Digital is more and more present in our lives, and by the look of things, this trend won’t wind down, but grow exponentially. A study made by We are Social revealed that this year, roughly 3,7 billion people have access to the internet, and around 2,78 billion are active social media users. Compared to last year, when 3,4 billion people had internet access and 2,3 billion were active on social media, these facts paint a very clear picture.
If you wish to get a better understanding of how much people’s lives are influenced by digital take a look around you. How much time do your coworkers, employees, family, and friends spend looking at different screens?
With all these people locked onto various screens for huge chunks of time, you have to find a way to communicate with them, and for this, you need Digital Marketing.
However, the importance of Digital Marketing doesn’t rely only on the sheer number of people using devices connected to the internet, but also on the overall benefits that a Digital campaign provides you with:
Reach a much bigger, accurate audience.
With a digital marketing campaign, you can seemingly control the size of your audience. You can create marketing campaigns that can reach people all around the world, or you can target smaller audiences, based on different criteria:
– Age;
– Gender;
– Location;
– Interests;
– Behavior (device used, job type, traveling frequency etc.).
And the list can continue. In a nutshell, the possibilities of targeting specific groups of people that are most likely to become your customers are endless, especially when compared with traditional marketing techniques. If you make a radio spot or a billboard, you can’t control who hears it or sees it, and you are limited to a certain location.
Create tailored content.
On top of being able to choose your target based on extremely detailed criteria, digital campaigns offer you the possibility of creating highly personalized content. Tailoring your articles, Social media posts or other pieces of content makes the potential customer feel like you’re addressing to him or her individually, giving him a sense of identity.
When someone is seen as a person with needs and preferences, and not just another face in the crowd, he or she is more likely to pay attention and connect emotionally with your message and not zone out. This translates into numerous benefits for you. According to a study made by McKinsey, the creation of tailored content can increase revenues by 5 to 15% and decrease acquisition costs by up to 50%.
Increased Engagement.
Engagement is one of the most important things that have to be tracked in order to determine how effective is your Digital Marketing Campaign. To drive up the engagement you have to be able to create relevant, personalized content for your audience. Many companies have acquired huge Social Media audiences quantified by the number of followers/likes. But how many of these followers are interacting with their messages? The number is for sure significantly lower.
For instance, let’s presume your company has 30.000 fans on Facebook but the number of people interacting with your content is around 300. If a competitor has 20.000 fans on Facebook, and roughly 1000 of them interact with their content, it’s clear that their digital campaign is more effective than yours.
From the entire pool of fans/followers, the people who are the most likely to buy your products or services, are those who engage with your content. This is one of the reasons why engagement is so important.
Track everything.
As opposed to the traditional marketing techniques in the Digital realm you can track everything. With instruments such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, and many others you can monitor virtually every interaction from all the stages of the buyer’s journey. With the amount of information, you can evaluate how efficient and effective your Digital Campaigns are, but more importantly, you can find out important insights regarding the behavior of your audience.
Only by determining what went right and what wrong, as well as incorporating the new insights in your marketing approach, you make sure that your future digital campaigns will be more and more effective.
Reduced Costs.
When it comes to traditional marketing budgets, the large companies are in a more privileged position than the medium and small ones. For many companies of the latter categories, the costs of making one or 2 TV spots can equal the entire budget for one year.
Digital marketing can compensate the different budget sizes, thus allowing small and medium companies to go to head to head with much larger competitors. How does it achieve this? In the digital environment, people have an increased control over what they are interacting with. This means that they skip ads, install Adblockers and so on if the ads are uninteresting for them.
A smart planned campaign with an excellent execution can engage with a large audience at lower costs than the traditional marketing techniques, and bring the same results, or even better ones. This translates into a better return on investment for you.
The transition towards the digital environment is a trend that is and will keep on growing. With more and more people having access to internet and smartphones, it makes sense to invest in digital campaigns.
However, in order to be effective, you have to make sure the people you work with, know what they’re doing, as throwing a lot of money without knowing how to create effective digital campaigns, won’t make that much of a difference.
