What are the benefits of digital marketing? Do all businesses need digital marketing?
Let’s first try to understand the concept of Digital Marketing. According to Financial Times, digital marketing is ” The marketing of products or services using digital channels to reach consumers. The key objective is to promote brands through various forms of digital media. Digital marketing extends beyond internet marketing to include channels that do not require the use of the internet. It includes mobile phones (both SMS and MMS), social media marketing, display advertising, search engine marketing, and any other form of digital media.” Basically, in today’s context, digital marketing is the promotion of products and services through various digital medium on the Internet and mobile.
There are several benefits of digital marketing. I have listed down the best few:
1) Equal Opportunity
Any business today can set up a Facebook or LinkedIn business page and start marketing their products or services. You create a Instagram page or a Twitter handle and Voila depending upon your bandwidth you can reach a million followers in no time. Any business now have access to these resources which were earlier available to MNCs or big corporate houses.
2) Cost Effectiveness
Traditional marketing or advertising is highly expensive and out of reach for small businesses or stores who are looking to market their products. Digital platforms which includes social media channels have made it increasingly possible for even school going kids to create their own start ups. The outreach of these digital platforms are much higher than traditional platforms like newspapers or TV. Not just social media channels, but emails and SMSs are way cheaper than the traditional ones considering the outreach and the effectiveness of these channels.
3) Real-Time Result
Analytics from the digital medium including website and social media channels gives us a quick and unique insight about our target audience. From the first click itself you can track the entire buyer’s journey. In case of traditional medium you have to wait for a long time to understand from where the lead or prospect has come and its quite a cumbersome process. In case of social media channels or emails you can instantly get a report about your visitor or lead.
4) Easy to Measure
It’s very easy to ascertain the effectiveness of the digital channels. You can easily adjust your campaign while evaluating the performance / parameters that you have set for your campaign. There are certain marketing automation tools which you can integrate with your website and social media channels for measuring the success of your web pages or campaigns. Email automation software allows you to find out open rates, click rates and eventually figure out the conversions. You can extract detailed reports which will allow you to tweak your campaigns accordingly.
5) Brand Building
If you want to increase the reputation of your company or want to build a brand from scratch than digital marketing is the best way. You get so may channels and so much space to promote your brand which is not possible through traditional medium. In case of a newspaper you just get a column(s) to advertise about your brand but think of all the channels that you have in digital marketing. But one important factor that always needs attention is consistency. You need to be consistent with your messaging and your brand guidelines. Digital marketing allows you to create a full-fledged website for your brand, create business pages across all social media channels, write blogs and do a lot of other marketing activities to win the trust of your present and future customers.
6) Targeted Audience
Through traditional medium like an advertisement in a newspaper or a billboard across the street, you will never get to know whether it has reached your audience or not. It’s like taking a shot in the dark. Although, there are methods to increase your success via traditional marketing tactics but there’s no comparison with digital channels. Social media sites provides you data with exact demographics of your users thus making it easier for you to adjust your campaigns and segment it accordingly. Take for instance, emails – emails are sent to people who are looking out for your kind of business. It’s very targeted. For websites and blogs, you can use SEO with targeted keywords which will help you to reach consumers who are looking for topics relevant to your business.
7) Meaningful Interactions or Engagements
With so many companies vying for the same set of people for their businesses it’s very much necessary to remain one step ahead as far as customer outreach is concerned. The only way to stay relevant and better serve your customers is through better engagement. The more you engage with your customers the more insights you will get of their buying decisions. And digital media allows you to engage with your customers real time, 24×7. Social media channels allows you to answer your customers’ questions at real time. These channels also help you to generate sales. So it is very necessary that you engage with your customers on a regular basis. Your main motto should be to build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Well, in this era of cut-throat competition, everyone wants their products and/or services to reach the maximum number of people. According to GSMA, a staggering 5 billion people across the globe now has a mobile phone and almost 2 billion people are online. And what best way to market your products, if not through digital marketing. Irrespective of the size or nature of your business, you are bound to achieve success through digital marketing.