Why Is Digital Marketing Important?
Because people spend so much time online, digital marketing allows you to reach a much larger audience than is possible through traditional marketing methods. In addition, digital marketing delivers a variety of important benefits that allow you to maximize the ROI on your efforts.
You Can Target Individuals Who Are Most Likely to Purchase Your Product or Service
Many traditional marketing channels, such as advertising on TV, radio, magazines or billboards, limit your control over the audience you reach. While some TV shows or magazines have more clearly defined demographics, it’s still challenging to identify exactly who will come across your ad. As a result, it’s common for traditional marketing efforts to reach a lot of people who simply have no interest in your offerings.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to target the specific audience that is most likely to be interested in your products and services. In addition, you have the ability to create highly personalized messaging that increases your likelihood of conversions. This will deliver a significantly greater ROI than is typically possible with traditional marketing.
You Generate Measurable Results that Allow You to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Efforts
One of the greatest limitations associated with traditional marketing methods is a lack of measurability. It’s virtually impossible to obtain data regarding the number of people your campaign reached, the number of leads it generated, or any other metric that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, provides you with a treasure trove of data that allows you to identify which strategies and campaigns are achieving the best results, and which strategies need to be adjusted or abandoned. You can receive highly accurate data for your digital marketing efforts in real time, allowing you to make the adjustments necessary to maximize your ROI.
You have the ability to track just about any data that can help you improve the performance of your marketing efforts, including:
- Website traffic
- Page views
- Impressions
- Clicks
- Time on page
- First page search rankings
- Email opens
- Social media likes and shares
You also have the ability to trace your sales back to a prospect’s initial digital interaction with your business. This process, called attribution modeling, allows you to better understand the ways in which your target audience researches and buys your product or service. This provides the insights needed to identify which aspects of your marketing strategy should receive greater emphasis, and which aspects of your buyer’s journey need to be refined.
You Receive a More Cost-Effective Marketing Solution
Most traditional marketing methods come with a fixed cost, regardless of the results generated. For example, it costs the same amount of money to run a TV commercial, a magazine ad or a billboard for a month whether it converts at a high level or doesn’t generate any leads for your business. Furthermore, since you aren’t able to generate any performance data, you have no way of identifying which of these campaigns are delivering the best ROI.
Because you’re able to track the day-to-day performance of every digital marketing campaign, you have up-to-date data on which initiatives are performing well and which aren’t delivering your desired results. This allows you to allocate more resources to the higher performing campaigns, allowing you to maximize your ROI.
In addition, digital marketing gives you greater control over how you spend your marketing budget. You can pivot your spending instantly if you determine your money isn’t being spent in the right places. For example, if your data shows that your Facebook ads aren’t converting at as high a level as your PPC campaigns, you have the ability to shift money from your Facebook ads budget to your PPC budget to take advantage of the additional traffic and higher conversion rate being generated by this method.
You Can Maximize Your Conversion Rate and Generate Higher Quality Leads
Since the success of your digital marketing efforts are easily measured, you’ll have the ability to improve your conversion rate. When you know the effectiveness of each strategy in your campaign, you can make adjustments to these tactics in order to achieve better results. This continuous refinement will help you optimize each campaign for the highest number of conversions.
In addition, digital marketing gives you greater control over the audience you target with your campaigns. This allows you to focus on the segment of your audience that will provide higher quality leads that are more likely to become customers and are more likely to spend a greater amount of money with you over the lifetime of your relationship with them.
You Have the Ability to Target Individuals in Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
In most instances, you won’t be able to convert people into a new customer the first time they come into contact with your business. There is a process most people go through when purchasing a product or service, called the buyer’s journey. There are three primary stages of this journey:
- Awareness – The individual first discovers they have a problem they need to address. In this phase, general information is gathered to provide a better understanding of the problem.
- Consideration – In this phase, the individual has a more comprehensive understanding of the problem and is now starting to evaluate potential solutions.
- Decision – After evaluating their options, the individual is now ready to buy. They may need a little additional information regarding which particular provider or brand will deliver their desired results.
Digital marketing allows you to make a connection with your audience in the awareness stage so that you can guide them through the other steps of the buyer’s journey. Because you’re able to create content targeting each stage of the journey, you also have a greater ability to get recognized by people farther along in the process. In addition, you have access to data showing you how your audience moves through the journey in each of your digital marketing channels, allowing you to optimize your conversion rate.
You Can Level the Playing Field with Larger Companies
One of the challenges facing small businesses is that it is often hard to compete with larger brands that have vastly more money to invest in their marketing. This is particularly true with traditional marketing methods, where a greater budget directly equates to reaching a wider audience.
Digital marketing helps small and medium sized businesses level this playing field by being more strategic with their initiatives. For example, you can create quality content targeting long-tail keywords which may be less competitive, but deliver an audience that is more ready to purchase. You can also focus your limited ad budget on the channels where your audience spends their most time, increasing the conversions generated from these efforts. With a savvy digital marketing strategy, you have the ability to compete with larger companies, even if your budget is much smaller.