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But within just the past few years, the importance of digital marketing has become something else.
It’s become an integral part of what a business is to its customers.
It’s no longer enough to have a website or run some un-focused Ads campaign.
Every business needs a clear, digital marketing plan.
Let’s take a look at why your business needs a digital marketing campaign to grow and thrive.
10 Facts About the Importance of Digital Marketing
1. Reaches People Where They Spend Their Time & Money
The average Internet user has at least 8 social media accounts.
97% of US adults under 65 are on social media at least once a month. The vast majority are on it every day.
Social media is strongly preferred as a means of customer care.
Although as many as 89% of customer messages are ignored by businesses.
22% of the world population is on Facebook. 62% of people in the US are there.
76% of Facebook users and 51% of Instagram users are on it every day.
30% of people on social media mention a specific brand when referring to milestones in their lives.
Gen X is slightly more likely to interact with a brand on social media than millennials.
The trend right now is the average person spends over 2 hours a day on social media.
Social media is integrated into everything they do from school, to work, to entertainment, to hanging out with friends.
One of the top 10 reasons people say they’re on social media is to buy products advertised to them.
They spend around 37% of their social media time interacting with branded content.
Putting valuable content out there where your target audience is already scrolling is an effective means of inbound marketing.
Inbound marketing is a form of marketing where you’re drawing your target market in and attract customers as opposed to outwardly pushing your brand on them, like cold calling for example.
57% of Millennials say that social media has made the ads they see more relevant to them.
48% of people say they made their last online purchase as the direct result of a Facebook ad.
But only 45% of marketers think their social media efforts are paying off. There are definitely some winners and losers on social media.
Social media marketing and advertising are only a piece of digital marketing. But it’s a very important one.
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2. Levels the Playing Field for Small Business
You’ve seen it happen before. A huge company like Walmart comes to town and wipes out 100’s of local specialty shops.
Starbucks rolls in and mom and pop coffee and bagel shops close down.
We’ve seen the online equivalent of this with Amazon.
It’s hard to compete with the name recognition or the millions that they put into marketing and reputation management.
That’s where the shines as a beacon of hope for small businesses.
It’s the same for brick & mortar, e-commerce, and personal brands alike.
Digital marketing actually allows smaller businesses the ability to hold a top-ranking position.
Digital marketing allows you to compete with your competition by exposing you to a wider audience on a much smaller advertising budget.
When managed effectively, it gives businesses laser-focused control over where and how they spend their money.
When you have this kind of control and the data to support decisions, you make smarter ones.
Additionally, the explosion of video marketing has leveled the playing field even further for small business owners.
Small businesses are going viral and reaching millions organically with short-form videos like TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and more.
Video has become the preferred media type by both potential customers and the social media platforms themselves.
Therefore, video marketing has become extremely effective at allowing small brands to reach their ideal customers by the masses.
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3. More Targeted
When you run a magazine ad, for example, you definitely do some targeting. You know if your target audience reads that publication.
You have some control over placement and size. You control the message within certain publisher guidelines.
That ad may reach 1 million-plus readers.
But what percent of this million is actually your target? A particular fashion magazine might have a demographic 59% female ages 35-55.
They may have some college education.
And you know they’re interested in the type of fashion depicted in the magazine. But that’s a huge demographic.
One of the gifts that digital marketing has given us is the ability to dissect huge demographics.
Whittle them down into very targeted groups to get super-focused on a specific kind of person.
Who’s that person? It’s the person most likely to purchase what you sell.
When you do targeting at this level, you create an ad that’s highly relevant to your target market.
Because it’s so relevant, it connects on a level that more general advertising can’t.
This connection gives it the ability to influence decisions. You can do it without following annoying traditional methods and advertising.
You’re not showing the same ad thousands of times over a month’s period. Or interrupting someone’s program over and over.
So, what kind of targeting is possible with digital marketing? You’ll probably be surprised.
Let’s look at search advertising as an example. That includes Google Ads. In this form of digital marketing, you target people doing searches in Google.
Search results now account for about 64% of website traffic across the Internet.
For businesses who’ve put a strong focus on SEO (search engine optimization) as much as 80% of traffic arrives from search results.
Search advertising, aka PPC (pay per click) allows you to position yourself near the top of searches.
Social media advertising similarly allows you to narrow your target audience Use the data they’ve collected about their users.
Tell Facebook, for example, to only show your ad to people with a very specific recent behavior, interest, location, or other identifiers.
You don’t have this level of control over who sees your ad with any other form of marketing.
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4. Can Be Hyper-Personalized
We’ve only just begun to discuss the importance of digital marketing in regards to targeting.
With email marketing, yet another important part of digital marketing, you can target almost down to the individual level.
We call this “segmentation”.
In some cases, you actually can get to the individual level. Marketers call this “personalization” or on a higher level, marketing automation.
72% of consumers prefer that businesses use email communication.
This gives people a sense of control that makes them more comfortable signing up for your emails and buying from you.
If they don’t like what you send them, they can just unsubscribe.
But when you send them content that is highly relevant, they stay on your list and continue to buy again and again.
You can see where the in the importance of digital marketing lies in a repeat lifetime customer.
There are basic programs that will allow you to add a person’s name or certain information automatically to an email.
But we’re talking about a much more advanced approach that’s proven its ability to get results for our clients, like the improvements in the chart below.
That’s email segmentation, automation, and personalization.
With segmentation, you’re collecting data about each email subscriber.
You use this data to sub-divide your list based upon certain traits or behaviors identified through analytics.
Once divided, send each segment a marketing message that is most relevant to that segment.
If it isn’t relevant, you don’t send it to them.
This way you’re sending the right content to the right audience.
And if you can make small changes to a piece of content to make it more relevant to a different segment, you do it to reach more people.
Marketing automation allows you to send that content at the optimal time to obtain the desired result. It takes the repetitiveness out of the process.
You learn what this optimal time is through your data collection process. This time may be immediate.
It may be a certain time of day. It may be sending a certain message before another one.
Finally, you have personalization. You recognize a person on an individual level.
You are able to recommend the best products to them because you know their purchase history.
You recognize that they just visited your website and abandoned their cart.
You refer to them by name. They feel that you respect their individuality.
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5. More Advanced Analytics
What do you really know about how a TV ad performed? You can determine best times for the ad to air and best frequency if you do some testing.
You might create a focus group to drill down on the data.
But generally, you only know its reach according to the agency and whether it increased buzz, sales, or met a similar marketing goal.
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6. Easy to Scale & Adapt
As with any marketing, there’s initial investment required to get traffic flowing.
But the importance of digital marketing to small businesses becomes very clear when you see how easy it is to scale and adapt as your business grows.
For example, with social media campaigns, display ads and search ads you can choose a daily budget.
You know exactly how much that campaign will cost you.
Now you begin to see amazing results. You don’t have to go in and renegotiate an ad spot to keep the ad running.
Your ad continues uninterrupted. As you continue to convert that traffic, you just increase your daily spend and revenues with it.
If you got a massive order in from a customer and need to scale back to avoid getting backlogged, it’s just as easy to do that.
If something isn’t working in your marketing, you don’t have to wait for the ad contract to run out. You don’t have to start from scratch.
You’ve got the power. Just make that small change and re-launch the ad.
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7. Best ROI
Email marketing has the highest ROI of any marketing method. It can get a whopping 3800% return.
That’s $38 in revenue for every $1 you spend. About 20% of companies are seeing an ROI of $70 to $1 spent.
Email marketing is a conversion machine. But you do need a way to build your email list with quality subscribers.
Then deliver highly relevant content to a subscriber’s inbox.
This is most often accomplished through a combination of social media marketing and content marketing.
But these marketing methods have an impressive ROI of their own.
Content marketing can generate 3X leads for about 62% less than traditional marketing.
Of course, when we say “lead” we’re not just talking about website traffic.
These are people who are very likely to buy your product and become loyal customers as you nurture that relationship.
As a small business, cost-effectiveness is your ultimate priority. You have to be able to stretch those dollars as you grow your business.
Every dollar you spend matters. You need to know it’s going to provide you an ROI.
That’s the importance of digital marketing to small businesses.
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8. Aligns with How People Today Shop
88% of people consider online reviews an important part of the buying decision.
23% of people visit your business after reading a good review.
The average American spends over 24 hours a week online.
47% of millennials and Gen X don’t watch traditional TV. And 22 million people had canceled their cable by the end of last year.
Magazine and newspaper sales continue to decline at a rate of about 16% a year.
But on the other side of this, over 1 trillion online searches are performed each year. Google holds the monster share with 3.5 billion of these queries.
8 billion videos are watched on Facebook each day, most of them from businesses.
Indeed, most consumers now tend to look for products, services, or anything they want online.
Most of them are also impatient and won’t go beyond the first 5 pages of the search results. So, you shouldn’t stop with just having an online presence.
You have to be ahead of your competitors. This is how SEO works for your business.
If your website is well optimized, then it will easily be discovered by users whenever they search for a keyword relevant to your brand.
From restaurants to doctors to bookkeeping software to commodities, the modern sales process starts online.
Whether it’s something a friend shared on social media, the result of a search query.
Or, an email newsletter that they received in their inbox, it all starts here.
The more integrated your business is with the customer’s online experience, the most easily you grow your business.
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9. How People Prefer that Businesses Reach Them
People are tired of traditional advertising. They learned that they have a choice. 20% of 16 to 34-year-olds use an ad blocker online.
Overwhelmingly, people flee websites that pop up annoying invites and ads when they first land on the page.
They’re choosing to consume media that doesn’t force them to sit through commercials.
This is why influencer marketing and affiliate marketing have become so effective.
The influencer marketing industry is expected to hit 16.4 billion by the end of this year.
Influencer marketing is when you as a brand pay an influencer (someone with a notable follower base) to promote your product or service.
Influencers use affiliate marketing or affiliate links to promote your product so they credit or commission for the sales they send your way.
This is what’s called sponsored content.
The reason influencer marketing is so effective is because they’ve built what feels like a close connection with thousands or millions of followers.
Their followers trust them and the products they recommend.
For the customer, it feels like a friend is recommending the product or service to them.
It’s a much more organic delivery than to disrupt someone’s screen with an unsolicited ad, and that’s why influencer marketing and affiliate marketing work so well.
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10. Integrates Marketing with Mobile Technology
According to research by IBM, mobile transactions are increasing at the lightning-fast speed of 35% year over year.
But it’s not just the actual buying and selling happening on mobile.
People are increasingly using their mobile phones as a kind of augmented reality layered over a business.
They’re looking at reviews and product information while in your store. They may be ordering online or communicating with customer care en route.
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5 Ways to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy
With this constantly changing environment, marketers should look to continuously update and refine digital marketing strategies so as not to become stale or lost in the noise. Here are 5 ways marketers can re-evaluate digital marketing objectives to maximize impact and results.
1. Focus on Conversion, Not Just Leads
One of the most important pillars of a winning digital marketing strategy is data. Data and metrics should influence every decision and action that a marketing team takes. In today’s market, this means digging through the data to understand where potential customers are spending their time (which social platforms and websites), and then targeting them with specific content.
While B2C marketing teams traditionally take the approach of casting a wide net and hoping for the best, advances in big data and machine learning have made it possible to dig deeper and impact conversion rates on an individual level. By targeting specific demographics and audience segments with certain types of content, incentives, or product recommendations, marketers can go further in pushing the customer’s decision toward a purchase.
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2. Set the Stage for Long-Term Value
While it may be tempting to shoot for short-term wins, marketers should always consider long-term value when making strategy decisions. Before pouring resources into a one-off campaign for a specific social media platform, marketers would be wise to perform due diligence and research to ensure the investment will pay off in the long term.
This mindset also applies to tools and solutions. When navigating the purchasing process, marketers should make sure the solutions are positioned to help the team succeed in the long run, not just solve short-term problems. While it’s not critical to have every detail of a multi-year strategy ironed out, it is a good idea to have a plan for growth and an understanding for how a tool will help make that plan a reality.
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3. Double Down on Customer Service
Digital marketers may be thinking, “What does customer service have to do with me?” Although it’s sometimes easy to forget, every single interaction a customer has with a brand impacts their opinion of that brand, and is thus considered ‘customer service’. This is even more important for digital companies that must repeat brand-conscious customer service tactics across multiple platforms and channels. This is a critical component of achieving success with omnichannel marketing, which means ensuring a single customer has a seamless, integrated buying experience, no matter the platform or channel.
Even though the concept of customer service may feel like a more fundamental concern for brick-and-mortar stores than online retailers, many of today’s brands have shown the importance of stellar service in e-commerce experiences. Digital marketers play a key role in establishing a customer-centric reputation for the brand. Whether this is through personalized emails, welcome pages, or customized product recommendations, that personal touch can make a huge difference in the eyes of the customer.
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4. Create the Ultimate Buying Journey
As it becomes easier for marketers to understand their consumer audience in more depth, it’s also possible to refine processes and create the ultimate buying journey. Digital marketers can see exactly what content is most successful among consumers, and then strategically build upon that momentum for maximum returns. If, for example, a brand knows a majority of customers are coming to their website via social media, it can beef up social campaigns and design smoother workflows to help the customer from point A to point B.
Creating the ultimate buying journey for customers also means optimizing their online and mobile shopping experiences. As shopping moves online, and online shopping moves to mobile, brands must make sure their sites render well, are consistent with brand guidelines, and make it simple for shoppers to find what they’re looking for. After all, the smoother the buying journey, the higher the likelihood of a conversion.
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5. Know When and How to Go Back and Refine Processes
While talking about refining processes is easy, it’s a little more difficult for marketers to actually get their hands dirty. If a workflow or process just isn’t working, it might be time to go back and re-evaluate where things went wrong. This is also a great opportunity to A/B test different campaigns and strategies. Marketing itself is a constantly changing landscape, and digital marketing is one of its most dynamic features. Marketers need to keep their eyes on the metrics and data to stay informed about the processes that are working, and where it may be time to refine.
