Digital Marketing
Any marketing that uses electronic devices can be used by marketing specialists to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to online marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device.
It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads, and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to βtraditional marketingβ such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing
The benefits of digital marketing
Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers several other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing.
A broad geographic reach
When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you havenβt limited your ad geographically).
This makes it easy to grow your business’s market reach and connect with a larger audience across different digital channels.
Cost efficiency
Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high.
They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place.
With digital marketing, you can create just 1 content piece that draws visitors to your blog as long as it’s active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it’s easy to change that schedule or the content if you need to do so
When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend.
Quantifiable results
To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?
There’s always the traditional option of asking each customer, βHow did you find us?”
Unfortunately, that doesn’t work in all industries. Many companies don’t get to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don’t always get complete results.
With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.
Easier personalization
Digital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can’t. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise.
Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to internet users people who have looked at your products. You know you’ll get better results if you target the offer to the person’s interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns.
One is for young families who have looked at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.
How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone records would you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn’t read the brochure you sent out?
With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips
More connection with customers
Digital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.
Think about your social media strategy. It’s great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it’s even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.
Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand’s story. That sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.
Easy and convenient conversions
Digital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a company while they’re doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?
With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but theyβll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further
How to create a digital marketing strategy
For many small businesses and beginner digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.
Set SMART goals
Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals is crucial for any marketing strategy. While there are many goals you may want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will propel your strategy forward instead of causing it to remain stagnant.
Identify your audience
Before starting any marketing campaign, itβs best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want your campaign to reach based on similar attributes, such as age, gender, demographic, or purchasing behavior.
Having a good understanding of your target audience can help you determine which digital marketing channels to use and the information to include in your campaigns.
Create a budget
A budget ensures youβre spending your money effectively towards your goals instead of overspending on digital marketing channels that may not provide the desired results.
Consider your SMART goals and the digital channel youβre planning to use to create a budget.
Select your digital marketing channels
From content marketing to PPC campaigns and more, there are many digital marketing channels you can use to your advantage. Which digital marketing channels you use often depends on your goals, audience, and budget.
Refine your marketing efforts
Make sure to analyze your campaign’s data to identify what was done well and areas for improvement once the campaign is over. This allows you to create even better campaigns in the future.
With the help of digital technologies and software, you can obtain this data in an easy-to-view dashboard. Mailchimpβs digital marketing analytics reports will help you keep track of all your marketing campaigns in one centralized location.
Digital marketing creates growth
Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any businessβs overall marketing strategy.
Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide.
The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you’ll be able to realize your company’s growth potential.