Advantages of Digital Marketing

Why should you use Digital Marketing in your Small Business?

Most small businesses have a limited amount of money to invest in marketing, so it is important to ensure it is invested as wisely as possible. The last thing you want to do is spend money on a marketing campaign; only to find out it didn't generate any sales (or not enough to cover your costs). At Probity Web Marketing, we strongly believe that you should invest your marketing dollars into Digital Marketing; but why should you?

Below are some of the main advantages of Digital Marketing.

Web Search continues to grow

The number of people using Google or other search engines to find a product or service grows each year. Below is a graph showing the number of Google searches for "Plumber" and "Electrician" since 2004 in Australia.

This clearly shows a steady increase in search. So common sense tells you that your marketing efforts should be based in the areas that people are looking for your products or services. Let's think about an example; imagine one of your pipes has broken, where do you look for a Plumber? Most people would go straight to their phone and search for a Plumber. They certainly wouldn't go looking for the local paper to see who is advertising in it.

Now we've simply used Plumbers as an example, but the same is true across most products and services. If you're not convinced, why not start asking your customers how they found you? Or maybe if your website is that bad and no-one finds you through it, you'll need to ask them how they generally find other products and services.

Digital Marketing is measurable

Not too many other forms of marketing can offer the level of measurement Digital Marketing does. If done correctly, you can tell exactly how many customers and sales it generated and how much it costs per lead/sale.

Using Google Analytics and Call Tracking, we can tell exactly how many sales, webforms or calls your digital marketing created. Right down to where they are from, their demographics, what page of your website they visited and what device they were using. When we combine this with your digital marketing costs, we can work out your cost per lead/sale. We can even add in your sales figures and work out your return on investment.

Ask yourself, how many times have you run an Ad somewhere and have no idea how many customers you got out of it.

Digital Marketing is cost effective

If you use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in your Digital Marketing strategy, you can get some of the cheapest leads/sales around. SEO as a long term strategy, when done correctly, will continue to give you increasing numbers of leads and sales. As the costs of doing SEO generally stay constant, your cost per lead/sale will continue to go down. Now do you know of any other form of marketing where the cost per lead goes down over time? In most cases marketing costs go up.

But how about an example? Our first ever web marketing client was getting around 50 leads a month when we first started. They have been on the same plan with us for over 8 months and now get over 2500 leads/month. This means their cost per lead has gone from around $40-50 back in 2010, to under $1 today.

You can easily control your Digital Marketing

If you use Search Engine Marketing (Adwords) in your Digital Marketing strategy, you have complete control over when you generate leads & sales, as well as how much you spend. You get to set exactly how much you want to spend each day and can easily pause it when you have enough sales to keep you busy. In fact, you can even decide how much you are willing to spend per customer. Try doing that with a radio or newspaper campaign.

So if you are serious about growing your small business, you really can't ignore Digital Marketing as one of your overall marketing strategies.