marketing is particularly important for businesses because it allows them to connect with consumers where they spend they a lot of their time — online. Some of the techniques that are often used as a part of a successful digital marketing campaign include:
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation is the process of increasing the level of high-quality traffic to web properties by improving their search engine rankings. It requires the use of several different techniques including link building and on-page optimisation.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
SEM takes advantage of programs like Google Adsense and Bing Ads to place advertisements on search engine results pages. These advertisements are typically placed above organic search engine rankings and can be very effective at attracting traffic to a website.
Content marketing
Content marketing involves the creation of highly-valuable content that is distributed across several digital channels. This can include white papers, blog posts, articles, social media posts, and videos. It is a very useful and recommended way to drive brand awareness and establish an organisation as an authority within its chosen industry.
Influencer marketing
This is one of the most recent forms of digital marketing. It involves hiring prominent figures on social media to endorse your organisation’s products or services. Their endorsement influences their followers, improving brand awareness and image through social media, encouraging more consumers to try your product or service.
Social media marketing
This form of digital marketing uses social media platforms and websites to promote your products or services. It is a very cost-effective and easy-to-use form of marketing which can help you market to specific demographics.
Data-driven marketing
Data-driven marketing involves the analysis of big data to form predictions about future behaviours. This information helps marketers improve their digital marketing efforts. The data that is used includes consumer interactions and engagements, behaviour of competitors, and analysis of marketing trends.
Ecommerce marketing
The goal of e-commerce marketing is to drive awareness of businesses that sells products or services electronically. It incorporates a wide variety of other marketing techniques including social media marketing and content marketing.
Display advertising
This is a form of online advertising that uses banner ads that are placed on websites and social media platforms. These ads can include images, videos, HTML 5 animations, and any other kind of rich media.
Email direct marketing
Email direct marketing uses email-based campaigns that are sent to a targeted list of recipients. These emails can include text, HTML, images, videos, and other types of rich media. It is a very useful form of digital marketing that typically achieves high levels of user engagement.
Web conferencing
This is an umbrella term for several types of online collaborative services including webcasts, webinars, and web meetings. These services can be used to promote products or services, provide training sessions, answer customer questions, and to provide support.
Mobile phone marketing (SMS and MMS)
This form of marketing aims to reach consumers on their smartphones, tablets, an and other mobile devices. It uses a range of technologies including SMS and MMS, mobile apps, websites, email, and social media.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a form of performance-based marketing where an organisation rewards affiliates for each visitor or customer they bring in via their own marketing efforts. Essentially, the affiliates will be launching their own marketing campaign in an effort to sell your product or service in return for a commission.
The Importance of Digital Marketing
Marketing – Better consumer engagement through content
Digital marketing creates many exciting new media opportunities for organisations to interact with consumers. Most of these opportunities differ greatly to the one-way forms of communication offered by traditional marketing techniques like tv ads and print media advertisements.
For example — a television or radio advertisement only allows an organisation to speak “at” a consumer. Digital marketing techniques, on the other hand, allow for a free-flowing exchange between organisations and consumers.
This interaction is a mutual dialogue that provides additional benefits to both parties. It is highly engaging for consumers and increases their appreciation for your brand in a way that traditional marketing techniques cannot.
It reaches consumers where they are spending their time
Consumers are increasingly turning away from traditional forms of media like television, print media, and radio. They are spending more time on the Internet and using their electronic phones as their primary source of entertainment.
According to research firm Zenith, consumers are now spending an average of 170.6 minutes online each day. They spend much of this time watching videos, playing computer games, reading news, participating in social media, or studying.
This statistic clearly highlights the importance of having a strong presence on digital platforms – which is only made possible by having digital marketing strategy. If you fail to market your organisation online, consumers simply won’t know you exist.
People use the Internet to make purchasing decisions
Most people now rely upon Internet research to make their purchasing decisions. The following statistics clearly highlight this fact:
- 50% of consumers will search for a business using their smartphone before they visit the business in person
- 78% of consumers have spent more time researching a brand or product online than they have researching in a store
- 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses (including 95% of people aged 18-34)
- 57% of shoppers say they look online for helpful recommendations or suggestions for gifts
- Consumers read an average of 10 online reviews before feeling able to trust a local business
- 91% of 18-34 year old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations
If your organisation does not have a digital marketing strategy, it may not be discovered as consumers perform their online research or it may be found to be lacking in some way. This will reduce your chances of attracting new customers.
Consumers usually opt for companies with the assets that digital marketing provides including a professional website, active social media profiles, excellent online reviews, and strong SEO.
A targeted approach to marketing
If your organisation decides to run a television advertisement, you have a ‘general’ sense of who is going to see it. If it is aired during a sportscast, you could safely assume the viewers will be sports lovers, for example.
However, you don’t know with any great certainty how old the viewers are, what their hobbies are, what they purchased last week, what information they are interested in, and so on. Many of the people who view your advertisement will be the wrong target demographic for the product or service you are providing.
Digital marketing allows you to create highly-targeted media content that is only displayed to people who precisely fit the demographic you are interested in. If you are interested in selling a product to cat lovers, you can use online ads that only appear when someone types in a search term relating to cats. You could also place advertisements on websites or social media pages dedicated to all things involving cats and so on.
This kind of recommended and highly-targeted approach can help you get much more ‘bang for your buck’ in terms of your marketing budget.
Dramatically improves brand awareness
Brand promotion is a critical part of marketing any organisation. In simple terms, you need to get your brand in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Digital marketing makes this task much easier by:
- Helping your brand appear prominently in search engine results
- Increasing the number of mentions your brand has on social media
- Using influencers to promote your brand on various digital channels
- Turning your brand into an authority for certain kinds of online content
- Helping you grow a newsletter list of loyal consumers who love your brand
- Harnessing digital technology like apps, emails, and smart phone messages to expose more consumers to your brand
Once your brand becomes well-known and well-regarded, it becomes much easier to attract and convert consumers.
An incredible return on investment
Digital marketing has a much better return on investment than traditional forms of marketing. This is largely because digital marketing techniques:
- Provide customer engagement
- Are highly targeted
- Have a bigger audience range
- Are much less expensive than traditional media
More accessible to customers
When an organisation obtains a strong online presence through digital marketing, it becomes much more accessible to consumers. It becomes easy for a consumer to interact the organisation via social media, email, blog comments, SMS messages, and so on.
Having a high level of accessibility leads to several important benefits including better brand recognition, consumer trust, market authority, and user engagement. Consumers will consider your organisation to be much more professional and trustworthy because it easy to reach online.
Customers will come to you
One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing techniques is that they can help you create a long-lasting online presence that continues to attract customers over time. You won’t have to constantly purchase television or radio advertisement slots to draw more customers in. They will visit your website, read your online content and engage with your brand in various ways into the future.
Obtaining competitive advantage
In today’s highly competitive marketplace, it is crucial to identify ways to differentiate your organisation and obtain a competitive advantage. Digital marketing is one of the easiest ways of doing so.
A strong digital marketing campaign improves brand awareness, consumer engagement, and consumer trust. Your organisation will have a powerful online presence that sets it apart from competitors and gives your organisation an advantage.
Allows for non-linear marketing approaches
One of the key advantages of digital marketing is that it makes non-linear marketing approaches possible. A non-linear approach uses multiple channels simultaneously to engage with users in a variety of ways.
You organisation can launch a digital marketing campaign that simultaneously uses blog posts, YouTube videos, Tweets, Instagram stories, Webinars, web forums and many other platforms. Users can then choose how they engage with the organisation.
Consumers will see your brand wherever they go online and will have many opportunities to share their experiences, opinions, and thoughts with your organisation. This is a far more effective approach than traditional advertising which typically uses one-way forms of communication.
It becomes easier to reach a global audience
Traditional marketing like television advertisements or print media are restricted to the limited geographical regions. You will only reach the locations where the television station broadcasts or where the newspaper is published.
When you use digital marketing to create websites, blogs, videos, social media profiles, and other forms of online content, it immediately has a global reach. This is particularly useful for organisations that are looking to take orders from around the globe.
Low cost marketing opportunities
Many organisations find it difficult to successfully market their brand because of the costs that are involved. After all, running an effective print, television or radio marketing campaign is not cheap.
Digital marketing provides a fantastic opportunity for those organisations because it uses many techniques which are either affordable or completely free. For example, it doesn’t cost anything to establish a social media account and start posting. A domain can be registered for a few dollars and your content can be published online for free. You will have many opportunities to promote your organisation without paying a cent.
Your competitors are online
You can virtually guarantee that your competitors are already taking advantage of digital marketing. When a consumer searches for a product or service that you provide, your competitors will probably feature prominently. If they have a good digital marketing strategy, they will probably dominate the search engine results and have a strong presence on online review websites.
The good news is – you can look at what approaches your competitors have already used to see what works and what doesn’t. Do your competitors have social media profiles? If so, do those profiles attract user engagement in the form of comments and likes? Do they use highly professional videos, a podcast or blogs? A digital marketing strategy will help you identify how they are succeeding online and develop ways to take them on.
Getting to know your target audience
It’s very easy to use social media, blog comment sections, online surveys, email, web forums, and other platforms to have a two-way dialogue that helps you learn more about your audience.
The information that you receive will help you understand your audience’s demographics, goals, and purchasing preferences. You will learn the answer to important questions like:
- What do my customers like/dislike about my products?
- How can I improve my customer service?
- What pain points does my audience often experience?
- Why does my audience prefer to use my competitors product?
Levels the playing field for small businesses
Small business have a tough time competing against large corporations with massive advertising budgets. Digital media marketing makes competing with big players easier because it lets you target specific niches that are relevant to your organisation’s interests.
Access to data-driven advertising
Data-driven advertising uses the data collected from consumers online to generate extremely effective and highly-targeted advertising campaigns. The data is collected with the user’s permission from emails, websites, social media interactions and other digital interactions. This type of advertising has been shown to have a very effective conversion rate and offers an excellent return on investment.
Easy to scale and adapt
Business conditions change very quickly in our fast-moving global marketplace. You may find that your organisation needs to constantly refine its marketing efforts. Digital marketing makes this simple, because most techniques can be altered on the fly.
It only takes a few clicks to change your online advertising budget or SEO budget. You can send a new email newsletter campaign to your subscribers within a few minutes. Having access to marketing techniques with a high level of scalability and adaptability means you can react quickly to changing circumstances.
Accessing hard-to-reach consumers
Younger consumers are considered hard to reach because they don’t watch television, read newspapers, or listen to the radio as often as older demographics. However, they spend more time on their mobile phone and the Internet. Having a digital marketing campaign is important for reaching these younger consumers.
Thanks for reading. For more information on Digital Marketing, contact Disseminate Digital today on (+44) 843 8963063.
