Most businesses avoid implementing digital marketing in their strategy because they think they are not ready for it.
They may think that they do not have the money to invest or the necessary resources. However they are not considering that customers will not just show up out of nowhere and if luckily they do, they will not be enough for the business to become profitable.
On the other hand, it is true that by using traditional marketing you might get your first customers, but you are not making the most out of your business. You can reach that point by using digital marketing as you are more prone to find a larger group of potential customers online than locally.
What is digital marketing?
If you are not familiar with this term yet, it involves all the marketing strategies that can be made online through digital technologies.
It is really useful to promote your business, specially start-ups. This is because you won’t need a huge budget to start and it has several channels to get to your potential customers.
What is the main reason to be online?
The answer is simple. Your potential customers and your competition are there already!
Truth is there are a lot of people online looking for a business like yours to cover their needs, but as they can’t find you, they will go with the competition. You are missing a lot of potential there, and of course sales.
Remember that nowadays what people do to find a product or service is looking for it online. Also, if by any chance people find you thanks to traditional marketing, they will not trust you if they don’t find you online. Same thing if they don’t find any reviews of your business.
What about the competition?
You should see your competitors as established businesses that may teach you something as they already went through everything you are going through right now. This is why you should acquire their best practices.
As mentioned before, if you are not online your competition will take advantage of that reaching the potential customers that you can’t reach. Truth is you won’t even be a threat for them if you don’t have an online presence.
What are the benefits of implementing it?
Reach a global marketplace
You can reach a global audience through the different digital marketing channels thanks to the digital marketing segmentation capabilities.
If you want your brand to reach an audience worldwide or locally you can do it with SEM or through paid social media platforms, it is up to you and your final objectives.
Remember that with digital marketing you can also have the exact information of people visiting your website and interacting with your social media posts as well as everything regarding age, sex, location and interests.
In this way you will be able to reach a more specific and important audience in your next campaigns.
Have a direct communication
You have at your disposal bidirectional digital channels that allow your customers to reach you without intermediaries.
In this way you will be able to convert your regular audience to trustworthy customers that will know they will be able to reach you no matter what and get a quick and useful response.
Remember that 84% of users expect a response within 24 hours to consider you have excellent customer service and without these platforms a direct communication and quick response will be almost impossible.
Save money
You don’t need a huge budget to start dabbling in the digital world along with your business. In fact, a well-targeted digital marketing campaign can reach the right customers at a lower cost than other non-digital marketing efforts.
It is important to plan where you want to have your digital presence, for example if you want to be on social media there are a lot of options to put your business out there and promote it for free.
Some examples are connecting with potential customers organically, contacting brand influencers that will be happy to promote your business in exchange for a product or connecting with a complementing business of your niche.
Still paid advertising is really powerful and if you have the resources to do it at first hand we recommend you to do it.
Get to know your customers
You may have an idea of who your potential customers are, but it is not until the moment that you interact with them that you really get to know who they are.
Digital marketing allows you to engage with your prospects and have a clear view of what they want, instead of guessing and wasting money in the way Digital Marketing allows you to get to know them and start a relationship with them.
You can even become more than a business to them as they will see in you as a brand that cares about their needs.
Create brand loyalty
To create brand loyalty your customers need to remember you. With digital marketing you can canalize your efforts to be on their top of minds. This would be impossible without a digital marketing presence.
According to Facebook, 77% of people repeatedly buy from the same brand once they earn their loyalty. What you need to do is to give your existing customers a reason to come back.
Keep in mind that likeability is an important factor as well as a good content marketing strategy to create brand loyalty.
Track your marketing efforts
Last but not least, digital marketing allows you to track your marketing efforts. In order to know if your campaign was successful you will need to measure the results.
With digital marketing you can get significant analytics of customer engagement and behaviour as well as other important measurements. In this way you will know exactly what to change and what to keep for future campaigns.
Without digital marketing it is impossible to exactly measure if your efforts are paying off. This is one of the most important reasons why you should implement digital marketing for your business.
Keep in mind that even if you feel a little scared about implementing Digital Marketing nobody’s born wise. You will learn in the way and you will see how the results for your business will improve.
