As technology becomes more essential in our daily lives, almost everyone is turning to the digital world for information and personal interactions.
Each day, magazines are folding, and newspapers are increasingly becoming online publications. These changes have significantly affected the marketing industry. Many businesses struggle with deciding whether to continue conducting their marketing activities the old way (use of radio stations, televisions, flyers, and more) or embrace digital marketing.
Marketing, in whatever form, is the act of connecting with your target audience with a bid to convince them toward purchasing or subscribing for specific products and services. It’s one of the most important activities that all businesses must partake in. After all, no business can survive without excellent marketing strategies and publicity.
Every business must decide which marketing approach they should use in their attempts to connect with their prospects. These decisions aren’t easy as the business decision makers must come up with concrete information regarding the following questions;
- Which marketing approach will give the highest benefits for my money?
- How do I know if the chosen marketing approach will work excellently for my business?
- Who should I trust with all my marketing activities?
- Should I undertake the task myself?
Talk to most shoppers, and you will be surprised how things have changed over the last decade. Most of them prefer checking products online before purchasing them in the local stores or even prefer purchasing whatever they need online. Such changes have changed the way marketers connect with their existing customers and prospects, leading to increased use of digital marketing approach. According to Ric Dean at Caffeinated, here is how digital marketing offers a better ROI than the traditional methods of marketing.
1. Low cost
One of the biggest financial burdens that every business must bear is marketing costs. While giant corporations may have no issue with dolling out millions for marketing activities, small business owners may find this a nightmare or impossible.
Fortunately, digital marketing is associated with minimal costs as compared to the traditional methods of marketing such as advertising your products and services via televisions, radios, newspapers, and more. This marketing option requires less effort too. For instance, you can subscribe to an email marketing service provider (at an affordable price) and send thousands of direct emails to your prospects!
2. Significant returns on investment
No doubt, nothing matters more to any business than the level of return on any investment it makes. Online marketing provides substantial returns on even small investments. For instance, running advertising campaigns on social media or email marketing or combination of the two strategies allows you to reach a broad audience and stand a chance of winning a large number of new customers. Surprisingly, these marketing activities cost far less than even getting your business aired on a local TV channel in just one day.
3. It’s measurable
You can easily ascertain the success of any digital marketing campaign. Unlike the traditional marketing where you must wait for a few weeks or months to estimate the veracity of a marketing campaign, digital marketing allows you to determine the number of people you have reached in a single day and how they are reacting to your information. For instance, you can easily monitor how an ad is performing at the comfort of your home or office.
Besides, different email marketing software allows you to track the performance of the emails you send to your target audience. For instance, you can determine the emails that were delivered, how many times the recipient read the emails, how many clicked the links to your products, and more. Google Analytics is also an effective tool for estimating your blog or website goals. Google AdWords manager allows you to monitor the performance of your ads on Google search. The tools can show you the number of people viewing your ad and get a detailed report about their conversion rates.
4. You can easily adjust your marketing campaigns
Since you can get real-time data on the performance of your marketing campaigns (something lacking in traditional marketing methods), you easily alter the campaigns to perform better. For instance, if you notice that your marketing campaign is performing excellently, you can easily invest more in it with just a few clicks. For a poorly performing ad, you can adjust it accordingly or stop it.
Unfortunately, traditional marketing methods don’t offer you an opportunity to know how the campaign is performing. That means you may not make adjustments based on real-time performance data because such data isn’t available instantly. Besides, these marketing methods are associated with a mountain of paperwork to be signed especially where marketing agreements are on long-basis. That means adjustments may be impossible before the expiration period even if the campaign isn’t performing as expected.
5. Better engagement
As much as we love and praise this digital era, we shouldn’t deny the fact that the cyber world is becoming noisier day by day. Most of the products and services you offer are also being offered by countless competitors. That means the average bounce rate on most websites is increasing (because the visitors have countless options) and the attention span is dropping (these visitors simply scan content within seconds and move to the next site if they don’t spot what they need).
One way of staying relevant and keeping these customers thinking and talking about your brand is to ensure continuous engagement with your audience through digital media channels. While an interesting advertisement on television may sound interesting, digital marketing options offer better engagement.
For instance, an engaging Facebook post (with graphics) allows your customers to react to the post, post comments, ask questions, criticize, praise, and getting more information about your brand as you respond to their concerns and comments. That means you can easily alleviate misconceptions and even increase sales using regular informative blog posts, shows, newsletters, promotions, and special offers.
Conclusion
Most experts recommend digital marketing for businesses intending to get better returns on their investments. However, there are instances where you may need to incorporate both digital and traditional marketing tactics.