Marketing is all about connecting with your audience at the right place and time. With the rise of the Internet, this means that you can connect with your audience easily on the internet through digital marketing. But what exactly are the advantages of digital marketing?
Digital marketing benefits businesses of all sizes by giving access to the mass market at an affordable price. Unlike TV or print advertising, it allows truly personalized marketing. Let’s now discuss further on the many benefits you and your business can derive from taking full advantage of cost-effective digital marketing methods.
- What are the Main Benefits of Using Digital Marketing?
- What are the Ways Digital Marketing is Cost-effective?
- What is a Cost-effective Marketing Strategy?
- What are the Benefits of Effective Marketing?
- What are the Main 5 Reasons to Implement Digital Marketing in a Company?
- What are the Benefits of Using Digital Media?
- What is a Marketing Cost and Benefit Analysis?
- What is the Most Cost-effective Methods to Reach Consumers via the Online Market Place?
- How Digital Marketing is Adding Value to the Business?
- What does it Mean to Say Cost-effective?
- Is Digital Marketing Less Expensive?
- How Important is Marketing Cost Analysis for Evaluating a Company’s Profitability?
- What are the 7 Benefits of Marketing?
- What are the 4 Types of Digital Marketing?
- Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Business?
- What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
- What is Digital Marketing and its Benefits in Future?
- What is Digital Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages?
- What are the 5 Benefits of Social Media?
- What is the Importance of Cost Effective Analysis?
- What is the Purpose of a Cost-Benefit Analysis?
- How Internet Helps in Marketing of Products and Services With Less Cost?
What are the Main Benefits of Using Digital Marketing?
Traditionally, businesses reached their target audience using channels like television, radio, magazines, events, and direct mail. Now, as people spend more time online, businesses are trying to reach potential buyers through digital channels. After all, marketers need to go where the people are.
Read Also: Developing a Search Strategy
Research by Pew Research Center shows that in the last three years, internet usage by adults has increased by at least 5%. Now, more than ever, businesses are tapping into the opportunities the digital world offers. In other words, online marketing plays a very big role in the shopping decisions people make.
If you want to make the switch and diversify your marketing strategy, you probably want to understand the benefits of these new digital marketing tactics.
1. Global Reach
Traditional marketing is restricted by geography and creating an international marketing campaign can be hard, expensive, as well as labor-intensive. However, digital marketing happens on the Internet, which means that the reach you can achieve with it is immense. Even a very small local business owner has the ability to reach an international audience with an online store.
This would never be possible with traditional marketing or would cost a whole lot of money to do so. This online accessibility has opened many growth opportunities for businesses to explore. The combination of global reach and visibility is a great opportunity for any business.
2. Local Reach
While global reach is a significant advantage of digital marketing, it also improves local visibility, which is especially important if your business relies on nearby customers. Local SEO and locally targeted ads can be beneficial for companies trying to bring more customers to their doors. Think of the reach you can get to a whole neighborhood with digital marketing versus the reach it would take you to print out flyers and distribute them around.
3. Lower Cost
Whether you want to promote your business locally or internationally, digital marketing provides you with cost-effective solutions. It allows even the smallest companies to compete with larger companies using highly targeted strategies.
Most of these strategies won’t even cost anything at all to start with (such as SEO, social media, and content marketing). However, not every form of digital marketing is suitable for every business and some may even have more costs than others. A business can find appropriate solutions based on its marketing goals.
4. Easy to Learn
While there are many aspects of digital marketing that you need to learn, it is fairly easy to get started with. It gets more complex from the nature of the goals and the scale of the campaigns. However, it is all a matter of finding the right strategy that works for your business.
5. Effective Targeting
Even if you don’t have a clear idea of your target audience, digital marketing enables you to extract data to see which audiences will work best for you and optimize your campaign around them. There are many different options of targeting such as through keywords for search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), or demographic information on social media.
This enormous amount of targeting elements at your disposal makes sure that every campaign reaches the right audience. It also helps you to analyze the changing behaviors of customers and modify campaigns for those changes. This ability to understand customers’ changing needs quickly is a sure way of success for any company.
6. Multiple Strategies
There are different strategies of digital marketing that can be used by different types of businesses. A B2B business that is interested in gaining international leads may have a totally different strategy than a B2C local business selling clothes. While some companies can benefit more easily with content marketing and SEO, others can benefit from conversion-based ad campaigns.
The key is to always analyze the results and develop better tactics and methods with time. A well-executed digital marketing strategy is one that changes and adapts quickly as the needs of the business transform.
Here are some of the most common types of digital marketing you can choose from:
- SEO-based content creation
- Search engine marketing
- Social paid ads
- Video marketing
- Forum engagement
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Local search
- Remarketing
- Influencer marketing
7. Multiple Content Types
Another crucial advantage of digital marketing is the different content types available to showcase your brand online. For a lot of platforms, there is a wide range of content types you can choose from to keep your brand fresh and build effective online campaigns. Unlike traditional marketing, you can more easily reproduce one content to fit as many platforms as you want.
Here are some of the most common types of content that you can choose from:
- Blogs
- Podcasts
- Emailers
- Ebooks
- Visual content
- Infographics
- Whitepapers
- Quizzes
- Social media posts
- Webinars
8. Increased Engagement
One of the most important advantages of digital marketing is increased engagement. Digital marketing is designed to be highly engaging by default. Users can share a blog post, like a photo, save a video or engage with your website via a paid ad click. The best part is that all of these actions can be measured.
This enables you to create even more engaging posts to increase brand awareness or boost sales. The more you engage online, the more loyal customers you can get. Businesses that use engaging formats effectively in their online strategies have an easier time converting cold traffic to loyal customers.
9. Analytics and Optimization
Another important advantage of digital marketing is web analytics which measures the result of digital marketing campaigns in real-time. This helps to optimize future campaigns and fix any possible mistakes quickly. Analyzing your digital marketing campaigns also enables you to have the ability to pinpoint every source of traffic and take total control of your sales funnels.
What are the Ways Digital Marketing is Cost-effective?
There are cost-effective strategies to use online to further legitimize and attract people to your business and its products or services.
Whether it’s through social media, a website, or other means, subtle digital marketing tactics can make a significant difference in your organization’s marketability and profitability.
1. Retargeting Ads
Traffic goes beyond getting people to visit your website and making your business visible. For your company to succeed with a digital marketing campaign, you will need to generate targeted traffic.
Targeted traffic refers to website visitors who aren’t just browsing your site, but are actively looking for products and information. It creates better conversion rates when you can attract targeted traffic to your website as they are more likely to purchase a product or engage in services and ask questions.
Good traffic is also needed for a more profitable return on investment. This way, your campaigns aren’t attracting people who are simply surfing the web, but instead, your ads are reaching people who inquire about what your brand sells, or they buy right away.
One way to direct ‘quality’ traffic is with retargeting ads. Retargeting is an essential audience-building mechanism. With set parameters about your preferred audience’s online behaviors, interests, and demographic details, retargeting will place ads before those who would like to work with or buy from you.
In addition, retargeting can even be used on people who have purchased on your website or app once. The ads serve as a reminder of or introduction to your value. Seeing how many conversions come through and where they come from can help you fine-tune future campaigns even more.
2. Social Selling Can Connect & Convert
Consumers are savvier and more informed than ever before. Because of social media’s increasing influence, people use such channels to make intelligent buying decisions by researching products and making or reading recommendations.
Of top salespeople, 62% attribute closing more deals to social selling. More effective social selling training sessions are needed to take advantage of essential touch points in the buyer’s journey. With buyers spending more time researching, supplying them with the right help and tools while they’re looking for answers is crucial.
For social selling to work, you need a social media team that knows how to use social to connect with potential clients. Social media marketers need to monitor their profiles and provide value to prospects, engaging buyers on an ongoing, long-term basis.
Sharing meaningful, eye-catching content is the major key to making social selling work. By doing so, you establish connections with people and can play on that impact to enhance your sales efforts. Identify who you want to connect with and what platforms they use, and then plan your content for those targets. Create content that is engaging visually and provides a solution to the customer’s problem. With every helpful and positive touchpoint with a prospect, you are positioning your brand as an industry expert.
Businesses currently practicing social selling reported the following benefits: increased audience reach and the scope, contact with prospects throughout the buyer’s journey, increased conversion rates, and improving sales efficiency.
3. Track Success & Adjust Campaigns
Using digital marketing methods, such as on social media, can help increase conversion rates in real-time. The conversion rate is the percentage of viewers who are converted into leads and, soon enough, customers.
Metrics and trackers such as return on investment (ROI), increment sales, returning visitors, and more are used to evaluate sales efficacy. These help you formulate your brand strategy, observe the issues that need to be addressed and create a more collaborative work environment as you improve.
Conversion rate and other metrics highlight weak spots within your marketing strategies. If you know an email was sent to a whole list of leads, but only a handful converted, you know something is amiss. When you see a campaign suffering, you can detect which touchpoints turned the customer off and adjust that landing page or email to be more appealing.
Acknowledging and using key metrics enables you to allot resources to the marketing channels and tactics that are working. Tracking success also helps you to replicate it more readily in the future, so you connect with prospects sooner.
4. Yield a High Return on Investment (ROI)
With any business, return on investment is a crucial statistic used to evaluate profitability.
Since you can measure ROI easily by dividing your investment by sales, you don’t have to invest too much before you can evaluate how you want to proceed. To calculate it thoroughly, you need to be sure of what your business’s aims and goals are.
Figure out your budget, the sales you need to make, and what you want to get from your digital marketing campaign before measuring your return on investment. You need Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to get an accurate measurement.
KPIs include general performance indicators such as traffic, leads, and reach as well as channel-based indicators (social networks, search engines, blogs, and so on). KPIs also include source-based performance (organic search, direct traffic, referrals), campaign-based performance (including conversion rates) and setting realistic goals.
Once a campaign has run long enough to gather data, get performance reports and calculate the ROI. You need to foster a collaborative environment between your sales and marketing specialists to track and improve ROI.
Digital marketing is cost-effective for business because you can continually evaluate how and if it is working. Measuring the ROI from your campaigns helps you to re-work strategies and put the resources toward the right projects.
5. Pay-Per-Click Gets to an Audience Sooner
If you’re running a business, especially a small one, pay-per-click advertising is a must. Around 45% of small businesses use PPC advertising as part of their digital marketing strategy. Your marketing budget isn’t expansive, so every dollar should be maximized.
You can develop greater brand awareness and get instant visibility to a relevant audience, something search engine optimization (SEO) might take months to achieve.
In contrast, PPC allows you to leverage your best assets to generate leads. Ads contain a value proposition (usually in the headline and meta-tag) that your target audience of online searchers and website browsers will find relevant.
Be wise about the keywords and phrases bidded on and used, adjusting your choices slightly might not affect the volume of clicks, but it might leave more room in your budget. Strategically change things up and see where you can settle on getting the best ROI.
Using premium search techniques, PPC generates a high return on investment and allows you to limit expenditures to convert customers.
6. Customer Acquisition Costs
Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) can be a make-or-break metric.
The CAC includes variable and fixed costs that go into converting new customers. It can even be calculated on an individual account basis to determine the resources it would take to bring on this new client. Calculating this figure for a campaign requires you to divide the total spend on customer acquisition by total new customers.
So, if $100 is spent on marketing in a year, yet acquired 100 new customers, the customer acquisition cost would be $1. These costs matter to your company and any potential investors. So, to make profitable and effective decisions, your business needs to know the average costs.
With digital marketing, a lot of your costs are low. Things like email campaigns, social media interactions and posts, and website content cost you nearly nothing to produce. When your customers come to you through these channels, your CAC is negligible.
7. Low-Cost Content and Customer Engagement
If you don’t have a big budget or you spent a lot of money on a particular aspect of a campaign, you can still advertise successfully. Use your social media to drive attention to your business by creating a series of posts that are on a trending topic and relate to your campaign or brand. This can help generate traffic from unexpected sources but from an audience that is still relevant.
Leverage your data to shape your marketing plan. Focus on what your current customers like about your company, including the emails you send, the content you share, or the promotions you do.
It’s valuable to use your analytics to gain valuable insight. And every once in a while, send out a survey to connect with and get feedback from customers. These tactics allow for honest feedback and enhanced information that numbers can convey.
Using more cost-effective strategies and interacting with your customers consistently, allows you to connect with new customers in a meaningful way. While creating a better foundation with leads means it’ll be much easier for sales and marketing to move them through the funnel.
8. Brand Awareness on a Budget
Digital marketing experts increase brand awareness through the simplest means without exerting too much spending power.
Email marketing is an inexpensive and very effective digital strategy. Compared to other digital tactics, eMarketer reports that email can generate four times the ROI. For that reason, it’s the go-to strategy for most businesses.
It costs little to nothing to run an email marketing campaign with user-friendly email management tools such as Marketo and MailChimp. All that’s needed is the persuasive text from the subject line to the body, a timeline that fits with marketing goals, an enticing call-to-action, and a great landing page.
When you have writers and designers in-house who can produce those materials, you’re set. If not, outsource copywriting and design to make emails and landing pages more appealing on a limited budget. If you work with an agency, they can set you up with great resources.
Social media marketing, whether through organic posts or cost-efficient ads like influencers, can get you the attention you need. Take advantage of trending topics, hashtags, community groups, and influencers who fit in with the image you have created. With so many channels out there, building brand awareness doesn’t have to bust the bank.
9. Take Advantage of Social Media Influencing
Partnering with social media influencers is becoming a trendy way for enterprises and small businesses to increase outreach.
If your business is in retail, this is especially useful, whether you’re selling jewelry, accessories or any other fashion-related products. If you’re a large retail brand, you could offer a higher price item in exchange for a sponsored post by a notable influencer. Though you have to pay a sum upfront, influencers have loyal followings that trust their recommendations. So, the right partner can position your products perfectly for a spike in sales.
Tools such as Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex are helpful in identifying the biggest social influencers across the major social networks. Most influencers can be found on Instagram, ranging from fashion to the music industry, as well as sports and other fields. You can also see how they fit with your industry and target audience. BuzzSumo can point out those who write and present similar topics of interest, allowing you to carve out an ideal target market.
Don’t be afraid to contact influencers. This is what they do. Tag them on social media posts if it’s something the influencer can relate to and ask them for a share. Striking up a good bond with such people in the social media industry will make your business and its services more enticing to a wider scope of people.
What is a Cost-effective Marketing Strategy?
In marketing your brand, it’s important to find a balance between the cost and the results. Particularly for a new brand that’s trying to grow, the goal is to maximize your ROI, by finding the most effective strategies for the least amount of money.
Here are some of the best and most cost-effective marketing strategies to explore.
1. Blogging
One of the simplest and most effective ways of driving traffic to your site is to have a blog. Google’s search algorithms favor websites that are updated frequently and provide high-quality, relevant content to their users. A regularly updated blog serves both of these purposes.
According to one source, sites that post 16 blogs per month (roughly 4 blogs per week) generate 3.5 times more web traffic than sites that blog four times or fewer. The more high-quality blogs you post, the more opportunities your audience will have to visit and interact with your site, and the better exposure you’ll get for your brand.
2. Mailing lists
“No matter what kind of customers you encounter,” says John Matson of TopCreditCardProcessors.com, “Get them on your mailing list, to build up your contacts.” E-mail lists have developed a bad reputation in recent years. But used correctly, they can be a very useful tool. If you’re spamming random strangers to tell them to buy your products, your brand will become annoying and unpopular.
So instead, you need to build a list of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and provide them with regular updates about what’s going on in your company and why it’s of interest to them. You’ll see much better results and generate real, qualified leads that can be nurtured into sales.
3. Online companies
One of the best and most cost-effective ways to reach new customers is by using online sites to market you company. Depending on your business, there are a number of sites that can help you reach new customers through search results and networking.
A Yelp profile can increase your visibility to potential customer. It also gives you an opportunity to encourage loyal customers to leave you positive reviews, thus boosting your reputation. TripAdvisor provides the same opportunities for hotels, restaurants, and other tourist-centered businesses. And Mogul provides a platform for female business owners to show potential audiences what their companies are all about.
Social media can be a helpful tool in this regard as well. Ty Crandall, CEO of CreditSuite says, “Some of the most effective and cost-effective marketing strategies for growing a new business now come from social media. Platforms such as Facebook now make it easy to test headlines, images, concepts, ads and more for investments of less than $5 per day.
Once you know what works, then it’s easy to apply that to other platforms that might cost more. This type of strategy can save you a ton of money and help you figure out what works quickly, even if you are only working with a shoe-string budget.”
4. Calls to action
“The key [to growing your business] is understanding how your target market is looking for your service, then maximizing efforts in those marketing channels with relevant and strong calls to action,” explains Spencer Kirk, CEO of Extra Space Storage. Believe it or not, many sites don’t include a call to action in their content. Every on your site, every blog you post, and every e-mail you send, should suggest the next step for interested users.
It may be, “Contact us for more information,” or “Download our white paper,” or “Subscribe to our newsletter,” but there should always be an opportunity for those who want to know more to further their relationship with your company.
5. Press releases
Distributing press releases is a great way to keep people in your industry apprised of important updates from your company. You can create press releases to announce new products, awards or accolades you’ve recently received, changes to your company structure, and more. It may take time to build up the right press contacts to gain your announcements real exposure, but the longer you persevere and the more effort you put into it, the better results you’ll see.
6. Coupons and discounts
One thing is guaranteed to get your audience’s attention: telling them how they can save money. Offer discounts and coupon codes on your products or services. Make them seem exclusive, like the customers who are getting them are part of an elite few. By offering a few dollars off of your regular price, you can bring in customers who will stay loyal to your company for years to come.
7. Using videos
Videos are one of the most effective tools to use in your marketing campaign. You can either create them in-house or do a quick search for “jacksonville video production” or something similar, and outsource them to another company that specializes in creating high-quality video content. Whichever option you choose, videos are a great way to engage your audience visually and increase your brand’s visibility.
What are the Benefits of Effective Marketing?
The positive benefits of marketing will be evident as you build your brand, raise your visibility among diverse audiences and gain a competitive edge over the competition. Without a doubt, every business should understand the benefits of marketing and the types of marketing strategies that will help gain you a solid customer base.
Here are six benefits of having a marketing strategy:
1. Growing your sales
When you employ good marketing tactics, you will make more sales. Fact.
It’s not just about attracting new customers either. While the common misconception is that marketing is all about targeting new customers, a well-designed marketing strategy will also encourage more sales from your existing and past customers. That’s only good news when it comes to planning your business future.
The core benefits of marketing strategy understanding are that it makes you more memorable, easier to find when customers need what you sell and more visible when people want to know more about what you do. The benefits of marketing are many, but when it comes to increasing sales, marketing is the tool in your business management toolkit that you should never be without.
2. Using and managing your reputation
Having a positive reputation in this super-connected world is proving to be a critical differentiator. Fact.
Your business reputation is very important. As you market online and through advertising, being transparent, engaging with customers and using smart tactics will enhance your reputation positively. Building your brand reputation is one of the marketing benefits that smaller businesses either overlook or dismiss.
Today, consumers will often thoroughly research every product and service they want to buy, so reputation matters more than ever. Not only that, but there’s a whole marketing type known as reputation marketing — using the positive reputation of your business to promote it.
Big businesses use positive reputation brand content and a monitoring strategy to ensure they maintain their reputation. But when it comes to developing brand value, the right marketing strategies are extremely effective even for smaller businesses. It’s a tricky subject to get right, but if you’re aiming to strengthen your reputation, it’s hard to beat the marketing benefits of highlighting and using your positive reputation as a marketing asset.
When used correctly, your reputation will mean higher levels of trust from your target audience, attracting better talent to your team and more profits.
3. Audience marketing benefits
Good marketing helps you gain data and metrics to learn more about your target audience(s), so you can be more targeted in your strategy and advertising.
A targeted marketing strategy based on data about your customers is one of the best ways to develop multiple revenue streams from segmented audiences. Once you have a solid understanding of your audience, you can target them to match their specific needs and pain points.
You start by breaking your target audience into well-defined segments. Once you know what each of those segments is looking for, you will be able to send marketing messages that will be more likely to resonate. Your audience will be more responsive because you’re finding and presenting marketing messages that target their precise requirements. This kind of marketing benefits you and your customers alike.
4. You earn trust
Great marketing strategies help to build trust, which is like gold. Trust will keep your customers invested in your products, services and brand. Fact.
Without trust signals, your business will be less likely to make sales. You can use a great marketing strategy that gets people to your website, but if they see something that makes them feel uneasy about trusting you, they’ll leave your site and look elsewhere.
Trust is essential when it comes to business. With a marketing approach to trust that utilizes all of the reasons consumers can have confidence in you, your business reinforces those trust signals. It’s like a perpetual motion machine that feeds itself while generating what it needs. Put simply, when you’re looking at the benefits of a marketing strategy, growing your trust indicators is one of the most useful.
5. Knowing what works
Effective marketing strategies help you determine what works and what doesn’t. Fact.
When you have a series of campaigns, the metrics can help you assess what to do, when to do it and what to stay away from. One of the easiest marketing strategies to use that showcases this is email marketing. While social media took the wind out of email marketing’s sails for a while, it’s now considered one of the best tools for effective marketing.
Partly, that’s because it is straightforward to conduct A/B testing on marketing emails. By segmenting your email output and using slightly different content for each audience, you can see what works and what doesn’t. So if your email open rates are low when you use the subject line ‘Special Offer This Week’, but they’re higher when the subject line is ‘Guide to our Best Weekly Bargains’, then you know what works.
6. Learning the marketplace
A core outcome of the marketing process is that you will learn more about the marketplace in which you are operating. Fact.
It is essential to not only know the customers but understand your marketplace as well. Of course, having different brand personas is more important than ever so that you can position your products and price them to extract maximum value from the marketplace.
However, as with everything when running a business, the more you know, the easier it is to identify opportunities. For small businesses, especially, knowing everything about your marketplace is essential. That means knowing more than simply who your target market is. It means knowing your local, national and international competitors.
It also means knowing the trends and industry events that may change your business model and the consumer trends that may dictate buying behaviour. With the right marketing, you can earn high-value insights in your marketplace and actionable data about financial forecasting.
What are the Main 5 Reasons to Implement Digital Marketing in a Company?
Digital marketing is more than just running ads on social media. It’s about understanding your local market, making connections with customers through content that resonates, and being able to measure the ROI of every campaign you run. So why is digital marketing so important?
Here are 5 reasons why digital marketing is so vital for businesses today.
1. Your customers are online.
With the growth of the Internet, more people are spending their time online. Over 4.7 billion people use the Internet across the globe. It’s become an integral part of everyday life to conduct searches, check social media, and purchase products online.
Your customers are online, which highlights the importance of digital marketing. They’re browsing the web looking for your products or services. If a potential customer can’t find you online, they may conclude that your business doesn’t appear to be legitimate.
2. Your competitors are online.
Wondering why digital marketing is essential? Your competitors already know. They’ve created social profiles, adapted their website for SEO, and run paid advertisements to reach new leads – but that’s not all! If you want your business to compete with others in today’s market, you have to do what they’re doing and more! By neglecting digital marketing, you’ll fall behind the competition before even starting.
3. Compete with global corporations
It’s hard to compete with them when you’re in a market with bigger corporations, like Walmart, Target, and Amazon. They have a big name for themselves, which automatically draws people to trust those corporations.
With digital marketing, you have a fighting chance against bigger corporations. Your business can reach interested leads with the same methods as a larger corporation. Methods like SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising level the playing field.
With SEO, your site ranks in the search results based on relevancy. A corporation can’t buy its way to the top of the ranks. They have to optimize their pages just like you. The same goes for PPC, Google ranks ads based on relevancy, too.
4. You can target ideal customers.
The ability to target your audience is one of the most obvious reasons why digital marketing is important. Imagine being able to market directly to people who have an interest in your products or services. With digital marketing, you can directly reach leads interested in your business.
You don’t have to hope that people will see your traditional marketing efforts and contact your business. You can input important information about your audience and use that information to shape your digital marketing campaigns. It makes it easy for you to reach the right people. This would ensure that only the relevant people specified would see your ad.
5. You get to know your audience and allow them to know you personally, which can help to create brand loyalty and a community.
Engaged users in a digital community provide transparent and instantaneous feedback that is invaluable for a business to stay ahead of the curve. This feedback can help your business constantly improve your products or service and customer experience.
It also helps maintain the visibility of your brand and stay in constant touch with your customers. An active digital community helps solve each other’s problems and develops new and efficient ways to use the product. This makes people feel involved with the product and leads to customer retention and brand loyalty.
What are the Benefits of Using Digital Media?
Digital technology means that devices can be more compact, faster, lighter, and more versatile. Huge amounts of information can be stored locally or remotely and moved around virtually instantaneously. Even the term “information” has expanded to include media such as photos, audio, and video, and no longer refers to just words and numbers.
You will find some of the advantages of these digital media or technology below.
1. Social Connectivity
Digital technology makes it easy to stay in touch with friends, family, and work remotely, even if you are in another part of the world. You can communicate by words, video, audio, and exchange other media.
Websites, apps, and software have all been created to help users to socialize. Social media, messaging, texting, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, mean that nobody need feel isolated in the digital world. Users can be regularly updated with news on local events and social happenings.
2. Communication Speeds
Internet speeds have increased exponentially since the early days of dial-up. Ever faster broadband enables the transfer of large amounts of information across the web almost instantaneously, making it possible to stream video and audio in real-time, send large data files, and access data from virtually anywhere in the world. Traditional media communication can take much longer.
3. Versatile Working
The nature of work has been transformed by digital technology. Increased connectivity options mean that many people now have far more opportunities for working from home, as remote working becomes increasingly common.
Many jobs can now be done from hundreds, or even thousands of miles away without difficulty. Without the need for all workers to be present in the same building, many other flexible working practices are now possible.
4. Learning Opportunities
Anybody with access to the internet now has access to a huge proportion of the world’s knowledge over the web. Lessons and courses can now be delivered virtually online.
Communication advances mean that you can now easily communicate with most of the world’s population and learn directly from sources. For example, if you are trying to understand foreign events, or learning a new language. Digital technology can also be easier to use for people with disabilities and often give them equal access.
5. Automation
Digital technology is increasingly making machines smarter. In some cases, the machines no longer need humans to operate them, freeing up workers from often repetitive tasks for more interesting jobs. In other cases, smarter machines mean better standards of safety or a better experience for the user. Products and services drop in price as technology develops and becomes more common.
Many tasks can now be done directly by customers, rather than having to be done through another person acting as an intermediary, for instance, booking a holiday.
6. Information Storage
Digital technology enables the storage of massive amounts of information in relatively small spaces. Large amounts of media, such as photos, music, videos, contact information, and other documents can be carried around on small devices like mobile phones. As well as physical locations, data can also be stored online, enabling it to be accessed from any device which has internet access.
7. Editing
One of the great advantages of digital technology over traditional media is that the information can be much easier to edit or manipulate. Word processing has brought about a revolution in the editing of text.
Video editing, which used to require expensive studios and equipment, can now be done on a laptop in a bedroom. All sorts of photographic effects are now available, as well as the ability to crop, resize, and creatively alter images.
8. Accurate Duplication
One of the great things about digital technology is that it enables the exact duplication of media. For instance, you can write a work report and email it to multiple recipients, or you can distribute multiple copies of photos to family and friends. Breakthroughs in technology are now happening in the field of 3D printing, which looks set to radically transform our world.
9. GPS and Mapping
Finding your way around used to involve referring to a paper map, but digital combined with satellite technology has transformed travel.
GPS services can now pinpoint your position accurately, update you on traffic jams and road closures in real-time, and give you lots of up-to-date information such as the time of arrival at your destination, as well as alternative routes. If you want to find a gas station or drugstore that’s open, that’s easy too.
10. Transportation
Many trains and airplanes already rely to an extent on digital technology. Road vehicles, such as cars and trucks, will become fully automated in the not-too-distant future. Accessing timetables, as well as booking planes and trains now often takes place online.
Passports contain digital chips that hold information, enabling self-service machines to speed up the process of checking in and passing through customs.
11. Low Cost
Aside from paying for internet service and the basics like a modem, much of what the digital world offers can be accessed for free. Sending an email, communicating via a video link-up with family, and surfing the internet generally cost nothing.
It can provide opportunities for low-cost self-education, setting up a business, buying and selling items, or earning money online.
12. Entertainment
The entire entertainment industry and the way that people amuse themselves has been radically transformed since the start of the internet revolution. Many people get their fun from online social media or playing computer games. Traditional media has evolved too, as televisions and broadcasting have become digitized, along with radio.
What is a Marketing Cost and Benefit Analysis?
A cost-benefit analysis is a process of comparing the projected or estimated costs and benefits (or opportunities) associated with a project decision to determine whether it makes sense from a business perspective.
Generally speaking, cost-benefit analysis involves tallying up all costs of a project or decision and subtracting that amount from the total projected benefits of the project or decision. (Sometimes, this value is represented as a ratio.)
If the projected benefits outweigh the costs, you could argue that the decision is a good one to make. If, on the other hand, the costs outweigh the benefits, then a company may want to rethink the decision or project.
There are enormous economic benefits to running these kinds of analyses before making significant organizational decisions. By doing analyses, you can parse out critical information, such as your organization’s value chain or a project’s ROI.
Cost-benefit analysis is a form of data-driven decision-making most often utilized in business, both at established companies and startups. The basic principles and framework can be applied to virtually any decision-making process, whether business-related or otherwise.
What is the Most Cost-effective Methods to Reach Consumers via the Online Market Place?
Your online marketing skills aren’t going to magically develop overnight, but if you put in the time to learn how to use these marketing channels, they can provide a cost-effective way to promote your company and grow your business without breaking your budget. Let’s take a look at seven cost-effective internet marketing strategies for small businesses:
1. Blogging
Blogging is one of the most cost-effective online marketing strategies for small businesses. An informative, well-written blog is the ideal way to introduce your company to a wide audience while driving traffic to your website. Blogging is not just a matter of writing interesting short articles, however.
To be effective as a marketing strategy, blogs need to be highly relevant to your target audience and adhere to SEO guidelines. Once you publish your blogs, you need to promote them on social media, bookmarking sites, etc. Keep in mind that blogging is not a fast-acting marketing strategy, but a long-term method for developing sustainable traffic.
2. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of making your website more visible online. Since online searches are the primary way that customers find products, businesses, and services, SEO is an essential part of any internet marketing strategy. Optimizing your website with voice-first SEO strategies is not easy, but it will help customers find your business whether they search through mobile devices, virtual assistants, or browsers.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing is a highly affordable internet marketing strategy that delivers an incredible ROI. Emails can be a great way to maintain long-term relationships with your customers, provided you make your emails stand out to get your desired response. Start with a riveting subject line, add in some interesting images or infographics, and include compelling copy that contains a clear call to action.
4. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is an essential part of online marketing strategies for small businesses for any company trying to market on a tight budget because it helps you build a relationship with customers through investment primarily of time rather than cash.
Gaining a following on social media is harder than it looks, though. Most businesses will need to invest in influencer marketing and paid social ads to establish a strong social connection with customers.
5. PPC (pay per click) marketing
PPC or paid search marketing is ideal for small businesses on a budget because you can set the exact amount you are willing to spend. Divide your PPC budget between ads on Google, Bing, and paid social (Facebook Ads, Promoted Posts, Twitter Ads), and link to dedicated landing pages to gain the best return for your marketing spend.
6. Content marketing
Content marketing makes the list of the most cost-effective marketing strategies for small businesses because it relies on the knowledge you already possess. Any small business can take advantage of this marketing strategy. Create different types of content such as infographics, videos, podcasts, and webinars to answer customer queries and apply SEO strategies to attract customer notice.
7. Reputation marketing
Managing your reputation through online review sites is an easy way to market your small business on the tightest budget. Many customers now search for online reviews before choosing a business, so it is important to claim your business on Google My Business, Yelp!, and other review sites. Keep your company profile updated with current pictures and information, and respond quickly to reviews.
How Digital Marketing is Adding Value to the Business?
Digital Marketing is adding immense value to every business in a variety of ways. In this post, we have described how one can make use of marketing to add value to any industry [either small-scale or large scale].
Here are the best ways that prove Digital Marketing is adding value to your business.
1. Enhanced Customer Service
Through digital advancements, a myriad of social media channels has come into the picture. On the other hand, the expectations of the customers are raising up. The ultimate target of every business is to satisfy the customer with their products, and services and offer the best customer care.
Focussing on the customer’s needs is truly important in a business. By setting up customer-specific blogs, consumer forums, etc., you can easily improve your interaction with them. This, in turn, will help you find out the actual requirements of the public. Blogs can be created online which is a part of Digital Marketing.
2. Demand Prediction
Demand and supply have a great correlation with one another. A business can produce more and more products only when there is a favorable amount of demand for the same. One can supply the goods and services to the consumers solely after witnessing a demand for the product.
Business people have acquired the ability to predict the demand for their products through Digital Marketing. By compounding the information regarding the possible resources for the demand, the industries can get precise data.
This helps the business people to place their goods stock in the regions where there is greater demand. Demand Prediction is possible by using Digital Marketing strategies. One of the most popular and widely used marketing tactics is social media channel usage.
The immense buzz about a product on social media channels will certainly help businesses to expand in different regions across the world. Ensure that you get a number of responses from the consumers on social media for your product. This lets you predict the demand for your business.
3. Customized Consumer Experience
Since the past decade, we have been witnessing rapid craze about the web designing in the market. Responsive Web Design is the greatest way to design a specific website. Irrespective of the device, web designing appears truly spectacular. Online e-commerce websites have emerged in the market and it has started rendering amazing online experience for consumers.
This has become possible all because of Digital Marketing. The delivery of the products has turned out to become pretty much simple through online services. The experience of the customer has enhanced drastically with their own choices.
4. Market Research & Interactions
Conducting research about the market can be expensive and it is a massive time-consuming process. The manual mode of researching the market was truly a challenging thing for business people. But now, with the advancement in technology, you can easily collect the ideas and requirements of customers who have diverse notions about a product. This will help the marketers to gather all those ideas and finally produce a product into the market in the real-time. It is easy to take feedback from customers through online websites or blogs.
If the product receives a huge number of positive feedback, it will definitely add value to your business. You can gain profits through Digital marketing by this sort of modules. Besides market research, market interaction has become quite common and easy too. You can easily communicate with your customers via online chatting on various social media platforms. By this, you can acquire feedback in just a few moments.
5. Ease of Online Marketing
With the swift progress in online marketing, it has become quite simple for people to purchase products or return them. As of now, several industries have started realizing the influence of social networks to entice customers and handle inbound analyses. In order to make online marketing much simple, different companies have discovered online tools. This enhances the efficiency in their marketing of various products or services to the customers.
What does it Mean to Say Cost-effective?
The definition of cost-effective is something that is a good value, where the benefits and usage are worth at least what is paid for them. Something that is cost-effective saves or makes a lot of money in comparison with the costs involved. The bank must be run in a cost-effective way.
A transaction is cost-effective when the greatest benefit is gained for a comparatively low price. The concept is commonly employed when choosing from a variety of investment options, so that the greatest possible return is generated in exchange for the amount invested.
The addition of a product feature to a product design is cost-effective if the result is an increase in sales that exceeds the cost of the feature. Or, a modest investment in a bottleneck production activity is warranted if doing so allows a business to increase the amount of throughput generated.
Is Digital Marketing Less Expensive?
You probably already know that digital advertising can be a powerful tool when reaching highly targeted audiences in real-time, but did you know that digital advertising is also one of the most cost-effective ways to test your marketing message?
With digital advertising, you can test different messages while your campaign is running, often generating new business in the process, without needing to risk your whole budget upfront or spend money on costly market research before hitting the market.
You don’t have to be an expert number cruncher to get that marketing online is much cheaper than traditional advertising approaches.
The cost of newspaper and magazine advertisements can run into the thousands and TV and radio can often blow a company’s entire marketing budget.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, can cost as much or as little as your budget allows.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t be running traditional marketing campaigns.
In fact, the most effective marketing campaigns employ a broad mix of activities, but don’t risk your entire marketing budget until you’re confident your investment in these mediums will be effective.
How Important is Marketing Cost Analysis for Evaluating a Company’s Profitability?
A marketing cost analysis is essential for any new project, product or campaign. It is designed to provide a comprehensive breakdown of all the costs associated with a new marketing campaign, in order to calculate profit margins and to determine the value of the investment in marketing.
A good marketing cost analysis should include not just the monetary costs (including indirect costs, such as shipping and taxes), but also the cost of energy, focus and time. These intangible costs can be much harder to evaluate but are vital when determining the overall value of a campaign.
Businesses undertake marketing cost analysis to pinpoint the potential risks and gains of a marketing campaign. The aim is to understand how much the promotion and distribution of a product will cost, and create an accurate, contextualized estimation of its profitability.
A marketing cost analysis should include numerous elements, such as the cost of creating logos, training sales teams on the product, shipping to sellers, promoting the product across all relevant channels, and conducting marketing research.
It’s about the time and resources invested in marketing activities, too. Performing a comprehensive marketing cost analysis helps companies to manage expenses carefully and aim for maximum profitability.
What are the 7 Benefits of Marketing?
The importance of marketing can be further highlighted from its seven benefits listed below:
1. Marketing Widens the Market:
Marketing draws out the hidden wants of consumers, creates new demand, locates the untapped areas and finds out the possibilities of selling new products. It thus enlarges the market and enables the producers to increase production and earn more profits
2. Marketing Facilitates Exchanges in the Ownership and Possession of Goods and Services:
It creates time, place and possession utilities for the goods and services. It is helpful to both producers and consumers. Producers come to know about the specific needs and preferences of the people and the customers about the products that manufacturers can offer.
3. Marketing Helps in Optimal Utilization of Resources:
As the marketing efforts widen the area of market, the producers can utilize their resources, otherwise remaining partly utilized, to the maximum. This optimum use of resources reduces the total cost per unit.
4. Marketing Accelerates Other Activities:
Because of marketing so many other activities such as banking, transport, insurance, warehousing, etc. get a boost as they are needed more to help in the marketing process.
5. Marketing Increases the National Income:
National income is the sum total of goods and services that a nation possesses. The net effect of all marketing efforts is a rise in production of existing industries, investment in new industrial units and provision of more services. The nation becomes richer with the increase in its national income and there is a rise in per capita income. The economy rises from underdeveloped stage to developing stage and then marches towards a developed economy.
6. Marketing Raises the Standard of Living:
With the provision of more items of necessities, comforts and luxuries, cheaper as well as costly and with more services and amenities as its disposal, the community enjoys a higher standard of living. Even the poorer sections of society find many more things within their reach because of lowering of costs of commodities and services.
Paul Mazur says “marketing is the delivery of a standard of living to society”. Prof. Malcom Me Nair added further that “marketing is the creation and delivery of standard of living to society.”
7. Marketing Provides Gainful Employment Opportunities:
Marketing creates a climate for more production and services. It also results in more social overhead as more roads, more warehousing facilities, more transport and communication, more banks, more training and technical institutions, more manpower is needed for the same and the avenues of employment increase.
Moreover, marketing is a complex mechanism involving a number of functions and sub-functions which call for different specialized personnel for employment. It is estimated that 30 to 40 per cent of total population is engaged in direct or indirect marketing activities.
What are the 4 Types of Digital Marketing?
To further elaborate on “Digital Marketing“, it encompasses 4 most important digital marketing types that play a crucial role in any business. It is very important to not focus on just one type of digital marketing technique. The most prosperous digital marketing strategies use a multi-channel approach.
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the art of using a storyline with valuable information that translates to brand building and awareness among your target audience. The effects of content marketing are long term and your target audience are primed with information to take a profitable action. The key to an effective content marketing strategy is to build relationships with the target audience rather than posing.
Content marketing aims at building relationships with potential customers and becoming a partner rather than an advertiser. It means content marketing is often used in inbound marketing strategies through a content strategy that focuses on providing value to the target audience with content.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of using organic tactics to rank high on search engines. It is a natural way of generating traffic to your website from the search engine results page. It doesn’t stop with just driving traffic to your website but it also has a part to play in converting these traffic into quality leads.
SEO is often grouped under three categories as listed below:
- a) On-Page SEO
It is nothing but optimizing a web page to target a specific search query and rank high on search engines. It can be achieved by doing various activities like keyword research, content creation, and keyword optimization.
- b) Off-page SEO
It is carried out to build the reputation of a web page by linking it with other quality websites. By doing this you make search engines to trust the content on your website. This increases the reputation and reliability of your web page on search engines. This process of generating backlinks by connecting your webpage content with other quality websites is called link building.
- c) Technical SEO
It is usually carried out to provide a great user experience. It is generally done by focusing on your site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, site structure, and indexation.
Many have come to a misconception that SEO has become ineffective in the B2B space, but the reality is, more than 70% of B2B purchases begin their buying process with a generic search. Hence your SEO strategy should focus more on creating quality content, generating quality backlinks to reach a wider audience, and rank high on the search engines. Though SEO has become challenging day by day, it is still one of the best channels for B2B.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a paid tactic to gain attention to the brand by appearing high on search engine results. This strategy is often called paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. It involves various activities such as setting up the ads, optimizing the ads, setting a budget and most importantly placement of ads.
SEM can be carried out on various search engines but is done predominantly on Google. Google supports paid advertising on its search engine and partners called Google Ads.
SEM is the most effective marketing strategy in the B2B space. Its impact is immediate and as soon as you launch your campaign, you can see your ads showing on SERPs. With SEM, you will have the luxury to define your target audience and you can filter them based on age, interests, location, habits and more. You can also keep a track of ROI which makes SEM more effective for B2B.
4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is the process of gaining traffic or attention from social media sites by posting content relevant to your target audience. Some of the popular social media sites include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Snapchat.
Each platform has its own set of rules to market your product or service, and it requires a unique approach and strategy. Your blog content may be ideal for one platform, a simple picture will help you reach a wider audience in another platform. Also, there are platforms where only video content works. It’s important to identify your audience and create content accordingly.
The immense growth of social media marketing shows that B2B companies have shifted from broadcast media to social media platforms like LinkedIn to market their service or product. This channel helps them to better engage with their customers and create long term relationships.
Right from Content Marketing to Social Media Marketing, leverage all types of digital marketing techniques to reach your target audience with your product/service.
Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Business?
When internet users are comparison shopping, they’ll default to the business that provides the best customer experience. Basic information like hours of operation, location, prices, special offers, and contact info should be easy to find. If customers don’t feel that your digital store is open at their convenience and on their terms, they will find another store.
That being said, online marketing is much more than a defensive play. It’s not just about keeping potential customers away from competitors. Instead, think of it as a proactive strategy that shows customers that a brand has thought about them and their purchase journey. An effective digital marketing strategy starts with making that journey as easy as possible, even for brands that are not strictly focused on e-commerce.
Digital marketing offers many advantages over traditional advertising methods, such as print ads and direct mail, billboards, TV and radio. It allows brands to do more with their resources while empowering the customer to do business with that brand on their terms.
At a minimum, online marketing allows customers to find the information they need even after you’ve closed up shop for the night. It gives them the option to email questions at any time, rather than forcing them to call during business hours; it puts your interactions on their schedule and not the other way around.
Done well, digital marketing is the ultimate way to build authority and brand awareness in the largest market on Earth: the Internet. Brands can engage directly with their target audience through social media to learn exactly what consumers are looking for, and forge authentic relationships that create trust and brand loyalty.
In short, the importance of digital marketing goes beyond making a sale; it is a long-term investment in the health and growth of your business. Here are some of the benefits of adding digital strategies to your marketing plan:
1. Reach
Most types of digital marketing are far less expensive yet have far greater potential reach than classic strategies, making digital ads a cost-effective choice for small businesses who are worried about ad spend.
Direct mail and billboards depend on customers living in a certain area, while radio and television demand that consumers pay attention to specific media formats that are falling further and further out of style. By comparison, online marketing can reach anyone, anywhere, even on a global scale.
Most potential customers are using mobile devices, or are at least spending a big chunk of their day online. Brands can use content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and other digital marketing channels to meet those customers where they are.
2. Targeting
Digital marketing tools and analytics can help brands identify and target customers who are most likely to want their products or services, so they can invest resources into the demographics where they will deliver the most value. A strong digital marketing strategy enables companies to better use their budget and personnel while driving greater return on investment.
3. Flexibility
Modern marketing analytics tools provide real-time insights that let businesses adjust marketing campaigns on the fly. In contrast, traditional marketing methods demand sunk cost: The money is already spent, and if the campaign fails, there is nothing to be done until the next one. A faulty digital campaign can still be salvaged, and so can the money spent on it.
4. Measurability
Unlike billboards, TV ads, and radio jingles, digital marketing channels come hard-wired with the tools brands need to measure performance.
“These days, it is critical for marketers to have a fundamental understanding of analyzing customer and market data in order to make informed decisions,” said P. K. Kannan, Dean’s Chair in Marketing Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland and instructor for the Fundamentals of Digital Marketing course.
It’s easy to see how many impressions, clicks, and likes are being generated by social media posts, or how many visitors are coming to your website and from where. Attribution modeling traces a customer’s first sale back to their first point of digital contact with your brand. Choose the metrics you value most and start learning how your digital marketing campaigns affect conversion rates.
5. Legitimacy
Potential customers are more likely to trust businesses that have an online presence that includes:
- A website
- Testimonials
- Social media accounts
A healthy online presence shows that a brand is established and trusted. Trust can make or break the deal for consumers who are considering a new product or service.
Tip: Collaborating with influencers on social networks is one of the most powerful ways to improve your brand reputation.
6. Democratization
Digital marketing (when done right) can level the playing field for small businesses competing with major corporations. Amazon, Walmart, and other big box retailers may have the deepest pockets, but money can’t buy search engine relevance. The only way to land at the top of the Google results page is to establish relevance through strategies like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO).
What is Digital Marketing Strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is a plan for establishing an internet presence through online channels such as organic search, social media, paid ads, and other web-based mediums such as your website. The goal of digital marketing strategies is to increase awareness about your business and attract new customers to your brand.
A strong digital marketing strategy helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selected mediums. Similar to marketing strategies versus marketing tactics, “digital marketing strategy” and “digital marketing campaign” are also often interchanged.
What is Digital Marketing and its Benefits in Future?
When we talk about the scope of digital marketing for businesses, it is extremely motivating. Digital marketing has allowed businesses to start allocating their marketing resources to the right set of people through the right channels.
This ensures optimum use of resources and higher conversion rates. Thus, it has become a very integral part of all kinds of businesses today.
And especially since the covid-19 pandemic, Digital marketing has now turned into a necessity. Ideally, it is one of the most effective ways to reach your target market while they’re stuck at home and spending a lot of time on the Internet.
Consequently, this has given a boost to the scope of digital marketing careers. To run smoothly, companies need digital marketing professionals and experts and thus, the job market is growing tremendously.
The biggest contributor to the bright scope of digital marketing is naturally the benefits they offer, and we have covered some of the benefits below.
1. Reaching a Global Audience
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that it has removed all sorts of geographical barriers.
You can open your doors to foreign countries and offer your services to customers living miles away. You can market to them with just a click and create awareness to people who otherwise had no chance of knowing about your existence.
While we do know that considering a global audience is a very huge number, that problem can be solved with the next benefit of digital marketing.
2. Marketing to Niche Audience
Niche targeting means reaching out only to those people who fit your criteria. This can be done with the help of digital marketing. When you advertise on digital platforms, you can filter out the audience as per the qualities that match your target audience and then run ads.
For example, you can filter the location as India, then further filter them as women between the age group of 25-40 and then further go on to filter them as women who are working.
That is how detailed targeting can get and even further. Thus, is the most desirable benefit of digital marketing.
3. Increased ROI
We consider this as the biggest benefit of digital marketing. In the end, all business activities boil down to the money they require. With the extensive reach offered by digital marketing, the costs are comparatively affordable and not a burden. The investment in digital marketing is significantly lesser than in traditional marketing, sometimes even 0.
Hence, the ROI on digital marketing efforts is considerably higher than traditional marketing. This also allows small-scale businesses and start-ups to make optimum use of digital marketing without causing very heavy stress on their budgets.
4. Trackable & Measurable Results
In our opinion, any company strategy is a waste of time if you cannot measure your performance. This basically means making efforts in the blind.
Compiling a strong strategy and implementing it is just half the battle. Tracking your performance, measuring your success/failure, and taking corrective steps is the ultimate goal.
With platforms like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns end-to-end.
That’s how you decide what works best for you and continue those strategies.
5. Improved Conversion Rates
As we saw above, with the help of tracking the performance, we can assess where our maximum sales come in from and accordingly target consumers.
Thus, it simply means higher conversion rates as we invest where we are in demand.
In traditional marketing, it is difficult to impossible to find out where the lead got converted from and thus you may be wasting your time on the wrong leads.
But with digital marketing, this can be solved by targeting a similar audience that had the maximum leads converted.
What is Digital Marketing Advantages and Disadvantages?
Digital advertising and marketing becomes an effective promotional strategy for companies to reach a worldwide market. In this era of modern technology, it becomes necessary for organizations to take advantage of digital techniques to explore and access the mass market to remain at the competitive edge.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
- Wider Reach: Digital marketing helps improve awareness about products and services through an online platform to reach a wide base of customers across the world. This strategy allows even the start-up companies to have equal access to the customers while competing with big enterprises in the traditional market.
- Brand Development: It is necessary to establish a brand image for the product or services through the marketing campaign so that customers consider it a reliable and trusted name. Digital marketing helps to build the brand in various ways of direct campaigning and personalized approach. This technique makes customers more engaged and allows them to experience the unique selling proposition and value of the brand. This leads to a sense of positivity among the customers towards the brand.
- Personalization: The strategy of digital marketing is more effective because of its ability to interact with prospects and get feedback. Bringing the audience closer and approaching them with the product that meets their requirement, helps to create brand loyalty and reputation. Digital marketing provides a platform for personalized marketing by designing specialized content for customers. The purpose is to make customers feel that the brand is addressing their individual needs.
- Accessibility: Marketing methods using digital platforms provide the opportunity for both sellers and buyers to get easy access with the flexibility of time and location. The potential customers get an experience of a virtual shop with information about services and availability of product range. The customers can leave reviews and recommendations that guide the organizations to plan their marketing strategies accordingly to respond to customer requirements more effectively.
- Better Engagement: Digital marketing allows the brand to create better awareness among the customers and get recognition from more people. A suitable promotional strategy using blogs, social media content, and promotional offers allow the brand to get a hold of the customer’s attention and build credibility.
- Lower Cost: The popularity of digital marketing is attributed to its cost-effective way of handling business activities. The cost involved in digital marketing is much less in comparison to traditional marketing campaigns. The digital marketing methodology is easier to implement with a limited budget and infrastructure which is beneficial especially for small businesses.
- Trackable results: The digital analytical tools and other online metrics help to track how effective the marketing campaign has been in terms of customer reach and response. It provides necessary information about the extent of customer engagement and response to your website and advertising.
- Improved conversion rates: The digital marketing process creates a seamless and immediate connection with potential customers with the convenience of making a purchase just with a few clicks on your website. This leads to better chances of making a purchase in response to marketing campaigns.
Disadvantages of Digital Marketing
- Skills Requirement: There is a need of gathering the right knowledge and expertise on the digital platform to carry out the marketing activities successfully. With regular advancements in technology, it is essential to remain updated on tools, platforms, and methods to quickly respond to any changes.
- Time-consuming: We need to plan and implement various tasks related to optimization of online advertising and creating suitable content for promotions that can take up a lot of time. It’s also important to regularly track the results and modify strategies accordingly to ensure a return on investment.
- High competition: A wider reach to the global audience with digital marketing also requires building capabilities to face global competition. It can be a challenge to establish the brand against more competitors and to grab attention among the many digital channels campaigning in real-time.
- Complaints and feedback: The digital platforms allow for feedback or criticism by anyone about your product or services that can be visible to your audience through social media networks and review channels. Any negative review can create an adverse impact on some part of your customers unless you have a strong foothold through brand loyalty and efficient customer service. There is a challenge to maintain the brand reputation by responding to negative feedback effectively.
- Dependability on Technology: Digital marketing is purely based on digital technology and internet access. There can be instances of failure when the links may not work, the website may not respond, and user access gets hampered. This may create dissatisfaction among the prospective customers that forces them to switch to other brands. A regular checkup or maintenance of the website is necessary to cope up with the constantly changing technological environment.
- Security and Privacy Issues: The more use of online platforms demands better security and website protection. For a digital marketer, securing and safeguarding the network connections by using firewalls and good antivirus is always desirable. The legal formalities for protecting and using customer data in digital marketing strategies need to be completed to avoid any complaints on data breaches.
Advantages | Disadvantages |
Online access to digital tools and techniques help to find new markets globally creating a wide customer base. | The right knowledge and skills to handle digital tools and techniques are required for successful marketing campaigns and sales. |
A digital marketing campaign can be cost-effective than traditional marketing methods | Digital marketing campaigns can be time-consuming due to planning suitable tactics and strategies. |
Proper strategies on social media content management help to build customer loyalty with customized and engaging messages. | Reaching a global audience also increases competition with global brands. |
The conversion from promotion to purchase is better in digital marketing as it offers better access with the flexibility of time and location. | Online access allows the possibility of any negative reviews or complaints to be visible to target customers, affecting brand reputation. |
What are the 5 Benefits of Social Media?
For businesses, social media has created a way to send a brand’s messaging to the right people at the right time. If your content stands enough to get them interested, it can drive traffic, sales, and even long-term loyalty. That’s why leveraging social media for your business is a no-brainer.
Here are the top 5 reasons why it’s imperative for businesses to be on social media.
1. Faster, Easier Communication
Customers can contact a customer service representative faster and easier now than ever before thanks to social media. Businesses can also receive, review, and respond to customers’ grievances faster and easier than ever before.
Depending on the industry and the grievance, challenges certainly still remain, but the line of communication that once was somewhat challenging to establish is no longer nearly as difficult to do so. It’s faster now than ever before to contact the right people, oftentimes without having to even pick up a phone.
And it’s only becoming easier as more people and brands use social media platforms to keep in contact with the people that matter most to their business.
Customers can now communicate real feedback in real-time via reviews and chat, something businesses have strived to achieve for a long time.
2. Social Makes Your Brand More Relatable
One of social media’s greatest qualities is its ability to humanize the brands people use the most throughout their lives. Not only does it give a brand a likeliness and vibe, but it makes it more relatable too.
Our lives feel much more at ease with a highly qualified board of parents, nurses, teachers, and doctors being the brainchildren of the new backpack made to ease tension on young kids’ backs and shoulders.
Same for the engineers, scientists, and safety experts building our everyday transportation vehicles.
And same for the butcher down the street who spends 12 hours a day chopping meat and helping customers. You’re going to trust (and sometimes even enjoy) getting your meat and poultry from him/her.
These are the experts of their crafts, but they’re also humans just like you and me.
It’s human instinct for us to take care and lean on one other. And who better to do that to than the best at their trade — or at least a hard-working, knowledgeable person just like you.
Social media lets us share those images and portrayals to build a following of customers and fans that can last a lifetime.
3. Social is Great for Promoting Content
One way to get that humanization of a brand out there is through the major promotion of quality content.
Brands sharing valuable content with the right people is always going to be an enormous differentiator from those brands that don’t at all or simply miss the mark in doing so.
Show who your brand is, what makes it unique and memorable, and what drives your brand to achieve its goals each day, month, and year. This doesn’t stop at cool and catchy photos either.
Think outside the box.
What about a homemade meme that perfectly articulates the not-so-perfect dilemmas that plague your industry?
How about a Spotify playlist made by your team to get through those exhausting days?
A video of the crazy day-to-day routine at your company could be a great inside look at what goes into keeping your brand successful — and having a little bit of the brand’s character shine through surely wouldn’t hurt.
The ideas are endless.
But keep them on par for your audience and remember the goals of building that relationship with your customers and promoting your brand for what it is authentically.
4. Reputation Management
Upholding – and surpassing – expectations as a brand goes a long way with each individual that engages with that brand at any level.
Of course, promoting and sharing great content is one way a brand can attract people, as well as keep them loyal to the brand, but that being likable is only going to go so far.
Businesses are going to have bad experiences. It’s part of life.
The idea is to greatly minimize those “bad” experiences and capitalize on them by learning and reacting. Social media is the ideal place to do that.
And the companies that understand that and embrace that stand out above the rest, always.
Lines of communication are simplified and kept as formal or informal as either party deems. Customers just want to be treated fairly and properly. Social media gives us a simple way to achieve that.
5. Generate Leads Directly & Indirectly
Most marketers and business owners know that social media is a great tool to let people get to know and even understand a brand, but it can still be a great driver for leads, too, both directly and indirectly.
It seems obvious but is overlooked far too often. Make sure it is easy for people to convert through all of the social media platforms used by your brand.
As social media platforms have evolved over the years, they have become more and more powerful for driving leads, with most of the platforms eventually adding clear calls-to-action to brand pages, posts, and more.
If the platform hasn’t yet evolved toward the paid/marketing aspect of a network, it’s likely only a matter of time.
New innovations for driving leads arise all the time, too.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even Snapchat have gone through updates to help display CTAs for brand accounts where businesses can showcase products and services offered.
This makes real sales from within the platform more common than ever before.
Social media platforms have also added other CTAs to profile landing pages in addition to the standard Follow and Message buttons seen on most accounts.
What is the Importance of Cost Effective Analysis?
Cost-effectiveness analysis is a way to examine both the costs and health outcomes of one or more interventions. It compares an intervention to another intervention (or the status quo) by estimating how much it costs to gain a unit of a health outcome, like a life year gained or a death prevented.
CEA provides information on health and cost impacts of an intervention compared to an alternative intervention (or the status quo). If the net costs of an intervention are positive (which means a more effective intervention is more costly), the results are presented as a cost-effectiveness ratio. A cost-effectiveness ratio is the net cost divided by changes in health outcomes.
Examples include cost per case of disease prevented or cost per death averted. However, if the net costs are negative (which means a more effective intervention is less costly), the results are reported as net cost savings.
What is the Purpose of a Cost-Benefit Analysis?
Cost-benefit analysis is a way to compare the costs and benefits of an intervention, where both are expressed in monetary units.
What inputs are included?
- Costs including those of implementing an intervention.
- Benefits including those resulting from an intervention, such as medical costs averted, productivity gains, and the monetized value of health improvements.
How Internet Helps in Marketing of Products and Services With Less Cost?
Internet marketing is important because it aligns with the way consumers make purchasing decisions. Studies by analysts such as Gartner indicate that increasing numbers of consumers use social media and research on mobile Internet to carry out preliminary product and price research before making final decisions.
Read Also: Actionable Guide on Online Search Marketing
Internet marketing enables you to build relations with customers and prospects through regular, low-cost personalized communication, reflecting the move away from mass marketing.
Convenience of Internet Marketing
Internet marketing enables you to be open for business around the clock without worrying about store opening hours or overtime payments for staff. Offering your products on the Internet is also convenient for customers. They can browse your online store at any time and place orders when it is convenient for them.
Cost of Online Marketing
Marketing products on the Internet costs less than marketing them through a physical retail outlet. You do not have the recurring costs of property rental and maintenance. You do not have to purchase stock for display in a store. You can order stock in line with demand, keeping your inventory costs low.
Growing Importance of Social Media
Internet marketing enables you to take advantage of the growing importance of social media. An article on the Harvard Business School Executive Education website highlighted the link between social networking and online revenue growth.
According to the article, a group of consumers that responded most strongly to the influence of social networks generated increased sales of around 5 percent. You can take advantage of this type of influence by incorporating social networking tools in your Internet marketing campaigns.
Relationships with Customers
The Internet provides an important platform for building relationships with customers and increasing customer retention levels. When a customer has purchased a product from your online store, you can begin the relationship by sending a follow-up email to confirm the transaction and thank the customer.
Emailing customers regularly with special, personalized offers helps to maintain the relationship. You can also invite customers to submit product reviews on your website, helping to build a sense of community.