5 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Matters Now More Than Ever

Digital marketing is becoming more important than ever. But not every business owner is aware of how vital digital channels are for expanding business reach and connecting with the audiences.

Still, have doubts? Here are five reasons why.

1. More affordable

The one big truth is that online marketing is much more affordable than traditional, brick-and-mortar marketing like print, television, radio spots and other display ads. Paying for ad space like TV commercials is not cheap and thus, traditional marketing can be out of the financial reach of many small business owners.

On the other hand, digital advertising is the most cost-effective way to market your business, where every organization can have the chance of catching the audience attention on the same platform. If you’re new, social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, … are wonderful tools to build up customer relationships and they are completely free to join. If you already own a website, putting content on the website only costs you time. Of course, there will always be additional costs associated with getting professional help – but it’s much more bearable than producing TV commercials and airing them on prime time.

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2. Measurable results

When it comes to digital advertising, data and results are easily recorded. With Facebook Insights, Google Analytics or any other insight tools offered by most social media platforms, business owners can track customer engagement and interaction rates, reach percentage, sales numbers, …online advertising also enables business users to easily target audience by providing detailed analysis of their behaviors, age, locations, interests, hobbies and personality traits.

With traditional marketing, it’s more difficult to measure ROI as the audience is so much broader. For example, how can you estimate the number of people seeing a print ad on the street? Seems impossible.

Unlike traditional methods, digital channels allow us to monitor the number of people landing on the page and especially how many converted to buyers. In terms of paid advertising, you can also use A/B tests to identify the most converting ad placements, contents or designs.

3. Customer engagement

With over 53% of the world’s population on social media, we can imagine how wide the reach on social media platforms can be.

Business owners can easily engage and interact with audience on a daily basis to make sure their brands are not forgotten. Besides, social media networks like Facebook, Instagram and even TikTok are updating regularly with new functions every day to bring out the best user experiences – so why don’t we take advantage of that? Online environment is very sharable: utilizing share buttons on social media enables your message to be shared incredibly quickly.

It’s quite clear that businesses can go viral quicker on digital platforms but there’s no easy game. In order to capture the customer’s attention, contents are what distinguish one business from the other. Without good content, there is nothing to get you connected with your customers. And in an increasingly competitive market, great content now are about the customer rather than the marketing or the company. Did you know that nowadays, businesses only have 1.7 seconds to grab audience’s attention on social media before they scroll down? While customers have so much information available to consume, their attention span gets shorter. The heat is on: content is now king.

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4. Accurately targeting

Digital advertising enables business owners to deliver the right message at the right time in the right place – if we know how to utilize all the tools. Programmatic advertising has become an effective tool for marketers, as it has pricing efficiencies thanks to automatic bidding, and uses customer data to more precisely target individuals.

With traditional marketing, everything gets more complicated. For instance, TV ads utilize multiple connected devices exhibiting similar behaviors or common logins across devices to target audience and collect user data. But those data are inaccessible, or we will have to pay a really high price for data collection services.

But to maximize the results of paid advertising, business owners must understand not only who you’re targeting (their age, their location, their hobbies and interests) but also the setting that they’re in and the relationship they are having with the brand. Rather than selecting a wide group of potential audience, it’s better to break them down into very targeted groups and get a high convertible audience.

5. Everything is becoming digital

Technology has become an every-day part of our lives and business models are being disrupted, accordingly. Today, 90% of the business owners say they need technical skills to adapt to a rapidly changing environment: the environment in which the world’s largest taxi company (Uber) owns no cars; the world’s most popular media owner (Facebook) creates no content and the most valuable retailer (Alibaba) sells nothing.

Not to mention there are a lot of changes in the business landscape since COVID-19 hits the world and the global pandemic is shaping customer behaviors in many ways. During the pandemic:

• 45% of customers surveyed by PwC indicated that their mobile phone has become a shopping channel.
• The engagement with mobile ad increases by 15% during the pandemic
• Social media usage consumption rose by 58%.
• The daily users of Zoom sky-rocketed from 10 million to over 200 million in March/2020.

And marketing is not an exception, not only for the temporary adaption but also for the sustainable development of businesses. The online environment is where your customers are.