Why Digital Marketing is Important
The obvious answer is that your potential customers are all online, so shouldn't you be? Try and think of another marketing channel where all your potential customers are, I bet you can't. They're not all listening to commercial radio or watching commercial TV; they're not all reading the same newspapers or magazines; they're not all driving past the same signs. But they are all browsing on the internet and searching for stuff they need; even my 80 year old Dad. So that's why digital marketing is important. But let's delve a bit deeper.
Let's start with some current digital marketing stats
Google tracks pretty much everything and their stats below are from 2021, the year of COVID and Lockdowns. Admittedly some of these stats would have been driven by people being locked at home, but at the same time, many of the people having an experience online will most likely continue in some form. So let's look at some stats:
- eCommerce sales grew 20%, with 9 million households shopping online
- 9 in 10 Australians searched online before buying in person
- 61% are searching for store related information
- 8 million Australians streamed YouTube to their connected TV
- 83% of Australians watched YouTube
- 1 in 3 consumers will choose their second choice brand because it showed up in search
Now we can keep looking for more stats, but I feel we've made our point. Australians are going online and using online more and more, so if you're serious about growing your business through marketing, you have to be online. So this means you must be doing digital marketing.
Find out what is digital marketing.
Why else is Digital Marketing important?
Maybe you're still on the fence about digital marketing. After all, you've been doing radio and local paper advertising for years and it still seems to work. So let's go through some other reasons why you should be doing digital marketing.
Digital marketing is great for tracking
The biggest issue with traditional marketing strategies is that they are hard to track. When you ask most businesses how many sales they made from a newspaper advert, they can't tell you. How do you know if a marketing channel is working for you and giving you a return on advertising spend (ROAS) if you don't know how many sales it generated?
Most forms of digital marketing can be tracked in many ways. Using a simple tracking measure as clicks let's you know how many people click on an advert etc to find out more. Add in some conversion tracking (eg. webforms, phone calls, online sales etc) and you have a fairly complete picture.
Digital marketing is synonymous with inbound marketing
Inbound Marketing is where you market your products and services to people who are actively looking for them. For instance, making sure that your website comes up when someone searches for a product or service you provide. As you can imagine, this form of marketing has a lot higher conversion rate than pushing your products or services on people not currently interested in them, like when they're listening to the radio.
Digital marketing is affordable
There are lots of ways you can start marketing online for very little spend, unlike say developing a video for a TV advert. You could do something as simple as fill in an online profile with "Google My Business" and other online directories.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is extremely affordable in the long term. It may take a while to get it working, but once you are ranking well, the cost per leads and sales is lower than most other forms of marketing.
Digital marketing is extremely flexible
Most digital marketing strategies can be started and stopped whenever it suits you and can be tweaked at any time. For instance, unlike a brochure, a website can have the design changed at any time and your adwords can be stopped whenever you have enough sales.
Digital marketing has many different strategies that can all work together
There are a lot of different digital marketing strategies that you can choose to use and support the success of each other. A great example of this is by running an SEO campaign to drive visitors to your website and then a retargeting display campaign to keep your products and services in front of these visitors after they leave your site. Or maybe an Adwords campaign combined with marketing automation to send an email series to prospects on why they should use your products or services.
Digital marketing has a strategy for every stage of the marketing funnel
The marketing funnel explains how a customer works through the various stages before actually purchasing something. They move from finding out about a new product or service, to researching to find out more about them to deciding whether to buy from your business. Digital marketing has a strategy for each of these stages.
Does your business use Digital Marketing?
After reading the above you should now be aware that you need digital marketing in your business. Sure, there may be some great offline marketing strategies that are worth using, but not at the expense of a good digital marketing campaign.