Digital Marketing is an overarching term to describe all of your online marketing activity: web presence, social media, email, blogging, SEO, and more. And it’s vital for a growing business! Marketing offline (a.k.a. traditional marketing) can still be beneficial for certain types of small businesses, but we would argue that there are quite a few advantages to investing at least part of your budget into digital marketing efforts as well. Here are just a few of them:
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that your efforts are not limited geographically. Leads and customers can open up your emails from anywhere in the neighborhood, the country, or even the world. Even if your target customer is local, you can reach them at home or wherever they most frequent. Digital marketing is the best way to reach them and improve brand recall.
Traditional direct mail or printed flyers are sometimes referred to as “the shotgun approach,” targeting anyone and everyone in one specific geographic location, such as placing flyers on car windows or designing a billboard. That type of approach is very limiting geographically and is a hit-or-miss tactic.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows for more laser-focused tactics by targeting persona profiles who are much more likely to want your product or service. You can reach people in a certain geographic location such as a city or state and hone in on who would most benefit from your product or service. Yet you are not limited to a specific physical location in those areas. The kitchen, the car, the living room, the movie theatre – you can reach those targeted potential customers anywhere they go. By targeting a specific audience, and reaching people wherever they are, your company will enjoy higher success rates.
Any marketing campaign, whether traditional or digital, should have measurable objectives built in. Digital marketing metrics provide fairly comprehensive data. Let’s compare campaign metrics from a traditional direct mail campaign with a digital email campaign:
| Direct Mail (Traditional) | Email (Digital) | |
| Sent | ✔ | ✔ |
| Bounced/Invalid Address | ✔ | |
| Opened | ✔ | |
| Clicked | ✔ | |
| Conversion | ✔ | ✔ |
Direct mail can produce solid results, but as you can see in the graph above, digital marketing can provide fantastic data that you can later use to perfect and tweak future campaigns or provide insights about your target audience.
Despite the larger number of metrics, reporting on digital marketing campaigns is also easier, as many digital marketing platforms can create automated reports sent directly to your inbox. There isn’t a lot of data-mining or formatting required to read insights or present to the board – the data is pulled and formatted automatically, saving you time and frustration.
Let’s say that you sent an email campaign, and while only 4% bought your product as a result, about 15% signed up for your company newsletter. That means you can follow-up with that lead and nurture them through the sales funnel. Even though they didn’t buy right away, you haven’t lost them completely and can continue monitoring their interest and move them along the funnel at their own pace. You can even automate those follow-ups. Imagine someone subscribes to your blog, you can then set up a series of emails that go out on their own without having to click “send” manually.
The other fantastic advantage of digital marketing is its shelf-life, so to speak. Imagine a physical flyer. Your potential customer will most likely take one look and then discard it, if the timing isn’t right. Even if they keep it, who’s to say it won’t get lost and buried under a pile of papers never be seen again?
Digital content, on the other hand, is searchable for a very long time and can be discovered and utilized right at the ideal moment when your potential customer needs to see it. If you sell carpets, for example, a potential home-buyer might flag your content as interesting or make a mental note to check back, but it’s not the right time to pick out carpets. When they make their purchase and are starting to think about renovations and installing new carpet, they can search for that helpful article online or that flagged email in their inbox when they most need it. Even if they didn’t flag it, they can run another Google search, and your valuable solution to their immediate need will appear.
What’s not to love about digital marketing? Contact us today to see what strategy would be most useful for your business.