When a business is started, the focus of the owner is often on how to get their first set of customers that will pay for their service.
Some businesses rely on traditional marketing like billboards, flyers, radio, and television ads.
With the traditional marketing method, people are likely to trust your business enough to buy from you.
It is only a matter of time before your customers will stay buying from you.
Although traditional marketing is good and it brings in few customers to businesses, there is a better marketing method you should try out for your business.
You should try to consider the huge marketplace of online prospects. Any business that wants to succeed should not over digital marketing because it has a vast marketplace.
Before we dive deeper, let’s understand what digital marketing is;
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing also known as online marketing or internet marketing is a marketing method that is done online through the use of our smart devices.
If you want to see success in your business, you don’t need to postpone or suspend your digital marketing campaign instead you should try it out and start today.
As a business owner, you don’t need to give any excuse to avoid adding digital marketing to your business marketing campaign.
Some business owners believe that they don’t have what it takes to make their business a success online.
Some of them prefer to stick to the traditional marketing method because it is at least bringing in few customers to them.
Yet digital marketing is the online marketing method that can bring in huge customers to them without them breaking their bank account for advertisement.
There are lots of techniques that are involved in digital marketing to make a success;
They involve techniques such as SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, PPC Marketing, Video Marketing Automation, and Content Marketing.
- PPC or Pay-per-click:
This is a digital marketing technique that brings paid customers to your website. The customers come through the online PPC ads that you run for your business on the web.
PPC campaign let you pay per website visitor that clicks on your ad.
- Social Media:
This digital marketing technique makes use of online social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, Snapchat, etc.
Social media gives you the opportunity to meet your potential customers where they hang out and promote your business to them.
Social media most times are also used for customer service by some businesses.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization):
This is another digital marketing technique that helps businesses to increase their website ranking and traffic on the search engine (e.g Google search engine).
With SEO you will be able to target your potential customers through the use of keywords they might likely be typing in the search engine.
The higher you rank your website on the Google SERPs (Search engine result pages) the more chances you are to increase your sales and revenue, this is because the customers that come to your website through SEO are the customers that are really interested in what you offer.
- Content Marketing:
The digital marketing technique that gives your business the opportunity to bring customers to your website through the use of valuable and educational content.
The focus of content marketing is to create value. Your customers are able to trust and buy from you if you are consistent in creating and disturbing valuable content online.
- Video Marketing:
Video marketing is the most popular media that is distributed on the web and social media.
If done effectively video marketing can bring huge customers to your business.
It can be used to create awareness for your business, business stories, and customer testimonials and you can also use it to promote your business products.
- Email Marketing:
It is a cheap digital marketing technique with a huge ROI. It involves sending out valuable personalized emails to the customers that declared interest in your business through your website.
Importance of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing can give your business a lot of opportunities and growth; it gives your business the advantage of exposing your services to the wider world at large.
Digital marketing has become the norm for any business that wants to be successful because the internet has brought a whole new market that is larger than traditional marketing.
If your business does leverage the usefulness of digital marketing in today’s world then your business will not grow and will likely shut down.
As a business owner, your goal and desire is to see an increase in your sales and revenue, to achieve this then you will need to involve a digital marketing strategy in your business marketing campaign.
The digital world has a larger group of potential customers that are likely to be your paying customers.
With digital marketing, you can reach out to a wider audience in a cost-effective and measurable way.
Some key features of online marketing include:
Below are the reasons why you need a digital marketing campaign for your business which will also serve as its importance.
Why You Need Digital Marketing For Your Business.
1. Your Customers Are Online
As a business owner, digital marketing is not what you can ignore or avoid. As far as you will want your business to succeed digital marketing is a must for you.
If you are confused about how to start you can reach out to the digital marketing experts on how and when to start your digital marketing campaign.
The truth is that your customers are already online looking for what you have to offer.
They are looking out for the solution your business might solve for them, but if they find it difficult to get you online then you have given them the right to choose your competitors that are online before you.
Whether it is your niche or general, people these days go online to search on how to solve their problems or search for the businesses that can solve their problems.
If they are also curious about what your business is all about or what services your business offers, what they do is go online to learn more about you.
Their expectation is to find you on the web with your website URL or a social media presence.
Some of them might even be interested in reading the review of your past customer's experiences for them to get to know more about what people are saying about your business and whether they can trust you or not.
In fact, 91% of online shoppers say they read at least one review before making a purchase decision on a product, business, or service.
Your business presence is important online because if your potential customers can’t find you on the web, they will doubt the legitimacy of your business and won’t take it seriously.
By not finding your business online, you have given them no other option but to head to your competitors that are active online.
They might never come back to your business again once your competitors are able to serve them better.
2. Your Competitors Are Online
If you want your business to be successful you will need to pay attention to your competitors, learn from what they are doing better than you, and take advantage of their weaknesses to grow and succeed in your own business.
It is not only to beat your competitors; you have a lot you can learn from them because if you pay attention to their online campaign, they are likely to have a lot of things to teach you in what they are doing.
When you pay attention to what your competitors are doing, you will be able to get some rich ideas of what is working and what isn’t working for them.
Most likely, whatever type of business you might be into, you will have already had competitors that would have established a strong online presence before you.
You will then pay attention to the type of content (Blogging, video, Graphics) they use to communicate their brand to their audiences, what they do that makes them unique, and how they engage with their audience.
You ask yourself the one million dollar question: Do you think you can do better and bring your business to the spotlight?
Your answer is likely to be a “NO” if you are yet to participate in the digital world, you need to first establish your online presence before you can do better and outrank your competitors.
If your potential audience goes online to search for businesses that are similar to yours and all they could find is your competitor's website and not yours, it shows that your business is not present, for this reason, they are not able to choose you because they don’t know if you exist or not.
In a scenario like this, you have given your competitors the opportunity to race ahead of you regardless of whether their website is effective or has valuable content.
3. Be Accessible to Your Customers
It is no more a surprise in today’s digital world that the web has become the first place the average consumer will go to search for what they are looking for; they go online to search for whatever product or service they are looking for.
This search is mostly done on google web so if you have no online presence, your business won’t be found and this will make it hard for you to compete.
Even if you have an online presence you must make it easier for your potential audience to find you first before they found your competitors.
After your business website creation, involving search engine optimization in your marketing campaign will help you move the visibility of your business website ahead of competitors just by being the first business name that your potential audience finds in the Google SERPs (search engine result pages)
There are simple questions that your potential audience will want you to provide quick answers to. They are questions like;
Most customers will want to look at your website working hours, prices, specialty, and customer care hours and compare them with your competitor’s website
This is why it is good to know what your competitors are doing and you should try to do better than them.
Your potential audience is watching out on both of you to choose which business is the best for them; they are comparing you to find out if you are the best option.
What great advantage do you have over your competitors that they need to find out?
4. Let Customers Come to You
Digital marketing gives your potential audience easy accessibility to your business, it makes it easy for them to reach you and learn more about your products and services.
Digital marketing also creates a platform that will let your business attract a much larger audience than you could ever imagine.
The presence of a website will open your business to the world 24/7, it allows customers from all over the world to reach you any day and at any time.
Customers at their convenience time can reach you on your website to make calls, send you an email message, or make purchases and if you are an eCommerce store they can browse through your inventory.
If you have an online presence Potential audiences don’t have to be at your physical location before they can make a purchase.
5. Get to Know Your Target Audience
Digital marketing gives you the advantage to engage with your potential audience, it gives you the opportunity to know about them, the challenges they are facing, and how they are looking to solve them.
Social media as a digital marketing technique can make it easy for you to communicate with your potential audience.
You can do this by paying attention to their comments or responses on your social media post.
Digital interaction with your potential audience will give you an easy way to get to know them better.
You can learn to know about what their pain is and come up with a better solution on how to help them solve it.
With digital marketing, you don’t need to guess about the problems of your potential audience.
It has tools that can help you find out who your potential audience really is, what they want, and how they want it.
This way, it makes it easy for you to build a relationship with them; they will give you their full trust and make you a trusted partner that can solve their problems.
People love to buy from business they trust.
Digital marketing is also cost-effective and cheaper than traditional marketing.
Even if your business is a small business with a low budget you can still do some digital marketing advertisement, like sticking with your website SEO which will make you communicate your brand and reach your wide targeted audience that is most interested in your business.
Digital marketing cost is considerably less yet it reaches the wider world at the same time.
The number of internet users has grown to be over 3 billion users, reaching these people with various digital marketing techniques should not be a matter of debate as it gives your business a better chance to succeed and become a well-known brand.
6. Ease of Measurement
Another importance will you get from digital marketing is the easiness to track and monitor consumer behavior.
Digital marketing has various digital tools that can let you easily track these behaviors.
One of these consumer behavior tools which is also very popular is Google Analytics; owned by google, google analytics lets you view statistics of the actions of your customers on your website.
The statistics are needed to help you find the areas of your website you might need to improve that will increase sales that come from your website.
By measuring your website traffic, you can prioritize SEO and optimize your website to bring in more customers to you.
With digital marketing, there is no limitation to the marketing tools you can take advantage of to monitor your customer's activities and increase your conversion rates.
Some tools also come with geographical data relating to visitors' locations and more.