Marketing has changed. A lot. If your marketing strategy hasn’t kept up with new trends and technology, you’re losing profits to your competitors who have invested the time and money into refining their strategies. Digital helps your marketing make more impact on your business than any previous way of marketing, and it puts more money into your business. Digital methods are progressive and can change easily with new direction and ideas, smoothing business model transitions. Here’s how digital marketing helps your business grow.
Reach More of the Right People
Marketing can sometimes feel like shooting in the dark. How do you know if you’re leaving an impression on anyone, let alone persuading them to learn more about what it is you do? Your marketing personas, or your ideal clients, guide the direction of your strategy. They have certain needs, wants, behaviors, and qualities that drive them to buy in your industry. But catering to that client type needs to be as personalized as possible if you want to stand out from everyone you’re competing with.
Technology designed for digital marketing are guides for how you should be cultivating your strategy. Tools like Google Analytics, Moz, and SEMRush provide insight on important details of your target audience, such as:
- Age
- Interests
- Location
- Words they are searching for in search engines
- Products and services they want the most
- Problems and challenges they face that make them look to your industry for solutions.
With this kind of information at your fingertips, you can create a laser-focused marketing strategy directed at the people who want to buy your products and services. Digital marketing lets you reach more people than ever before. Most of your customers do all their shopping online (96% of Americans, according to BigCommerce). If you’re not in that space, you’re missing out on that 96%.
Get Noticed Where People Are Looking With SEO
If you’re like one of the millions of people around the world, you use search engines like Google to quickly find what you need. Your customers are searching for what they need, just like you are. If search engines are unable to find you, it’s unlikely the majority of people will be able to find you either.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website easy to find in search engines. When people enter keywords into a search bar, the pages that are well optimized are the ones that pop up on the first page. If you want to be on the first page, you need a website that is optimized for:
- Keywords
- Content
- Images
- Video
- Readability
- Internal links
- Website speed
- Website structure
- Website security
- Localization
If that seems like a lot, it’s because search engines take website authority and helpfulness extremely seriously. The less definitive a website seems on a particular topic, the less likely it is to draw much attention. It’s all about how quickly and easily the customer can find what they need. Strong SEO establishes your business as the one that will fulfill their needs and answers their questions.
Get Tangible, Measurable Results From Your Marketing Efforts
Traditional marketing has always had some ambiguity about it. How do you really know if you’re getting out what you put into it? What if you’re wasting valuable money on marketing campaigns that are ineffective and do little to help sell? With digital marketing, everything is transparent. Your marketing team can track all available marketing data to determine a variety of important topics like:
- Conversion rates
- Website traffic
- Email subscriptions
- Click-through rates
This data is essential because it shows what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs improvement. A marketing strategy has to be constantly evolving to compel the right people to buy. Hard data about your successes and failure lay out the roadmap for that evolution. A reliable marketing consultant can ensure that evolution takes place competently and successfully.
Digital Marketing Persuades More People to Buy What You Sell
One of the most challenging aspects of marketing is using it to inspire people to take the actions you want them to take. It’s hard to know just how to make a plan that motivates prospects, or how people respond to different types of campaigns and concepts.
Digital marketing uses the customer journey to entice them into taking that action. Your marketing team leads people to take one step after the next when viewing one of your online platforms. These platforms include:
- Websites with Calls-To-Action, beautiful design, and compelling copy
- Email marketing campaigns that offer special deals and important news and information for customers
- Social media profiles on channels like Facebook and Twitter for regular social postings about your business and industry
How can this be done methodically and not as a guessing game? Data is key here. Using analytics data, they can modify every part of your strategy, depending on:
- Which web pages people click on the most
- How people enter your website
- The last page they visit before they leave
- Social media likes, post engagement, and post reach
- Email click-through rates
These modifications not only make interacting with your brand more enjoyable and meaningful for your customers but also make your investments in marketing more meaningful and impactful for your business.
Digital Marketing Builds Customer Loyalty and Brand Reputation
Marketing can no longer be a purely reactive process. The less your brand interacts with your customers, the more likely your customers are to fall off and be scooped up by your competition. People want to sense a symbiotic relationship going on that caters to what they like and what they need. Marketing needs to be proactive and consistent. It needs to make existing and potential customers excited about what you do. You need to establish yourself as an industry leader so that your customers feel well taken care of and reassured that they are buying from the best in the business.
A digital marketing specialist can generate awareness, hype, and passion for your brand through proven tactics:
- Content marketing: This means giving your customers entertaining and educational content like blogs, videos, and infographics. You’re an expert in your industry, and this is your chance to show people how much you know.
- Social media marketing: Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter is another declaration of your business to the world. By pushing content, showcasing ads, and talking to customers directly through comments and in messages, you can facilitate customer loyalty in ways unthinkable in a pre-social media era.
- Email marketing: Do you have special offers and important content that you want people to see? Email marketing lets you not only alert people but inform the ones who show the most interest in your emails.
- SEO: Your website will never be found unless it is optimized to be crawled by search engines. Your digital marketer will optimize your web content with keywords, images, meta descriptions, title tags, XML sitemaps, and manage the speed of your site.
These tactics project the story of your business to the world and teach everyone about what it is you do. It’s not about telling people why they should care about your business; it’s about giving them a reason to care.
With platforms like social media and blogging, marketing can be more personal than ever before. You can talk directly with your customers to answer their questions, solve their problems, or simply thank them for reaching out. Plus, with all that data at hand, you can determine the topics they’re more interested in that would make for great new blogs, new videos, and new ways to explain why your products and services get what they want.
This kind of interaction and information makes your customers more likely to trust your brand and trust what you sell. It’s all about creating a strong relationship with them.
Stand With Your Competitors, Both Big and Small
Chances are, your competition has already adopted digital marketing strategies. That means they’re ahead of you. But you can catch up with a website and a robust digital marketing plan to accompany it.
Even the big names in your industry have to play by the same rules online that you do. There’s no way to trick search engines or the rest of the online world–not in a way that yields long-term positive results. With the right plan, you can beat them in a way that you never could in the past. Anyone can reach most people, but reaching the right people only happens through careful research and preparation. When you know your audience, it doesn’t matter who has the biggest budget or the most employees; what matters is knowing how to stand out and appeal to them better than the competition.
The way your competitors handle online marketing isn’t secret either. Tools like SpyFu allow you to literally spy on competitors’ websites and see how they’re using SEO to drive traffic. See how they’re performing on search engines, what’s yielding the greatest success for them, what kinds of paid search campaigns they are running, and what you can do to outrank them.
You might find out you’re not as far behind in the game as you thought. Your competitors’ websites might look pristine at surface-level, but pulling back the curtain can reveal a lot of surprising weaknesses in their strategy. Consider how you can use these weaknesses to your advantage and build a better marketing plan right from scratch, avoiding some future makeovers or backtracking. Stay vigilant, and don’t lose your competitive spirit, even if the business you’re racing with is bigger than yours. With enough work, you will become just as formidable in the online landscape as they are, if not more so.
Digital marketing is the present and future path forward. Don’t let your fear of something new leave you behind. We specialize in professional online strategies for small businesses. We can help you push your message to an audience that wants what you offer and will become the kinds of dedicated customers that help your business thrive. We also keep you updated on all the numbers and provide you with the charts and statistics that show how your strategy is helping your business, as well as what can improve in the future.
Let’s get you up to speed starting now.
