Why Is Digital Marketing Important For All Businesses?
What you'll learn
What you'll need
The internet has completely revolutionized the way businesses market their products and services. In the past, businesses could rely on print advertisements, television commercials, and word of mouth to generate leads and sales.
Today's consumers, however, are much more savvy and have access to a wealth of information at their fingertips. As a result, businesses need to find new and innovative ways to reach their target audiences.
One of those ways is digital marketing, which has quickly become one of the most powerful tools available to businesses of all sizes. Gone are the days where marketing was a luxury only for big companies with huge advertising budgets.
These days, small businesses can use digital marketing to reach a global audience, increase brand awareness, and engage in better customer service — all while having access to better data, insights, and analytics than ever before.
But how exactly does digital marketing make an impact? Let's take a closer look at the host of benefits it can offer.
1. Expands your reach to a global audience
Nowadays, borders are no longer a barrier when it comes to marketing. With digital marketing, businesses can target customers in other states, cities, and even countries. That means businesses now have the opportunity to reach a much larger audience than ever before.
If your product or service has a global appeal, then digital marketing is a must. Rethink your marketing strategy and consider how you can reach a wider audience by going digital. What you thought was your target market might just be the tip of the iceberg — when it comes to digital marketing, the world is your oyster.
For instance, if you run a small business that sells eco-friendly home goods, you could use digital marketing to target customers in other countries who might be interested in sustainable living. You could also use social media platforms to connect with like-minded people and engage in conversations about the environment and sustainability.
2. More cost-effective than traditional marketing
The standard barrier to entry for marketing has always been the cost. Marketing campaigns can be very expensive, especially if you're working with a big advertising agency. This made it difficult for small businesses that didn’t necessarily have a large marketing budget.
Digital marketing has changed all of that. With digital marketing, businesses can reach their target audiences at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods. For instance, inbound marketing costs 62% less than traditional outbound marketing (per lead).
In fact, many digital marketing tools are completely free to use, such as social media platforms and search engine optimization (SEO) tools.
Plus, because it's more measurable than traditional marketing, digital marketing makes it easy to track your return on investment (ROI) and adjust your strategy accordingly. This way, you always know what's working and what's not so you can get the most out of your marketing budget.
These factors make digital marketing a more flexible, cost-effective option for businesses of all sizes. Money spent on digital marketing is always an investment, not a gamble.
3. Provides access to better data and insights
Not too long ago, making informed marketing decisions for your business meant relying on gut instinct and guesswork. Without data-powered insights, it was difficult for businesses to track the success of their marketing campaigns and know which areas needed improvement.
Those days are long gone. With digital marketing, businesses have access to mountains of data that can be used to inform marketing decisions. This data includes everything from website traffic and conversion rates to social media engagement and email open rates.
This data is incredibly valuable because it provides insights into customer behavior and how they interact with your business online. As a result, you can make more informed decisions about your marketing strategy and how to allocate your marketing budget.
You can also use this data to improve your products and services. For instance, if you notice that people are abandoning their shopping carts on your website, you can use that data to figure out why and then make the necessary changes to improve the user experience.
Similarly, if you see that people are unsubscribing from your emails, you can use that data to improve your email marketing strategy. Maybe you're not sending enough emails, or maybe the emails you are sending aren’t relevant to your audience.
This data-driven marketing approach is extremely valuable as it allows businesses to make informed decisions that will ultimately lead to more sales and a higher ROI.
And, of course, this information can also be used to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. This is especially true for local businesses, which can use data like location and demographics to create hyper-targeted marketing campaigns using methods such as geo-targeting to reach potential customers in their area.
4. Focuses on building relationships
While traditional marketing followed the one-way communication model and focused more on brand awareness, digital marketing focuses on building two-way relationships with your audience. This is done by engaging with them in a more personal and conversational way, such as through social media posts, emails, and blog comments.
This is incredibly important in today's digital world, as people are more likely to buy from brands that they know, like, and trust. In fact, according to a study by Harvard Business Review, 64% of people said that shared values are the main reason they have a relationship with a brand.
It's no longer enough to just have name recognition and an online presence; you need to actively engage with your audience and build relationships with them so they trust you and your brand. Only then will they take action, such as making a purchase or signing up for your email list.
With a successful content marketing strategy, for example, you can create valuable and informative content that will help build those relationships by providing useful information that people find interesting or helpful. This, in turn, will help you build trust with your audience and increase sales.
Pro Tip: To write social media captions that resonate with your audience, use Copy.ai's free Instagram Caption Generator — it's easy to use and helps you come up with creative ideas in seconds!
5. Frees up time for you to focus on other priorities
One of the best things about digital marketing is that it's easy to automate. This means you can set up your marketing campaigns and let the tools do their job while you focus on other priorities, such as running your business!
Take email marketing, for example. With the right email marketing tool (like Mailchimp or AWeber), you can create a series of automated emails that go out to your subscribers at set intervals. This could be a welcome series for new subscribers, a product launch sequence, or even a monthly newsletter.
And that’s not all — email marketing tools track your results to see what's working and what's not. This data-driven marketing approach allows businesses to make informed decisions that will ultimately lead to more sales and a higher ROI.
On your part, all you need to do is keep your list clean and segmented, create the initial campaign, and then monitor the results. This frees plenty of time that you can use to focus on other aspects of your business.
One more example? Let's look at social media.
Automation for social media involves scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule your posts in advance. This is a huge time-saver; it means you don't have to be online at specific times to post. You can just set it up once and forget about it!
As you see, the kind of automation that digital marketing brings can be extremely helpful in freeing up time to focus on other areas of your business. Better yet, the time you save when you’re not constantly micro-managing your marketing strategy can be used for your personal life — we all know how important work-life balance is!
Thanks to digital marketing, you now have the opportunity to plan your day around other things and still see your marketing campaigns succeed.
6. Allows you to be available 24/7
Remember top-of-mind awareness? Before digital marketing, businesses had to rely on traditional marketing methods such as print ads, TV commercials, and radio spots to keep their brand at the forefront of people's minds. That took a lot of time, effort, and money.
Nowadays, digital marketing makes businesses available to their customers 24/7. That's because digital marketing channels are always on, meaning your business can reach customers anytime or night. Digital marketing never sleeps, even when you do.
Thanks to modern automation, you can schedule email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and even ads to run while you're sleeping or out of the office! And because these channels are always on, your customers can reach out to you at any time, whether to ask a question about your product or make a purchase.
Even for those messages, you can set up automated responses to take care of your customer's needs until you're back online. This way, you can relax and enjoy your time off knowing that your business is still running smoothly — all thanks to digital marketing. This applies to your business's emails, live chat support, and social media.
If you're online, you can engage with your customers in real-time as inquiries come in. This is a great opportunity to build relationships with your customers and provide them with the best possible user experience.
In short, digital marketing allows you to be available to your customers 24/7 — even if you're not. That's a huge advantage for businesses of all sizes!
Pro Tip: To leverage automation to the fullest, allow your customers to receive a notification whenever there's a new blog post, product launch, or other important event happening in your business by integrating an email marketing tool with your website. This way, people interested in your business will be the first to know what's happening — and you don't have to lift a finger. This will boost sales since the people most interested in your business will hear about your latest product or offer.
7. Engage your audience at every stage with digital marketing
To push your leads through the customer funnel, you need to connect with them at the first stage of the buyer's journey: the awareness stage.
This stage is where people are just becoming aware of their problems and starting to search for solutions. Here’s where digital marketing comes in. During this stage, you can use digital marketing to create content that will capture people's attention and introduce them to your brand.
You can use various digital marketing channels, such as SEO, content marketing, social media, and even paid advertising, to reach people during the awareness stage. And because digital marketing lets you track how people engage with your content, you can see what's working and what's not so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
Moreover, you can use digital marketing to stay in touch with your leads at every stage of the buyer's journey — from awareness to purchase. This way, you can nurture your leads until they're ready to buy from you. And even after they've made a purchase, you can continue to engage them with digital marketing to turn them into lifelong customers.
In a nutshell, digital marketing empowers you to engage and track your audience as they navigate the buyer's journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
Even if your leads don't convert right away, you can be sure that, at the very least, they've been introduced to your brand and have started to develop a relationship with you. This is something that simply wasn’t possible with traditional marketing methods.
8. Lets you compete with bigger brands
If you relied purely on traditional marketing methods such as print ads or television commercials, you would be at a major disadvantage when competing against bigger brands. After all, they have much deeper pockets and can afford to reach a wider audience.
Digital marketing levels the playing field, giving smaller businesses the chance to reach people online without spending a fortune. That means there are many opportunities for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audiences and stand out from the competition, no matter how big or small.
For instance, one common digital marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). While it does require some time and effort to optimize your website for SEO, it's a relatively inexpensive way to get your brand in front of people who are already searching for solutions you offer.
To start, you could identify long-tail keywords that relate to your product or service (those are generally less competitive and easier to rank for) and create high-quality content to help you rank on search engines for those keywords.
And yes, search engines will choose to show the most relevant content to their users — regardless of who created it. So, you don't have to be a big brand to benefit from SEO. Google, for one, doesn't care which brand is the biggest.
That's just one example of how digital marketing can level the playing field for businesses of all sizes. So, if you're not using digital marketing to reach your target audience, you're missing out on a major opportunity to grow your business.
Digital marketing for your business
Digital marketing is a powerful tool to help businesses of all sizes reach their target audiences. While it may seem complex, it's relatively easy to start! You need a well-planned digital marketing strategy that meets your goals and the patience to modify your strategy as you learn from data-driven insights. With that under your belt, you'll be well on growing your business.
Since a major part of digital marketing involves content, it's also important to ensure that your content is high-quality and engaging. If you're not sure where to start, Copy.ai can help. Try it out now to get started with newsletters, blog posts, social media posts, and more.
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