Digital Marketing and Its Impact on Any Business
Since time immemorial, the way to get a word across like a product or service is through marketing. Long before the invention of the internet, marketing has gotten so ingrained in our head that there is no other way we can think of marketing a product or service.
Marketing in itself is already a no-brainer: let the word out and expect customers to respond.
But then the internet happened and digital marketing soon followed. Thanks to digital marketing, companies have found simpler and less expensive ways to operate and communicate with current and potential customers.
Let’s look at how digital marketing has impacted on business growth:
1. It helps that certain percentage of customers that wouldn’t have found you through traditional means
The tool that is used in digital marketing is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Simply put, it’s the lifeblood of every business that is online. With the right tweaking, it increases the chance of getting your business ranked by search engines like Google or Bing. The goal here is to end up on the first page of every search engine thus introducing you to potential customers early on. Since your business comes up on the early hits, the more encouraging it is for customers to click on your brand whether it is a website or a social media account.
Why should it matter? Look at it as increasing the foot traffic at a mall. You want your store to be one of the first or THE FIRST thing a customer sees when they step inside right? Same as how you would want your brand to be seen first in search results.
2. It gives you almost instant feedback allowing you to adjust your marketing tactics on the fly
If you launch a digital ad, the beauty of that is you get instant feedback. Whether it is negative or positive feedback, it allows you to tweak that ad in real time saving you money in the process. With traditional marketing, you may have already lost a lot of money before you realize it. Then go out and spend more to correct it and yet risk losing more.
One thing to decide, though, is which metrics or determining factors should you focus on; it’s also a juggling act.
3. It allows you to communicate and better interact with both current and potential customers
Let’s face it, we are consumed by social media. Around 85% of the total population is browsing practically anything through social media.
4. It establishes a digital presence
Let’s face it, only a handful of people still look at traditional media. Nowadays, it’s either digital media or no one is going to find you. We won’t need to discuss the number of businesses that closed down just because they were hesitant to embrace the digital revolution.
It’s a good thing that advancements in the smartphone are still there or else you wouldn’t be on your phone reading this blog.
Creating your social media account is the first, quickest, and cheapest thing to do to start your digital branding. You wouldn’t be using your computer now if it weren’t for digital marketing telling you why your computer is the best for you.
5. It provides you with tools that allow you to reach your target demographic much better
There are a billion reasons why digital marketing is superior to traditional forms of marketing, but one of the most obvious reasons is that it provides powerful and important data about its customers and as mentioned in number 2, it gives you instant feedback allowing you to make immediate changes thus saving you time and money with minimal to no loss.
Among all the digital marketing tools out there, the cheapest option that gives you the best ROI would be email marketing. With the right content writer, you can grow your customer base with just a few emails and newsletters.
6. It provides value to your customers which gives them content that matters to them
Another marketing tool it provides is customized marketing. With your customers’ information spread around the internet, it is very easy to create ads that target one, two, or three different demographics without affecting the others.
On the forefront, we have content marketing. Back in the day, content marketing is just a bunch of words beautifully put together in the hopes that customers would respond to you before you can even get any form of information. Now, we have web copies, blog posts, social blurbs, hashtags, and the like that seem simple enough but are actually powerful markers that give us more information than just a name and a phone number.
For example, you may just receive a notification from a customer who just clicked on an image you posted. It may just be an image to them, but the information that you have received is much much more like, their gender, age bracket, region, and sometimes even race or religion. It’s that powerful.
If a lot of you are familiar with the Pareto Principle, this is it. 20% of you effort will affect 80% of your target demographic.
Digital marketing has completely changed the way companies interact with their customer base with the way customers find a company to do business with. Its impact on any business growth will only continue as more and more businesses go into digital marketing.
In this day and age, if a company lacks a solid digital presence, it will hamper its ability to communicate with existing and potential customers. The lack of a digital presence also leads to a lack of trust in the brand itself.
If a business – big or small – implements a strong digital marketing plan that addresses things such as social media and content marketing, it can have a positive impact on that brand; Small brands become big while big brands become bigger.
