Digital Marketing is a topic that is extremely popular right now.
In fact, digital marketing has helped millions of businesses evolve and increase sales by marketing products and services through multiple digital channels.
When you perform digital marketing, you would establish an online presence in mediums such as search engine, social media, mobile apps, and email.
So what is digital marketing?
The main idea of digital marketing is to promote your website through digital channels and reach a large group of audience.
This is where digital marketing comes in.
Digital Marketing Benefits for Businesses
Here are the 5 main benefits of digital marketing:
Benefit #1 – Target Potential Customers Based On Their Interest And Behaviour.
With a large amount of data being collected by digital channels such as Facebook, Google, and Youtube, you will be able to reach your ideal customers based on their interest.
This will help to avoid a scattergun approach and ONLY show your ads to people who are more likely to convert into customers.
Benefit #2 – Gather Valuable Data
You would be able to measure the number of leads, sales, and customers you generate via digital marketing, something that traditional marketing such as radio and TV could not measure.
You can then use this data to perform analysis and tweak the ads to increase your key metrics. Given that everything is measurable, you will no longer be left clueless on where your marketing budget has gone to, and most importantly, you will now be able to quantify the ROI of digital marketing.
Benefit #3 – Reach Customers At Different Stages of Buying Journey
Most people start their purchase journey online, digital marketing would funnel and educate potential customers from the research stage to the buying stage.
Different personalized messages would be shown to people at different buying stages.
For example, a person who has just known your product will not buy immediately, use digital marketing to educate these group of people who are at the research stage.
Once they have been educated, they would move from the research stage to the buying stage. This is where you can close the sale by offering your product through various digital channels.
Benefit #4 – Acquire A Mixture of Local And International Clients
With billions of people currently online, you no longer have to restrict your customer base to just your local area.
Use digital marketing to target customers from different regions and expand to international markets.
Benefit #5 – Still Cheaper As Compared to Traditional Marketing
If you are tight on budget, digital marketing is still the cheaper and more effective option as compared to traditional marketing.
However, as more companies shift their advertising budget from TV and radio to digital channels, the cost will be escalated in the coming years.
If you have not already, start utilizing digital marketing in 2018 (while it is still underpriced).
Types of Channels Used For Digital Marketing
1. SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help you grow and increase sales through the use of free organic traffic.
SEO helps you optimize your website and appear on page one of Google. Once you are there, you can generate free traffic to your website without spending on advertising.
Also, your cost of acquiring leads and customers will start to reduce and revenue would gradually increase as potential clients can easily find your company on Google.
The caveat for SEO is it usually takes 6 months to 2 years for SEO to work as Google will not rank your website overnight.
Here’s a basic guide to SEO if you are interested to know more about SEO and its benefits.
2. Pay Per Click (PPC)
Paid search or PPC advertising allows you to showcase paid results in search engines.
Each time a person clicks on your ad, you will pay a specific amount depending on the keyword competitiveness. The best part is that you will only pay if the ad is clicked by a person.
When a person clicks on the ad, it shows that he or she has expressed some form of interest in your products or services.
While PPC advertising is more costly than SEO, it will deliver quicker results than SEO. Your ad will show up on Google within a day.
This is ideal for businesses who have the budget for advertising or for businesses who are waiting for SEO to take effect.
Once your website has appeared on page one of Google, you can either stop PPC entirely or allocate a lower budget for it.
3. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing allows you to promote your business on social media with free and paid methods.
Social media marketing can help improve brand awareness, grow your business online, and establish a platform for your business to engage with your audience on a personal level.
With a combined audience of few billion users, social media has now become the go-to channels for both small and large companies. To get started, all you need is a business page. Popular social media channels to drive leads and sales include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
4. Email Marketing
And finally, we have email marketing.
Email marketing helps you communicate with customer at different stages of their buying journey. Email marketing is also the cheapest form of marketing as you can share your company updates and products with your customers without having to spend money on advertising.
All you need to do is collect your customers’ email and use a software like GetResponse to send out an email blast.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is one of the best methods to grow your business online. It provides you an effective digital platform to promote your content, products, and services to attract customers.
The best part about digital marketing is, you have full control over the strategies used to target your audience and the cost of digital marketing is still relatively cheap as compared to traditional marketing.
What are your thoughts on digital marketing? Have you utilized them for your business? Leave them in the comments section below!