Why is digital marketing so important?
More than 63% of the world’s population is now online. That’s around 5 billion people, a figure that has increased by 200 million in the last year. On average, we’re all spending almost seven hours a day connected to the internet. It’s impossible to tap into this potentially huge audience with traditional marketing, like radio, TV, print, outdoor and direct marketing.
This also means consumer behaviour is changing quickly, with a majority of consumers now using online searches to find brands and make purchases.
Digital marketing allows you to target your messaging by location, age and gender, interest, remarketing (which means connecting with someone who has shown interest in a product or service similar to yours), or even customer lookalike audiences. This means each conversion is much more cost-effective than traditional marketing.
Digital campaigns yield measurable results in real time and are easy to fine-tune and optimise, based on the data they capture.
How do I get started?
Digital marketing is a specialist skill and can be difficult and time-consuming if you’re trying to teach yourself the basics as you try to create campaigns.
You can use a specialist digital marketing agency (for example The Being Group!) to create your strategy and set up and manage your digital campaign, to gauge its effectiveness, before deciding on next steps.
As your business grows, you might want to employ an in-house expert — but for most small to medium businesses, an agency retainer is far less than the salary and associated costs of a dedicated staff member. A quality agency will also bring guaranteed expertise and the experience of working on multiple campaigns to your digital strategy.
Which platforms should I use?
That depends on the unique goals of your brand. Do you want to grow your brand awareness in your target audience or reach new markets? Do you want to drive sales? Do you want to grow brand awareness, then focus on sales?
Because every business has different goals, every digital marketing strategy is also unique.
“If you’re wanting to build brand awareness, you might use bespoke video content on Instagram and Facebook to tell your brand story. But if you want a sales lift, you’ll be using targeted Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to make sure you’re at the top when someone’s searching for your product,” says The Being Group’s Digital Lead, Lily Harrison.
“It’s important to develop a full-funnel marketing strategy which nurtures your target audience on the path to purchase. Selecting the right key performance indicators (KPIs) and channels ensures the success of a campaign.”
Will I get results?
You will reach your goals if you clearly identify what they are and put the right digital marketing solutions in place.
“Because digital marketing is so targeted, flexible and measurable, it’s easy to understand how much bang you’re getting for your buck and what, and where, you need to spend to achieve your goals,” says Lily. “It’s important you know what you want to achieve, have a clear strategy to make that happen and receive regular reports to track your progress.”
Want to chat to us about digital marketing? We’d love to hear from you. Start a meaningful conversation here.
“Digital marketing is at the core of everything in marketing today. It has gone from ‘one of the things marketing does’ to ‘the thing marketing does’.”
Sanjay Dholakia, Former Chief Marketing Officer, Marketo