From toddlers to retirees, it is impossible for anyone living in the developed world to have missed the fact that – in the space of just a few short years – everything has changed. In just about every way, the world has switched gear from analogue to digital – and your business must too.
It’s good news
The digital revolution has connected the world in previously unforeseen ways, and when it comes to marketing your product or service, that is very good news. But why is digital marketing so crucial for your business? Because it is fast replacing its more traditional counterparts, which in the space of just a few years might be gone completely.
There are other reasons you need to fully embrace digital marketing for your business right now:
The reach
While fewer and fewer people are buying print newspapers, more and more people – of every age and generation and belonging to every socio-economic group – are turning on laptops, iPads and smartphones. Statistics show that in a country like Australia, almost everyone – more than 90% of the population – are now online. That’s an awful lot of potential customers, all within your grasp.
It’s faster
As quickly as you can click a mouse button, you can be digitally marketing your product to a specifically-targeted audience. And not just that, by sitting in the driver’s seat of your website, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, you can stay in control and ensure that changes of strategy in your mind can be instantaneously delivered to your customers without involving a sluggish and expensive middle-man.
It’s more affordable
Before, you would market your business in costly traditional ways, such as in phone books and directories, and even in magazines, newspapers and on radio and television. But your customers are now online, learning not only about the world but the products they want to buy through things like Google search and Facebook. That is not only good news for your hip pocket – with online marketing costing a mere fraction of traditional marketing but potentially reaching a much bigger audience – but also for your business at large, because it levels the playing field when it comes to competing against even much bigger businesses with huge marketing budgets. Banner ads, pay-per-click, email, mobile and social media advertising are as achievable for you as they are for the biggest of your rivals.
It allows you to get creative
With traditional marketing, those with the biggest budgets won the day and the customer. But digital marketing not only levels the playing field when it comes to the more affordable outlets of today, it allows you to get creative. Now, high creativity and motivation allows you to out-strategise and out-research your competitors with much bigger budgets by using creative ideas and clever content, with blogs not only keeping your audience entertained, engaged and up-to-date but your all-important SEO value as high as possible.
It connects you with your customers
Social media channels in particular allow you to cut through the usual marketing hype and connect directly with your customers. Engaging and interacting with current and prospective clients, for example through comments sections, not only builds your brand and gives you fast access to honest feedback, it allows you to build real and genuine relationships with your clients, gaining their trust and getting instant recommendations to their ‘friends’. It also gives you a direct line to your targeted demographic, and an opportunity to simply ask them a question and get an honest, uncensored answer, because constructive criticism can be even more valuable than compliments.
You know exactly what is going on
The speed, cost and creativity aside, the huge benefit of digital marketing is the level of feedback it gives you, coupled with the many levers of versatility you can then apply to making your campaigns even more effective. As the sophistication of the various digital marketing platforms increases, so too does the amount of data that feeds back to you about the impact of those strategies. While traditional marketing forms required you to do ultra-expensive market and customer research, digital results are now fed back to you with remarkable accuracy and detail, and in real time, allowing you to constantly tweak and perfect the way your message is delivered to potential customers. And it’s not just things like sophisticated digital analytics, but the simple promotion of a ‘hashtag’ that will give you instant insight into what people think and are saying about you, and what they want you to do differently.
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