Choosing the best marketing strategy to use is a decision faced by every business owner. The right marketing techniques can help your business to reach your target audience and convert them into leads or clients. While traditional marketing methods such as fliers, billboards, TV ads, and print ads can still bring in business, for best results, you (and every business owner) should include digital marketing as part of your ongoing marketing strategy.
Digital marketing is a highly effective way to promote your business, regardless of how large or small your company is, and regardless of where you’re located or what the nature of your business is. It’s a cost-effective option, and it allows you to engage with customers in real-time, which can help you to bring your marketing strategies into focus. Here are some of the many reasons businesses should utilize digital marketing:
Find Prospects and Customers Wherever They Are
As technology continues to grow rapidly, more and more people shop for products and services online or through mobile channels, and some of them don’t shop any other way. For your business to be competitive in your industry, having a web presence and a digital marketing strategy is imperative.
If your business can be found online, you’ll be able to find potential customers where they are any time day or night. If you don’t take the time to utilize digital marketing, you’re narrowing the number of customers who will be interested in doing business with you, since some don’t shop any way other than digitally.
Reach a Much Larger Audience
Before digital marketing was an option, businesses had to use traditional marketing methods in order to attract potential clients who lived locally or might have been visiting their area. Your geographical location could put limits on how much your business could expand.
With digital marketing, you can still attract local prospects, but you’re not limited to your immediate area. Using online methods, you can reach much larger groups of potential clients, and you can even expand to a global marketplace. Best of all, you can attract traffic that is highly targeted.
Affordability
Traditional marketing campaigns can be very costly. Your budget may include items such as direct mail, television or radio advertising as well as print expenses. Analyzing your return on investment may have to be done manually, which costs more either in time or in outsourcing expense.
With digital marketing, you can reach more people for less money. Running social media advertising campaigns or email marketing costs a fraction of what traditional marketing methods cost and this strategy is likely to yield better results.
Easier Analytics
As an added advantage, when you utilize digital marketing techniques, analytics and market research can be accessed much more easily and at a lower cost. Digital marketing analytics can make it easier to determine which ad led to a better response, and this can help you make informed decisions based on being able to know the performance of an ad very quickly.
Using A/B testing, you can test the impact of tiny changes, such as a different headline or a different color choice. By evaluating these changes, you can ultimately reach a much more targeted audience.
Real-Time Results
Knowing for sure how your traditional marketing efforts performed can take a long time, sometimes weeks or months. While you wait for this information, you may not have a clear picture regarding what’s working and what’s not.
Digital marketing allows you to get real-time results for many aspects of your marketing efforts. You can quickly determine your bounce rate, the number of visitors that you have each day and what time of day people are most responsive.
Audience Engagement
Digital techniques have opened up tremendous opportunities for you as a business owner to engage with your audience and know exactly what they are looking for. Whether you interact through blog comments, social media or live chat, your prospects can communicate to you what they might not be getting from your competitors and what you can do differently to earn their business. When they know you genuinely care about what they say and think, engagement is likely to increase even more.
Mobile technology has made this process even simpler. Potential customers use their mobile device regularly making it easier for you to engage with them with mobile marketing, text marketing or social media.
Leveling the Playing Field
Before digital marketing was an option, large corporations were at a huge advantage. Their marketing budgets allowed them to reach the highest number of customers making it very difficult for smaller businesses to be noticed at all.
Digital marketing offers multiple opportunities for business of all sizes to improve brand awareness. This allows small and medium-sized businesses to be more competitive and it helps to level the playing field.
Building Relationships
When you market your business online, you have the opportunity to not only engage with your customers and potential customers, but to actually build relationships with them. When you provide content that is relevant and personalized, it encourages prospects and customers to keep coming back for more guidance and expertise.
It’s not about a hard-sell approach, but about providing valuable information in order to build trust and brand loyalty. When you take the time to get to know your customers’ pain points, you’re in a position to offer them solutions. Digital marketing allows you to interact with prospects and customers in a way that isn’t really possible by using traditional marketing methods exclusively.
The Bottom Line: Include Digital Marketing
Utilizing digital marketing techniques doesn’t mean traditional marketing methods should never be used, but in today’s marketplace, it’s imperative to use some digital marketing strategies in order to remain competitive. People expect you to have a web presence, and if you can’t be found online, you’re losing business.
There are many different ways to market your business through digital channels. Get in touch with Softline Solutions for expert assistance with your digital marketing strategies today.
