Digital marketing is a constantly evolving field. It’s very important for businesses to understand the different technical strategies to promote their brands and achieve online success.
So today, in this article, we are going to explore what digital marketing is and how businesses can leverage it to achieve their online goals.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to all the marketing techniques and practices that use digital channels to achieve commercial communication objectives.
This includes channels such as:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC),
- Social Media Marketing,
- Email Marketing,
- Content Marketing,
- Affiliate Marketing,
- Influencer Marketing,
- Video Marketing,
- Mobile Apps Marketing,
- and other channels.
One of the essential digital marketing strategies is organic SEO or Search Engine Optimization which aims to optimize the visibility of a website on search engines to attract targeted traffic.
By combining several of these techniques and digital channels, marketing ultimately allows organizations to achieve several objectives, such as acquiring new customers, retaining current customers, increasing sales, managing reputation, improving awareness or brand management.
What Are the Different Benefits of Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing offers different benefits for businesses of different sizes and markets, such as:
Lower Costs Than Traditional Marketing
Digital marketing campaigns are generally more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods such as television and print advertising.
For example, creating and maintaining a website and social media accounts is usually less expensive than producing and broadcasting a commercial.
Additionally, digital marketing allows businesses to reach a wider audience without having to incur the cost of traditional methods such as direct mail and printing.
If you’re on a tight budget, you can’t get better results than what digital marketing has to offer.
But, even if you pay professionals for your digital marketing efforts, the cost can be 50-75% less than comparable marketing efforts with the same potential reach. Let’s look at some examples.
If you have a local small business and want to run an ad on local TV, it will cost you 200$ to 1500$ per 30 second run. If they run it once a day, we are talking about 6000$ monthly if you manage to find the cheapest version.
If you go for a full-page ad in the local newspaper it will cost you 1000$ to 10 000$, and if you do a smaller one-inch column, black-and-white ad it will cost you 756.40$. If you run these ads twice every week, we are easily talking about 6000$ to 8000$ per month. So newspaper advertisements are not really cheap.
Compare this with the cost of a good SEO optimization, which would start at about 500$ – 1200$ a month. And for that money you can easily double your visitors and conversions in three to six months. So SEO is really effective compared to TV and newspapers.
If you pair SEO with PPC Ads (Paid-per-Click), you can easily get more than 100% increase in visits in under 3 months. And that will cost you around 500$ to 1500$ monthly if you are a small business.
So you get a total SEO + Advertising package for 1000$ to 2700$ monthly, half of the price of the cheapest TV or newspaper advertising costs and get double or triple the results. That’s why digital marketing is supperior to classic marketing.
Wider Reach and a More Targeted Audience
One of the biggest benefits of online marketing is the ability to reach a larger, more targeted audience.
Through digital marketing channels such as social media, search engines, and email marketing, businesses can target specific demographics and geographic locations.
Additionally, digital marketing allows for more precise targeting. Indeed, small businesses and digital marketers can use data and analytics to identify and target their ideal customers.
With digital marketing, you can target your audience by:
- By age,
- By location,
- By gender,
- By language,
- By interests,
- By previous online behavior,
- By the device they use (phone, tablet, computer),
- By keywords they search,
- By job or industry.
The problem with traditional marketing is that it must target a general demographic. You can target TV viewers, radio show listeners, or magazine readers.
Direct mail can be directed to a specific zip code or neighborhood. Digital marketing, on the other hand, can impact anyone.
There is no limit to its reach. As long as a person is connected to the internet in some way, you can send them a marketing message.
For example, let’s say that we sell yoga mats, or healthy protein shakes. We can make a Buyer Persona which will identify our perfect buyer.
And for our product it would be something like, a 32-year-old woman from Toronto who speaks both English and French, loves yoga, healthy cooking, and travel, shops on her iPhone, and frequently searches for “best protein shakes” and “affordable yoga mats.”
We can enter all of these things in Google Ads, or we can target them by keywords when we write our content. We can change our message so it gets to the right people.
Below is a Buyer Persona that we have created for one of our clients. Later, on the basis of it, we have created a marketing plan with SEO, Content Creation and Advertisement.
Digital Marketing Creates Brand Interactions
Business transactions will always have two components: the ability to solve a problem and the depth of the relationship you have with a customer.
Digital marketing encourages brand interactions and helps you build effective relationships.
As long as your products, services, and digital marketing efforts offer a strong value proposition, you will always have the opportunity to make a sale.
- Here are two statistics that confirm this:
48% of consumers reported interacting with brands more frequently on social media compared to six months prior, indicating a significant rise in brand engagement through these platforms. (Source) - 77% of consumers prefer shopping from brands they follow on social media, emphasizing the importance of maintaining an active and engaging online presence. (Source)
Digital Marketing Allows You to Expand Your Customer Service
One of the biggest complaints customers have about a brand or company is a lack of customer service.
If you are present on Twitter and Facebook or if you respond quickly to emails sent, you can anticipate certain problems that arise during the sales process.
This can help eliminate some of the negative comments that can come your way and ultimately damage your online reputation if it happens often enough.
The 5 most important steps for Customer Service are:
- Acknowledging the Issue Quickly: Responding quickly shows the customer that your company cares about their feedback and helps calm them down.
- Empathizing with the Customer: Letting the customer know you understand their frustration and want to help.
- Taking Responsibility: Owning up to the issue, even if it wasn’t your fault, to show you’re committed to solving it.
- Offering a Solution: Giving a clear plan to fix the problem, so the customer knows what to expect.
- Following Through: Making sure you keep your promises and show the customer the issue is really resolved.
Increased Engagement and Interactivity
Digital marketing channels such as social media and email marketing allow businesses to engage with their customers and build relationships.
Social media platforms provide businesses with a space to interact with their customers, respond to comments and questions, and build community.
Additionally, digital marketing channels such as email enable more personalized and direct communication with customers.
Content marketing especially increases engagement and helps you promote your business, product or service. By writing useful and education articles that you know a lot about and helping customers to solve a problem, you get a lot of engagement that can easily be transformed into converted sales.
You can also connect this to social media marketing and influencer marketing to give your message the widest possible reach.
For example, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson works with Under Armour to promote their products, especially the Project Rock clothing line. His huge social media following and trusted personal brand have helped increase sales and improve brand engagement as his fans value his recommendations.
His Rock Delta sneakers sold out within 24 hours upon release in 2017, marking them as Under Armour’s fastest-selling shoe of that year
Digital Marketing Increases Brand Loyalty
Relationships create loyalty. Loyalty creates recurring business opportunities.
It is much more profitable to attract repeat customers than to constantly reach new buyers.
Digital marketing can help you build the loyalty you need to strengthen your business presence.
Apple and Starbucks both use digital marketing to strengthen their brand image and maintain customer loyalty. Apple promotes its ecosystem, personalized recommendations, and exclusive content through digital marketing, contributing to a customer retention rate of around 90% for iPhone users.
Starbucks follows a similar approach, using its mobile app and rewards program to offer personalized deals, resulting in over 20 million active members in the Starbucks Rewards program and a 50% increase in spending by members compared to non-members. These strategies help both brands keep their customers engaged and loyal.
Conclusion
In conclusion, digital marketing is a major evolution of traditional marketing that allows companies to reach a larger, more targeted and more economical audience.
It has become essential for organizations wishing to remain competitive in the digital age and continues to grow in importance.
Marketing researchers and practitioners continue to explore new techniques and practices to maximize digital marketing effectiveness and improve business results.
From SEO to social media and paid ads, digital marketing helps more people find you, trust you, and stick with your brand. If you want to grow your business online, digital marketing is the way to go.
If you need any help with your digital marketing strategy please contact us right away! We run the best web marketing agency in Montreal.
