Five Reasons to Use Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business
Why digital marketing? It’s 2018 and no longer acceptable for businesses to just have a five-page website and go to sleep! With an ever-increasing number of people using the internet daily to find products and services, businesses are in constant competition to attract potential customers’ attention. Therefore, all businesses must improve their online presence if they intend to stay profitable and relevant.
Here are five reasons why you should use digital marketing to help grow your business:
1. Automation: Whether you’re selling a physical product or a service, it’s important that your customers can buy from you anytime they want. You don’t want to lose a customer to a competitor simply because he or she wanted to order a product at 4am while your store was closed! Having a platform that can take enquiries, receive orders, process payments, generate invoices and collect contact details while you’re away increases your business growth. Digital marketing can help you automate your business processes from lead generation and social media content posting, to email sequence and autoresponders, thereby ensuring that your business is open 24/7, 365 or even 366 days during a leap year!
2. Affordability: Compared to traditional marketing channels such as TV, radio and newspapers, digital marketing is affordable as it gives more ROI for your marketing spend. First, you can reach a lot of people for free using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, etc. By creating relevant content for your niche, you attract more customers through inbound strategies and stay relevant in their mind. Secondly, if you choose to spend a few pounds, you will reach more people with less budget online. For example, you can reach over a thousand people with a £10 budget with Facebook ads, but no TV, radio or newspaper ad exec will take that from you!
3. It is Measurable: With digital marketing, you can know the exact number of people that took a certain action using analytics tools. For example, you can tell how many people visited your website, how many people downloaded your eBook or product catalogue, how many people watched the video on your Facebook page, how many people opened your email, how many people visited your services page and how long they stayed etc. This is not the same for your favourite TV channel or radio station. They can brag about their estimated viewership during their prime time but can’t tell you how many people saw the advert you paid for, or the first 30 seconds before switching away. They can’t tell the percentage of the viewers who are male and which percentage are female, their age range and characteristics. No wonder some TV stations have started adopting digital marketing strategies by having an online streaming platform, so they can analyse their audience and how their content is being consumed! You can read this blog, to learn how to stay GDPR compliant when collecting visitors’ data online.
4. Accurate Targeting: Because digital marketing allows you to measure effectively the people who engage with your content whether on your website, social media or email, you can understand the characteristics of those visitors. Armed with this knowledge, you can craft marketing messages that are relevant to your audience based on their demographics and characteristics. This increases the success rate of your marketing campaign because your audience targeting is more accurate. You can even decide to have a segmented list and run a different campaign for each segment of your list as opposed to having a generalist approach as with traditional media.
5. It’s less invasive: We all hate it when our favourite song is interrupted by a marketing message on the radio. And even though some online advertisers can be quite invasive and aggressive, there are several digital marketing strategies that make it easy for your audience to find you only when they need you. For example, if you run a taxi company, you can use SEO to optimise your website to appear at the top of Google results and Google maps, so people looking for taxis can easily find you when they search for a taxi in their city. Since they found you and you didn’t market to them directly, the resistance is reduced and the chances of them using your taxi service increases.
Another example is if you sell skincare products, you can educate online searchers by answering frequently asked questions (FAQs) on your website’s blog section or do product reviews on your YouTube channel. This increases the customer’s confidence in your product and encourages them to order your product.
Finally, if you have a business website and already do some sort of PR, adopting digital marketing can amplify your reach, increase your visibility and improve your business profitability. Businesses can no longer ignore the massive opportunities the internet offers and having an up-to-date website, fresh content on social media and an effective digital marketing strategy will, at the very least, improve your overall brand perception.
WA
