Marketing has evolved over the years to cater to more informed and resourceful consumers. This new user has emerged through the popularity of the internet. This called for a new type of marketing that could tackle the challenging landscape of the digital world. Digital marketing, as many brands call it, is highly adaptable and can be customized to fit the brand mission of any business.
For example, if you are a business starting on your customer journey, this kind of marketing might be perfect for you to venture into. This marketing activity has brought success to many emerging brands through the use of SEO, emails, social media and websites to reach out to consumers. The best part of digital marketing is that you can get noticed by consumers anywhere and everywhere, depending on how well you are versed in digital marketing.
The first step to achieving success in digital marketing is to put together a strategy based on your business goals. This is because you must have a direction for reaching your ideal customers to fund a digital marketing strategy. Fortunately, the whole umbrella of digital marketing is powered by AI, which gathers data on your activities and potential business activities online to figure out how to tackle the issue of reaching the right people. This is one of the reasons why digital marketing is important for brands.
Additionally, AI also decides whether your marketing campaigns or ads on digital platforms are ranked high enough to be seen. This is why mastering digital marketing requires understanding the different kinds of digital marketing.
Some of these are:
Search Engine Optimization
This refers to improving your brand’s web pages so there is better exposure to the brand on SERP. When you optimize your website, platforms like Google will take notice of your page and position the business in a better spot on the SERP so you can reach more consumers.
Pay Per Click Advertising
If you decide to advertise on search engines or social media, you can use a payment model that requires you to pay only when your ad is clicked. This form of digital marketing is popular as you pay for only those interested in your brand, which could lead to a conversion.
Social Media Marketing
Since social media has taken off over the past decade, many advertisers are looking at social media as a never-ending audience pool. This is why social media marketing is required to get your brand noticed by consumers and drive traffic to your brand website.
Email Marketing
Emails have remained relevant and are still a promising communication between a brand and consumers. So by putting together a mailing list, marketers can use this medium to send out marketing emails in the form of brand promotions or offers to consumers that might be interested or even to repeat customers.
Influencer Marketing
This form of digital marketing has become an integral part of any marketing strategy. Using influencers on social media or the digital space to promote your brand is a sure way to inform consumers of your brand and build a sense of trust among consumers through the assurance of an established influencer.
These are only a few examples of what digital marketing can consist of if you pursue it. You also have search engine marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, video marketing and mobile phone marketing. Each is unique and can benefit any brand that implements these activities into its digital marketing strategy. But why is digital marketing important to a brand? Explore the reasons to use digital marketing in the next section of this article.
1. Brand Awareness
When brands used traditional marketing methods to reach consumers, there was always a limit to where their reach would extend. This was based on their physical location and if they had various storefront locations. The potential of reaching other cities or states would have been farfetched. It was mostly possible for multinational companies and brands with the resources to push traditional marketing like flyers, door-to-door sales and billboards into other cities, states, or even countries.
Digital marketing has pushed those boundaries and given the ability to reach millions of people worldwide through the internet. Even the smallest brands can reach consumers in the world’s furthest corners if they wish to. Brands can use different digital marketing strategies to get noticed by audience groups that will most likely find their products/ services interesting. The first step is establishing an online brand presence through social media, SEO and email marketing. But you can also utilize other channels such as podcasts, webinars and video marketing to attract consumers to your web pages and increase your brand awareness in the digital space.
The best part about increasing your brand reach through digital marketing is that you do not require a large budget to do so, compared to traditional print or TV advertising. Instead, you can pay to run digital marketing campaigns that aim to reach audiences. This kind of targeting ensures you reach the right people without wasting funds on mass marketing. There is also the option of running A/B tests to tell you which digital marketing channel best suits your brand and will give you profitable ROI. This can only be achieved if the ideal consumers are reached and advertised.
2. Personalization
An essential part of digital marketing is the ability to customize your ads and campaigns to fit the ideal consumers you want to advertise to. By customizing ads, you can better target audiences that have the highest chances of giving you a conversion. This saves you time and money instead of targeting the masses with generic campaigns.
This is possible because of the large amounts of data that many digital marketing platforms hold. Social media and search engines collect mass amounts of consumer data that can be used to create personalized audience lists. Once you build your customized consumer audiences, you incorporate them into your campaign strategy. It guarantees profitable success if you are detailed with the audience lists. The more targeted the list is, the better your chances for a conversion from a consumer.
The data you have access to usually consists of consumer behavior and demographics. For example, you can create tailor-made ads or campaigns using the various parameters within these targeting sets. For example, if you are a sports drink brand, you can create an audience list that reflects the people who would most likely be interested in the brand. You can sift through consumer data and pinpoint aspects like people under 40 and people who like exercise and the outdoors.
Using those patterns, you can make an audience set that will only target those people through your ad. These parameters for targeting give digital marketing its edge over traditional marketing. For small brands, targeting the right people is vital to gain more profits and reduce unnecessary advertising costs.
3. Lead Generation
For a business to be successful, it needs top-quality leads to be generated so it can turn into a conversion. The beauty of digital marketing is that one of the sole reasons to implement this strategy is to increase leads. When brands decide to take their business into the digital space, they make it easier for consumers to find them when they search for a specific product/service. It also gives potential customers the portal to explore your brand’s website and learn more about your company. When consumers see this kind of information upfront, it creates a sense of trust that can eventually become a lead you can pursue.
Now, digital marketing has a unique channel called SEO, which helps brands appear on the SERP. Not only will you appear there if you optimize your website or ad effectively, but you could also be in the top position of the search page. This will only happen if a consumer searches for a specific keyword linked to your site or ad. Elements of digital marketing such as SEO give brands economical ways to be noticed by consumers on pages like Google and better chances at gaining leads.
Most consumers constantly research brands to find out what they sell and what the business stands for before giving them their business. It can also be assumed that most top results on SERP are the ones that get clicked on the most. Digital marketing campaigns can be set to generate leads only and focus on bringing in as many relevant leads as can be sustained with the budget you set. You can also use other forms of digital marketing to generate leads, such as content marketing, email marketing and digital ads.
4. Customer Acquisition Cost
The above-mentioned reasons touched upon cost, one of the main driving forces for a brand to utilize digital marketing in its marketing strategy. Unlike traditional marketing, which requires a lot of capital to start, maintain and even stop, digital marketing allows brands to monitor their costs closely, specifically the cost of customer acquisition. This refers to the number of pays a business spends on acquiring a customer through marketing. It can be assumed that traditional customer acquisition cost is much higher because you don’t know precisely who the ad/ campaign is reaching and how much of an effect it has on consumers.
For example, if a brand decides to pay for a billboard, you can never measure its impact on people. Not to mention the cost of advertising on a billboard is a lot higher than advertising on Google. But on the other hand, economical payment modes within digital marketing make acquiring a customer reasonable and do not force you to overextend yourself.
There are a few reasons why digital marketing lowers your customer acquisition cost. These are:
- You can target the ideal consumers and create personalized messages to appeal to them.
- You can generate top-quality leads and improve website conversion rates.
- You can run retargeting campaigns that guarantee conversions and automate almost every aspect of campaign monitoring.
- You can also track your campaign results more accurately and make real-time adjustments that can save you resources.
5. Digital Marketing Can Be Automated
Automated marketing would be highly beneficial if you run a brand that requires much attention to other aspects of your business. By automating your marketing, you can put out more inline campaigns through the internet and monitor them effectively without much effort. This also brings down your overall costs when you automate marketing activities.
Automation gives you more time to focus on your business and less time to try to gather data to fuel your campaigns/ads. For example, some activities you can automate if you pursue digital marketing are scheduling social media posts, sending emails, monitoring online shopping carts on your website and generating leads. You can also automate customer follow-ups and responses to filter out unrelated queries. Focusing on digital marketing automation will ensure you can scale up your business effectively and nurture more quality leads that will generate more conversions for your brand.
6. Targeting The Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is a standard benchmark to use when you are developing a marketing strategy. Each funnel section marks the consumer’s journey to buy a product or service. So usually, through traditional marketing, you could only target one section of the funnel at a time due to time and resources. Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to target the entire funnel at the same time.
If you are going for the top of the funnel, you can run campaigns that would spark interest among consumers about your brand through a pre-selected audience list. You could also incorporate SEO, digital PR and content marketing to ensure every base is covered. The middle of the funnel can be targeted by giving consumers valuable information about your products through webinars, emails and lead generation. This would incline them to move down the funnel.
Finally, if you are targeting the bottom funnel, you can use offers and promotions in ad campaigns to convince consumers to buy your products. This would allow consumers to trust your brand enough to engage with brand loyalty programs and make repeat purchases. Digital marketing allows you to perform these activities at once and gives you feedback about whether the three-pronged approaches on the funnel are practical.
7. Tracking Performance and Monitoring Of Marketing Activities
For digital marketing to be effective, you must achieve positive ROI. It is necessary first to establish key metrics and track them. You will then be able to see which campaigns and channels are most effective so that you can improve your overall marketing plan. When it comes down to it, digital marketing offers plenty of tools for this process; they allow marketers to make real-time adjustments, unlike traditional marketing, such as billboards and flyers, which cannot be tracked in terms of performance.
For example, if you run an ad on Google or Instagram, you can see how many people the ad has reached and how many people clicked on it to be redirected to your website. You can figure out how well different ads are doing through A/B testing. You can find what kind of users react to your ad the most: desktop or mobile phone users.
Suppose a particular ad performs poorly or a landing page does not convert as anticipated. In that case, marketers can use these platforms to make changes – even small ones – until they find what resonates best with users. For example, tools such as Google Analytics can inform you how many people you’ve reached based on ecommerce sales figures.
8. Adapting To Customer Behavior Pattern
Marketers must embrace new ways of thinking about customer behaviors, which are constantly evolving. For example, a marketer who doesn’t take steps to adapt will find their efforts now become dated and unproductive. Online marketing allows marketers to easily modify their strategies in response to current trends without relying on outdated methods. For instance, during an epidemic, many consumers began shifting from traditional retail outlets in favor of shopping at digital storefronts first.
This change necessitated a shift of budgeting priorities so that it focused more heavily on investments made through digital channels rather than offline ones, or you may notice one particular channel (like PPC) is not generating desirable results anymore. With online marketing opportunities available today, such as content marketing, adapting your tactics has never been easier than before.
9. Scalability
Digital marketing offers many significant benefits – even for smaller businesses. It provides an equal playing ground and the ability to continue scaling as you grow. If digital marketers have a tight grasp on their campaigns, they will always be able to contend with large ecommerce brands like Amazon; all it takes is a proper digital marketing strategy to put yourself out there.
Digital marketers can build powerful SEO strategies that’ll allow them to rank in new areas/keywords or launch ads on social media platforms while targeting audiences they weren’t reaching. They can also split up their content into smaller pieces which means they’ll appeal to larger audiences. Plus, thanks to automation tools built within some aspects of digital marketing, these marketers don’t need as much time/effort. All this reinforces the significance of investing in digital marketing today—as well as how great it could be for your brand.
10. Reaching The Right Customers
Digital marketing lets you speak to customers eager to purchase a product or service. Every person has different interests at every point in their customer journey, which dictates the kind of content that will respond best. No matter where consumers are in the customer journey, online marketing persuades people to take the action they want.
To attract people who would like to purchase your products and services straight away, it is advised that one focus on topics like the bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. You should also offer free trials or discounts, product demos or consultations, CTAs inside your emails and use social media advertising targeting similar audiences through lookalikes.
Traditional approaches don’t typically come with instantaneous responses because most consumers will have seen an advert long before deciding whether or not to act upon it. In comparison, digital platforms allow you to seize the opportunity whenever possible.
11. Brand reputation
Online reviews play a vital role in how consumers perceive your brand online. Even if you are not very active on the internet, your brand could still receive a bad reputation if complainants and inquiries are not appropriately addressed.
One of the key benefits of digital marketing is that it allows you to impact your brand’s reputation positively. For example, effective SEO enables you to dominate the front page of Google for critical keywords. In addition, social media monitoring tools enable you to track mentions about your company or other keywords.
Negative mentions can be responded to quickly before they cause unfavorable feelings toward your business among consumers. You can also use various forms of content and content marketing practices across different channels to impact audiences positively, thereby having more positive reviews of your brand. The culmination of positive reviews left by consumers will give other potential customers a sense of reassurance about your brand and the products offered.
Going over the reasons why digital marketing is important, it can be assumed that this marketing is the future for any brand looking to be successful in today’s digital age. While getting noticed in the sea of brands online might take a lot of work, it can be achieved when you know how the digital landscape operates. Building a brand is challenging enough when you need to venture into an unknown territory of digital marketing. If you need professional assistance, seek agencies like SV Digital, which are experts in digital marketing.
