» What is the importance of digital marketing?
Digital marketing is much more than just having an online (including social media) presence. Digital marketing means promoting your products, services, and other propositions through digital channels using carefully designed strategies, which are optimized for your business goals. These digital channels can be search engines, websites, social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Whatsapp, Pinterest), Email and Mobile applications.
Digital marketing companies make use of strategies like Search engine optimization, Pay-per-Click advertising, online reputation management, Content marketing, video marketing, Website design, Guest Posts, Public relations, and Blogging, etc.
Digital marketing is extremely beneficial for businesses, be it large, small or medium. Effectively crafted strategies keeping in mind your objectives, nature of the business, spends, etc. go a long way in making your business profitable and sustainable. Some of the benefits of digital marketing are:
› A better understanding of your intended audiences:
Businesses and brands have to not only deal with competition from other brands but also short attention spans of consumers. Digital marketing makes this very simple. Businesses can use metrics to understand the demographics of the current and intended audiences- Age, Location, Income, Interests, Purchasing behaviour, etc. These tools also enable businesses to track and analyze the behaviour of consumers for them to predict their preferences in the future and change them accordingly.
› Direct engagement with your audiences:
Unlike traditional media that is uni-directional, digital media is interactive and two-way. Through the content that you push through digital marketing, you can encourage your audiences to comment, like, and share your posts. You can create contests, roll out deals and promotions that encourage audiences to find out about your business and engage with it.
Digital marketing can help you enhance customer loyalty by incentivizing the audiences thereby making them feel rewarded and ensuring that they remain loyal towards your brand for a long time to come.
› Better brand visibility:
The more you share informative and educational content about your brand, a larger number of people get to know about your business. Better the audiences get to know you; more is the probability of them becoming familiar with your brand and sharing the content with their peers.
This leads to more traffic being driven to your website and an increase in the possibility of lead generation and conversion into sales.
› More online conversions:
Once the audiences get to know you after you build your digital marketing, start engaging with your brand and begin trusting you, they are more likely to make a favourable purchase decision quickly.
› Track performance and Returns on Investment:
For small businesses, every rupee of monetary investment in digital marketing matters. Therefore, it becomes even more important for them to track the performance of their strategies. It is important to understand what is working and what is not and take corrective action, if required. This helps in avoiding the smaller mistakes turning into larger problems later on.