What Is Digital Marketing? How Does It Benefit Your Business?

Digital marketing has gained popularity primarily because of the fact that it reaches a broad base of people. However, there are a couple of other advantages that add to its wide acceptance. Here we mention just a few benefits of digital marketing.

Benefits Of Digital Marketing

A Broad Geographic Reach

When an ad is posted on an online platform, people will see it irrespective of where they are. This means people from other regions can see your ad, too, thus helping you grow the business’s market reach.

Cost Efficiency

Not only does digital marketing reach a large audience, but it is also inexpensive. The additional overhead costs for TV spots, newspaper ads, and other traditional modes are relatively high. They also provide you less control over the fact that the target audience gets to see the messages.

With Digital marketing at your disposal, you could create just one single content piece and attract visitors to your blog. You could also create an email marketing campaign that delivers these messages to the target audience basis on a schedule. You can always change the schedule or content if you want to.

If you combine all this up, you will find that digital marketing offers more flexibility and customer contact for the money you are spending on ads.

Quantifiable Results

To know if your marketing strategy is impactful, you will have to figure out the number of customers you are getting and the total revenue generated. But can you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?

You can always ask them, “How did you find us?”

But this does not work for all industries. Most of the companies do not have a direct conversation with the customers. Plus, the surveys conducted do not give accurate results.

With digital marketing in place, monitoring the results is relatively easy. All the digital marketing software and platforms track the conversions you are getting. This includes email open rates, visits to the home page, and direct purchases.

Easier Personalization

With Digital marketing, you can collect customer data in a manner that any offline marketing method cannot. Data that you collect digitally will be more accurate and specific.

Supposing you offered financial services and want to give special offers to prospective customers. You know that you will get impactful results if you create the offer as per the person’s interest. Therefore you have decided to make two campaigns. One is for those young families who want to buy life insurance, while the other is for those millennials who want a reliable retirement plan.

But how will you get this information without automated tracking? How many phone records will you have to peruse? How many customer profiles do you have to check? Most importantly, how will you know who has or hasn’t read your brochure upon receiving it?

Thanks to digital marketing, you will get all the information at your fingertips.

More Connection With Customers

With digital marketing, you can communicate with customers in real-time. Plus, it allows them to reach out to you.

Think of your social media strategy. It is good that your target audience sees the post you have added, but it is much better if they engage and comment on it. This gets more buzz for your product or service, and you receive increased visibility every time anyone enters this conversation.

This level of interaction helps the customers too. Their engagement with you increases as they actively participate in the brand’s story.

This sense of being a partner creates brand loyalty in the customer’s mind.

Easy And Convenient Conversions

Digital marketing lets the customers immediately respond once they see your ad. With the traditional ads, you can hope to get a phone call after someone sees your ad. But do you think it is feasible for customers to call you when they are working or doing household chores?

However, with digital marketing, they may click on the link and save the blog post. They may not buy your product immediately, but they can stay connected with you. This increases the chance for you to interact with them.

What Types Of Digital Content Should You Create?

The type of content you should create is totally dependent on your customers’ requirements at every stage of their purchase process. You can begin this by first creating a buyer persona. This helps in finding out your audiences’ goals and their challenges in tandem with your business. Basically, the content you post must help them meet their goals and overcome all the obstacles they face.

Then you will have to think about when they would probably read your content. This is in relation to whichever stage they are in the buyer’s journey. You can call this as content mapping.

Content mapping involves targeting your content as per:

• The characteristics of the customer (here, we will use the buyer personas)
• How close is he to making the final purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage)?

Depending on your content format, you can try many things. Here we will share some options that you can try matching every stage of his purchase journey:

Awareness Stage

• Blog posts. They are perfect for boosting your organic traffic if you use a strong SEO and keyword strategy as well.
• Infographics. These are highly shareable, meaning that they boost the probability of your being found on social media if others share this content.
• Short videos. These are also very shareable and can get recognition for you if you boost these videos on YouTube.

Consideration Stage

• eBooks. It is good for lead generation as they are more comprehensive than any other content type. This implies that a customer is more likely to exchange his contact details for getting a free eBook.
• Research reports. This is also a high-value content piece that is good for lead generation. Such research reports can be utilized in the awareness stage, too, as the media often picks such items up.
• Webinars. They are a highly detailed and interactive type of video content so that webinars can be perfect for the consideration stage. You will find them as a highly comprehensive content form as compared to blog posts or short videos.

Decision Stage

• Case studies. Adding detailed case studies on the website could be a perfect type of content for those who are just set to decide on the purchase, as they can positively boost your decision-making process.
• Testimonials. If you think case studies are not suitable, then adding short testimonials on the website is a good idea. In case you are a B2C brand, then expand what you can include in the testimonials. For example, a clothing brand could show photos of how customers styled their dresses. You could create a hashtag where people would show their modifications, and you can convince the customers to buy.

What Does A Digital Marketer Do?

Digital marketers use all kinds of digital channels to create brand awareness and boost lead generation. These channels could include the company’s website, SEO rankings, email, company blog, and display advertising.

The prime task of a digital marketer is to focus on the different key performance indicators for each channel.

This helps them in measuring the company’s performance across each one of them. For example, a digital marketer who takes care of SEO will measure his website’s “organic traffic” This is the traffic that you receive from the visitors who landed on your business website using Google search.

Digital marketing is usually carried out in multiple marketing roles. In small companies, one generalist may practice more than one of the digital marketing tips we mentioned above. In big companies, these tips are practiced by many specialists, and each focuses on one or two of the brand’s digital channels.
Here are some examples of these specialists:

SEO Manager

Main KPIs: Organic traffic

The SEO manager has to get his business a higher ranking on Google. He uses multiple approaches to manage SEO. Mostly he has to work with the content creators and see that the content they produce can perform well on Google.

Content Marketing Specialist

Main KPIs: Time on page, overall blog traffic, YouTube channel subscribers

The content marketing specialists are, in simple words, digital content creators. They keep track of your blogging calendar. On the basis of that, they devise a content strategy that includes videos too. These people have to work with other department people too and make sure that all the products and campaigns launched get promoted on the various digital channels as well.

Social Media Manager

Main KPIs: Follows, Impressions, Shares

The role of the social media manager you can guess from the title itself. However, it is the company’s decision which network they will manage for the company. Most social media managers maintain a posting schedule for all kinds of content. This employee also has to collaborate with the content marketing specialist and formulate a strategy to decide which content should be posted on which network.

Marketing Automation Coordinator

Main KPIs: Email open rate, campaign click-through rate, lead-generation (conversion) rate

A marketing automation coordinator helps the team to choose and manage the software that can be used to determine consumer behavior and measure business growth. As many marketing operations are conducted differently from one another, there must be someone who may group the digital activities into single campaigns and then measure the performance of each campaign.

Does Digital Marketing Work For All Businesses?

Digital marketing works for any business or industry. It is immaterial what you are trying to sell; digital marketing comprises creating buyer personas and finding out what the customer needs. But that does not mean that all businesses must implement their digital marketing strategy in the same manner.

B2B Digital Marketing

In case your company is in the B2B segment, your digital marketing tricks should focus on generating leads online and the goal that the customers should speak to the salesperson. Therefore your marketing strategy should be about getting the highest quality leads for the salespeople to nurture through the website and other related channels.

Apart from your website, you can focus your marketing efforts towards channels like LinkedIn, where the target audience spends a lot of time.

B2C Digital Marketing

But if your company is in the B2C section, most likely, your digital marketing efforts should be about attracting customers towards the website and then becoming customers without consulting a salesperson.

In such a situation, you would like to pay attention to the leads in the traditional manner. You will work on developing an accelerated buyer’s journey from the time someone comes to your website to when they complete the purchase. This means that mostly your product should be paid more emphasis on the content, and you may have to use stronger Calls to Action.

Also, for the B2C companies’ platforms like Pinterest and Instagram would be a better option than a business-focused channel like LinkedIn.