Things used to be done differently in the marketing world.
Before, you needed huge budgets and marketing experts to advertise your products and services through traditional media.
Now, you can effectively market with as little effort as having a social media account and excellent SEO skills.
This made it very easy for small businesses, who usually don’t have a large marketing budget, to reach out to customers.
With the average American spending 4.7 hours of their 15-hour awake time online, and 70% of adults having at least one social media account, you can say that the Internet provides a great opportunity for marketing.
Here are some of the benefits to using online marketing in your business.
Targeted Audience
Social media has taken the guesswork out of marketing.
Most traditional media, such as television, radio and billboards are like gambling, where you put out your content and hope your target audience sees it. Moreover, you could only reach an audience in a certain location where the media is published.
With social media, you can reach a target audience from all over the world, you know exactly where they are online and can advertise directly to them.
You can even get them together by creating social media pages and groups where they can follow you and keep up with your brand. To keep them interested, update your social media regularly and plan your posts around things relevant to that target audience.
*If you’d like some very detailed step by step free training videos on Facebook advertising click here
Engagement
This was one of the biggest problems with traditional marketing—no engagement.
With social media, you can get your audience involved in conversations and get their feedback. The consumer landscape has also changed; people want to make informed purchase decisions, and social media provides platforms to do that.
Also, your in-depth conversations with your customers will help them understand your brand, products and services better.
Due to the growth of customer engagement, content has become a crucial aspect of marketing.
According to the Marketing Insider Group, 90% of companies primarily use content for marketing. To keep up with the competition, use blogs and social media platforms and talk about topics your audience is interested in.
This is an opportunity to build a relationship with your audience and show them that you care about their welfare beyond selling a product.
Alternating marketing content with general, informative content would also work well to attract your target audience’s attention.
Tracking
It’s important to know if your marketing efforts are working so you could decide which ones to improve and which ones to let go.
Traditional media offered very little opportunity to do so.
Tracking your marketing campaigns are essential because it assists you in making business decisions that will help your business grow and make profits.
According to Oracle, 53% of top businesses use analytics to drive strategy while 50% use them to transform daily operations from which they have seen three times the improvement on their company’s overall performance.
If you are not utilizing analytics yet, you need to start now and track the progress of your business. This will help make strategic marketing decisions for your business, which will lead to an increase in conversions and profit.
*If you’d like to use a tool for tracking, this one is one of the best, check it out by clicking here
On the Flip Side …
There are billions of content and marketing material online.
According to The Radicati group, an average person receives about 90 emails per day.
On top of that, there are the hundreds of articles they browse through, plus all the marketing pop-up advertisements, lead capture pages, etc. that they come across on a daily basis.
The Internet has made it easier for your content to get lost fast or, worse, to never even be seen by a single potential client.
With traditional media, you know your television advertisement is going to be seen by someone. After you submit it to the agency of your choice, you didn’t need to do much work.
With digital marketing, you have to understand the mechanics of the Internet. You have to learn how to craft your content so that it can get picked up by search engines and appear at the top of the search pages when users type in words related to your product, as well as know who your target audience is.
Also, people may decide not to interact with your page if it does not appeal to them. Thus, you have to learn to create engaging, informative content that influences your target audience’s buying decision without being pushy.
One thing to remember is that people want value online, so if your content is always trying to sell something, people will not want to interact with your page.
Content makes up 50% of what contributes to sales; you have to get the right mix to make a profit. Make any mistakes and you reduce your chance of getting a sale by 40%, according to Marketing Inside Group.
Digital marketing is more complex and demanding than traditional marketing.
There are many rules and metrics that marketers have to learn, and you still need to understand them even if you are hiring someone to do it for you.
You also need to know the content creation process, upkeep of a website, social media marketing and traffic generation, which could require more work than traditional media.
If you are wanting to educate yourself more on the many ways you can market your business online, watch a short video here.
Verdict?
No one can argue that the Internet has made it much easier for businesses to market themselves.
It provides a ready, targeted audience, and you can advertise on a very small budget. Companies can develop relationships with their customers while improving brand loyalty and product understanding.
However, it also made things more complex, which can be very taxing and confusing especially to new marketers.
The good news is, all the knowledge and information one needs to build a strong digital marketing campaign is available, so marketing doesn’t have to be such a stressful task.
