After reading your article on “Ways a Digital Marketing Agency can Help Grow a Business”, I thought the Agency Directory would be a valuable resource for your readers. It’s absolutely free and any agency can get listed in there.
– HubSpot
The HubSpot Agency Directory lists more than 700 marketing agencies and sales consultants who are experts at delivering inbound services on top of HubSpot’s tools. Agencies can get listed on the Agency Directory for free and improve their discoverability on search engine. It is a great marketplace for businesses to find agencies to help them out with their marketing processes and provide expert-level advice.
Choosing between traditional marketing and Digital can be quite a hassle for many small to medium companies, as the average size of the marketing budget is usually not big enough for both of them.
Out of comfort, or lack of understanding regarding how Digital works, many marketers from both small and medium enterprises choose to go with traditional methods or with a combination of traditional and superficially implemented digital methods. This is somehow understandable because when faced with a relatively small budget you want to get the highest value you can with the amount of money you have.
But what value can Digital Marketing bring?
Great Exposure to specific audiences
Traditional forms of marketing enable you to reach people from a certain area, like a city, with little to no possibility of specifically selecting the audience.
For example, if you sell products for teenage girls and you make a radio spot is pretty difficult to choose who is going to listen to that radios spot. It can be heard by teenage girls but also by old people, or other categories of audiences that are not part of your target. Moreover, that radio spot is limited to a geographical area, reducing the overall results.
On the other side, digital marketing doesn’t face location constraints. You can target people from every city or every country in the world. Furthermore, you can choose which people you want to reach with your ads, based on different traits, from gender to job title and hobbies.
This means that you can invest in ads that will reach only your specific target, instead of wasting money communicating to audiences that are not interested in your products or services.
Consumer insights
Marketing is no longer about pushing information to your potential clients, but about creating conversations with them. This means both giving, and receiving info.
Digital Marketing allows you to interact with people at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Before buying your product a person goes through different stages, from the awareness stage to the consideration one and finally to the decision stage.
By being able to communicate in real time during each step, you can extract relevant insights about your potential customers and clients using instruments such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and many others. These insights can be discovered only by using Digital Marketing, as traditional methods don’t provide the same accuracy and capabilities in tracking the interactions.
Once you discover different types of consumer insights, you can use them to improve your digital strategy, products, and services, and create a “Value loop”, which is a continuous process of improving your digital strategy based on new insights and interactions with clients.
Branding
Branding is usually correlated with what consumers think about your company. Digital Marketing generates engagement during each phase of the buyer’s journey. This means that people from your targeted audience who want to learn more about the products or services are having conversations with your brand, and subsequently form an opinion of it.
By delivering every promise you make as a company to your clients, the relationship between you and your clients will improve and the level of trust will increase. From a first buyer or occasional buyer, customers will become loyal ones and more importantly brand ambassadors, telling their friends about your company and subsequently generating free publicity for you.
A study made by Nielsen perfectly highlights the importance of branding and trust. According to this study, 83% of consumers trust the most the recommendations made by friends and family. Furthermore, 70% of the responders said that they trust branded websites. So, we can see that Digital marketing positively influences both family and friends recommendations through loyal clients that became brand ambassadors, but also through specific instruments such as the company’s website.
Cost-effective techniques
The costs and returns of Digital Marketing can be tracked extremely accurate. You can monitor and see what is the return of every dollar you invest in digital marketing, as opposed to the more traditional methods. This allows you to see how effective is your marketing approach and what can be improved, thus making considerable savings.
A study made by Gartner found out that 41% of marketers from companies all around the world said that they’ve saved money using Digital Marketing techniques as opposed to traditional methods.
Better revenue growth
Digital marketing doesn’t only helps you save money, by bringing clients at a lower cost than through traditional marketing methods, but also helps you increase your revenue. Google shed some light on this matter, showing in their study that companies that use digital marketing instruments are 2.8 more likely to increase their revenue as opposed to companies that didn’t use such instruments.
The value of digital marketing can be measured more accurately than ever, and the impact it brings can radically improve your company. Implemented professionally, it can increase your client base, loyalty, revenues, and profits. The key thing is to embrace the digital revolution and use it to your advantage instead of trying to resist it with old-fashioned instruments.
