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Why Digital Marketing Is Important

Digital marketing is any way of reaching your customer base over the internet, using social media, online advertising, search engine optimization and a variety of other techniques to hit your target market and grow your business. In the modern age, it is more important than ever.

Digital marketing is a crucial part of doing business in 2021. Even the businesses that traditionally may not have got clients and customers online are finding that this is more important in 2021, as we move through the pandemic and technological advances. Every year more people are shopping online, finding services online, and spending more of their time on social media and search engines. Making your business visible is essential.

 

8 Reasons Why You Need Digital Marketing

Whatever type of business you run, you need to embrace digital marketing. We’ve put together eight of the top reasons why it can be vital for your company and its visibility.

 

1. Know your online audience through social media

Social media allows you to engage with your customers and to learn more about them. Knowledge is power when it comes to marketing and understanding how customers and potential customers behave can be achieved through social media. You can get to know your clients by looking up their records online, but also through using Facebook and other platforms for competitions, surveys and more. Try to gain as much information as you possibly can.

 

2. Grow your market share

The truth of the matter is that businesses that do not embrace digital marketing techniques are destined to miss out in the long run. For example, think of a car garage that has no online presence. They may have a basis of customers, but eventually, as more and more people find their local car garages via Google and other online platforms, it becomes less likely that anyone will find the company and use their services.

Conversely, if you adopt the approach of increasing your visibility then you can grow your market share even by just fulfilling some basic marketing activities like getting listed in directories and having active profiles, as well as an active website.

 

3. Build a loyal community

Most business owners will tell you that the value is not necessarily in acquiring customers but in keeping them. For example, if you run a clothing store and you get someone to buy from you once, that’s worth a small sum of money to your business. If you become someone’s favorite clothing store and they buy from you every time they need something new, it can be worth thousands of dollars over the long term.

Consider the ability that social media can give you to keep reaching out to your customers and hooking them in. You can send promotions, even newsletters to provide a genuine relationship with your customers, which is far more likely to keep them loyal in the future.

Loyalty doesn’t necessarily mean that they love your brand and want to see you succeed, it can just mean staying in someone’s consciousness so they don’t forget you the next time they need to buy something or access a service your business provides.

 

4. More efficient than traditional marketing

Many traditional methods of marketing were clunky and ‘scattergun’ in their nature. Take television advertising, for example. Even though you can choose the channel you want to appear on, and even the show, you don’t really get to whittle down your audience. You inevitably end up paying to find customers who aren’t going to be interested in what you are offering.

With social media marketing, pay-per-click, and even email marketing, you can collect information about your potential customers. You can even tap into the data that has been collected by huge companies like Facebook. Target users based on age, interests, and more. For instance, a wedding company can target people who have their Facebook relationship status set to “engaged”.

 

5. Optimize your business using digital marketing techniques

Digital marketing allows you access to a huge amount of data. Who is clicking on your adverts, or visiting your website. How long they are staying engaged for, and what sort of conversion rates you are managing to achieve.

You can use this data to optimize your business and optimize your tactics for reaching people. A hugely popular tool for a lot of businesses is to split tests. For example, running two separate ads and seeing which is going to convert better. Tiny tweaks in wording and the psychology of an ad can allow you to reach more people or to convince people to trust you with their hard-earned cash.

Digital marketing is also a way to better understand the behaviors and interests of your customers. These sorts of details and profiling factors are big business. For larger companies, they may spend huge levels of resources trying to work out exactly what works best, and even evolve their business to suit what potential customers are looking for. Tapping into metrics such as search phrases found on Google, and optimizing for these searches, can be a way to make your business more successful.

 

6. Utilize social media after an increase in usage

Digital marketing is not just about reaching people, it is about hooking them in. Social media can be a spectacular tool for this. As well as finding people in the first instance, you can encourage

them to join your social media and be a part of your community after they have bought a product. You may even want to reward them with discounts or promotions for doing so.

This increases customer retention and means that you are more likely to have a customer for life rather than a customer for a brief period of time, and then have to start your marketing all over again.

Active social media with a lot of followers has another benefit besides being able to promote your business. It can show potential new customers that you are an active and reliable business. Are you more likely to go for the company with 17 followers on social media, or 17,000?

 

7. The argument for engaging, beneficial content vs traditional direct websites

Engaging and beneficial content is one of the ways you can build trust as a business. Customers have come to expect more than just having a web presence, and in the age of blogs and active communities, the onus can be on your business to give them beneficial content.

It’s not just about making your business more visible, though. Content can be a way for you to build trust. If you are a car mechanic, your website may be able to offer maintenance tips and even show case studies and examples of other jobs you have worked on. This is a way to engage people and market yourself in a way that is far more compelling and trustworthy.

Think about what content is on all of your platforms. Is it professional? Does it show that your business is trustworthy?

 

8. Gives your a fair fight regardless of your business size

This is why digital marketing is not just important, but very exciting for smaller businesses. It can give your business a fighting chance. You don’t need to have a huge marketing budget in order to find potential new customers. Instead, you can start small and create targeted marketing campaigns.

Some digital marketing techniques won’t cost you a penny. Blogging, and starting your own social media accounts, can be a great way to increase visibility and show people what your business does without having to spend a fortune. You have this platform free of charge. Gone are the days when you had to pay for ineffective ads in magazines and newspapers or to reach thousands of customers on television and hope some were interested, digital marketing can allow you to be much smarter.

Some huge brands have launched off the back of guerilla marketing campaigns, spending smaller sums of money but managing to go viral or find a niche for your business to exist within.

Digital marketing makes this possible for every startup that is willing to put in the time and effort. If you have a budget to spend, you can extend your reach even further.

 

Conclusion

It’s true that without digital marketing, many businesses will flounder and fail. Digital marketing is a race to the top and you need to keep up with the frontrunners in your industry and in your local area.

However, businesses shouldn’t see this as something scary, instead it should be viewed as an opportunity. If you are able to create targeted campaigns and use the smartest methods to reach potential customers, you can take your business to new and exciting levels and secure its future.

As e-commerce continues to grow, and people spend more of their time using social media sites, email, and their web browser, it is clear to see the importance of digital marketing. Businesses that may once have survived without an online presence are finding it more and more vital to start an effective digital marketing campaign.