Online shopping is bigger than ever, which means having an online presence is vital for businesses. Here, Jonathan Birch, Creative Director at Glass Digital outlines the key benefits of incorporating digital marketing into your current strategy.
Around 2.14 billion people have purchased goods and services online in 2021 (Statista), which makes online channels an incredibly valuable tool for marketers. With such a large audience of shoppers choosing digital platforms to make a purchase, it’s incredibly important that your brand has an online presence to make sure you’re getting your products and services in front of as many people as possible.
While you’ve no doubt already set up a website and social media accounts for your business, are you making the most of what the online world has to offer?
Digital marketing can help boost your online channels. Using a combination of online ads, affiliates, search engine marketing, and social media marketing, you can get your brand, products, and services in front of the customers who are interested in your business.
By adopting digital marketing into your current strategy, you could boost your company’s profile online, leading to improved brand awareness and an increase in sales. Whether you’re a multi-national business or a small, independent retailer, these points below are just some of the reasons to implement digital marketing into your current strategy.
Reach more of your target audience
Any marketing tactic, whether traditional or digital, helps you reach more of your target audience. However, one of the biggest strengths of digital marketing is its ability to target specific groups of people. For example, if you’re a small business that only offers a service to your local area, then digital marketing can help boost your local visibility and reach the most relevant customers. With targeted ads, search engine optimisation, and affiliate marketing, you can reach the customers in your area who are interested in your product.
Even in very niche industries, using the right keywords on your site can help you get your brand in front of more people who are most likely to lead to a sale, not only boosting your brand visibility within your sector, but also increasing your revenue. And, with platforms like Google My Business and local listings, you can ensure your brand is seen by the right audience when they search for your product or service.
Digital marketing doesn’t stop at local visibility either. Global marketing can be tricky, time-consuming, and expensive for small businesses using traditional techniques. But where digital marketing stands out is how accessible it is to companies of every size. Reaching a global market is now a level playing field for both local businesses and multi-national brands. By growing your online presence, you can expand your reach to customers around the rest of the country and even the world.
Improve your conversion rate
Digital marketing doesn’t just help you target the right people but can also help boost your conversions too. People who are searching for your product or service online are already considering making a purchase, which may not always be the case with traditional marketing avenues. All you need to do is encourage them to shop with you rather than a competitor by advertising your UPS.
While targeting customers who intend to make a purchase can help, there are various options you can take to boost your conversion rate even further. For example, by adopting an affiliate marketing strategy, you can provide unique discounts to your customers to encourage more sales. Or, you could consider creating targeted ads, which will only be shown to people who have searched for your product in the past, have shown interest in similar topics, or have visited your site before.
Target customers at every stage of the sales funnel
By far one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is that it helps you reach your customers at every stage of the sales funnel. By making the most of all your online channels, such as social media and your website, you can get your brand to customers who are considering making a purchase in the future as well as those who are ready to buy.
Using content marketing to offer advice, you can reach customers at the very beginning of the sales funnel. This method allows you to help your customers make the right decision before they buy. Even if your guides don’t lead to conversions right away, they will help to build trust between your company and your customer base and boost your brand authority.
With search engine optimised commercial pages and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, you can target customers who have the intention of buying. By pointing them in the direction of the products or services they’re interested in, you can encourage them to buy from you rather than a competitor.
Measure your results effectively
Every aspect of your marketing strategy has one universal goal: to make more sales and boost revenue, so you no doubt want to track how well your hard work is paying off. With traditional marketing, it can be difficult to measure exactly where your customers have come from, meaning it’s tricky to work out which aspects of your marketing strategy are working and which aren’t. And, once you’ve committed to an ad, it’s hard to make changes.
Since digital marketing all happens online, you can easily track metrics such as the number of impressions, clicks, shares, and conversions your posts and ads gain. This can make it much easier to see what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to make changes and improve your strategy relatively quickly. You can easily go back into your site and change up your content, or perhaps update your PPC campaigns to drive better results.
Get a bigger return on investment
Due to digital marketing’s ability to generate more leads and conversions, it can also be very cost-effective. Traditional marketing can carry large costs for printing materials or hiring ad space, and the results of these methods are relatively short-lived. Your marketing will only have an impact for as long as it’s in circulation.
With digital marketing, your efforts are always visible to your audience. Updating your site, generating a regular mailing list, and sending out regular social media posts can all be relatively inexpensive marketing techniques that could have a big effect to your overall goals. A blog post can continue to have an impact as long as it remains live on your site, meaning it could continue to generate leads for years to come.
As a result, you could see a bigger return on investment compared to traditional marketing techniques.
In the digital age, it’s vital for businesses to have an online presence. Creating a digital marketing strategy can help get your brand seen by even more customers, both locally and on a global scale, all for a bigger return on investment.
Jonathan Birch, Creative Director at Glass Digital