Without digital marketing nowadays, a business risks not being competitive at all. This is because people might not even find your business and know that you exist. But digital marketing is nothing without the right strategy. You will have to plan the creation of different types of content, promotion, analysis, tests, and much much more. If you wonder why you need so many components in a digital marketing strategy, just imagine that this is one big machine. For everything to work smoothly, you need all the parts to work well together.
When creating the digital marketing strategy for your business, you need to think about all the activities you would like it to include. It can be anything from simple site creation and maintenance to a detailed analysis of the enormous amount of data you collected from your customers. Think about which channels you would like to focus on, what is the messaging you would like to send to your current and potential customers, what tools you will need, etc. Creating a digital marketing strategy is not easy but worth the effort. Keep reading to find the 10 most important reasons why you need one.
1. You will get to know your target audience better
The key to success for every business is to know its customers. Understanding their needs and wishes will show you if you are meeting their expectations as a brand or there are certain aspects you should improve. Finding the right segment of people who will be more than willing to buy your products and services might not be easy. You will have to do a lot of tests to find the perfect channels to reach them, send the right messaging, provide the right offers, and just find the best way to sell to them.
But once you know more about your audience, you will also be able to predict their behavior and proactively offer them new services and products they might be interested in before other competitors. Trends are something that many brands miss out on or join the hype just a bit too late, and like that, they are already one step behind competitors. To avoid this, getting to know your public is crucial.
2. Avoiding being all over the place
Running various digital activities and being present on a number of channels is great. Still, if you don't have a clear strategy on how to coordinate everything, you risk losing track and sending controversial messaging. If your posts on Facebook and Instagram have completely different wording and messaging, this will harm your brand because people won't be able just to get used to your brand voice and style and recognize it among thousands of other brands.
Another risk is that if you are running special campaigns on different platforms, no matter if they are organic or paid ones, they might not be as well organized and coordinated as they should. For example, if you have a Black Friday promotion and the messaging on your site says it is applicable only for a particular tier of your plans, but then on Facebook, you don't mention this small detail, this can be confusing for clients. Your digital marketing activities should would well together and complement each other in the best possible way.
3. Helps with brand awareness
Being present on different social media channels or platforms is great, especially for brand awareness. Once you find your brand voice and messaging, you can grow your followers' audience by creating engaging content. This content can be educational, product-related, promotional, etc. But the important thing is to stick with your branding and make it recognizable.
You might have a really unique wording you use, or if you use visuals to create something that is only yours as a graphic and like that, people will start to recognize your brand. Once a person can distinguish a brand only by their brand voice, they are already one step further in the customer journey and will be more willing to get your product and also recommend it to others.
4. You will gain a bigger market share
If you are not present online, you might be considered practically non-existent. This is why your digital marketing strategy should include a plan to grow your market share. You can try organic activities like optimizing your site for SEO, producing more content and sharing it on social media, creating guest posts, and others. Or you can also invest in paid activities like ads, giveaways, influencers, etc. Combining both is always the best idea since you will reach more customers and increase your market share.
5. You are not optimizing
The goal of every digital marketing activity is to optimize a certain aspect. That might be your website and the user journey on it or the conversation rate of your email marketing campaign. No matter the activity and the metric you will be focusing on, the goal will be the same — optimization. Once you set up your goals, you will see which metrics fall behind, and you can incorporate the needed actions to improve them in your digital marketing strategy.
You will find many different tools you can use on almost any occasion. If you have a goal to improve the conversion rate on your site, you can use a tool to analyze the current behavior of visitors and identify what is missing. Then you can run A/B tests or other experiments with the help of another software. An optimization process can be very easy if you just have clear goals in mind.
6. Digital marketing is cost-effective
A big part of the digital marketing activities you might incorporate in your strategy is for free. Of course, if you would like to run ads, work with influencers or organize digital events, you will have to spend quite some money, but still, digital marketing remains one of the most cost-effective marketing activities. As you can imagine buying some ads space in a newspaper or even a billboard will be much more expensive than running Facebook ads.
Even with the free activities in digital marketing, you can reach a huge amount of people that you usually won't be able to. Posting regularly on Facebook will cost you nothing, but you might gain millions of followers if you do it right and you have engaging content. Activities like email marketing are also very effective. If you use a tool, the fee you will pay won't be too high, but you will again increase brand awareness, customer engagement, and loyalty, and therefore your return on investment, making it a very cost-effective option.
7. Improve your ROI
This is more or less linked with digital marketing being very cost-effective. With little investment, you will be able to reach more people and improve conversion rates. One of the best things in digital marketing is that assets you have already created can be easily reused. For example, you can create a number of illustrations and graphics that can be used for various social media posts just by changing the text. The easier optimization process also guarantees you better conversion rates which will inevitably lead to a better return on investment.
8. Better tracking options
For brands that offer their products only in physical stores is much harder to track customers' behavior and know what they should improve. Most of the time, it is out of their hands because maybe just the positioning on the shelf is terrible, but that's not something they can change. When it comes to digital marketing, you will be able to track every single action your customer performs on your site. Like that, you will see if the positioning of elements is correct, the user journey is simple enough, your site's usability is good, and so much more.
9. More personalization options
People like to feel appreciated and offered something created especially for them. It is not that easy to do that without investing some effort in digital marketing. There are many options for personalizing what people see on your site, what they receive as emails, see on social media, and just create the perfect personalized experience for them. Trust us is worth it because you will show them exactly what they want to see.
Email marketing is the perfect example where you can create customized flows for your different segmented groups. On top of that, based on a number of variables like gender, age, interests, purchase history, and much more, you can furthermore personalize the email that each recipient will get. This way, they will see something crafted explicitly for them and contains products they will like. The possibility of them clicking on some of the items and getting it, in this case, will be much higher.
10. You will have more flexibility
Digital marketing doesn't have some of the limitations that traditional marketing does. For example, if you run an ad in the newspaper, once the newspaper is printed, even if you notice a minor spelling error, you can't do anything. You already paid for it, and the newspapers are out there. But when you run digital ads, you can change the text and adjust how much you are willing to pay for each click/impression. When you publish your ad in a newspaper, each lead you might get after that will cost the same. With online ads, you can create customer segments and, based on different criteria, pay a different amount of money for each lead.
Nobody is perfect, and mistakes happen, especially when many tools are involved. However, digital marketing gives you the flexibility to react quickly and fix any issue in a matter of minutes. In cases when some trends are emerging, you will also be able to respond faster and optimize your digital marketing activities in a way that they will engage with the trend. Digital marketing offers a lot to brands that use its full potential. Don't miss out on an opportunity that can help you take your business to another level.
