6. The Beginner's Guide to Digital Marketing
How Important is Digital Marketing for the Future?
Digital marketing is booming and isn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Many businesses are shifting from traditional marketing to marketing their business online. You might be wondering why digital marketing is so important to the future of your business. Read on to find out.
"If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be
out of business."
Everyone is online, so every business must go digital. According to broadbandsearch.com, adults are spending an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media each day, and mobile is one of the primary factors driving web traffic. This is more time than we’re spending doing housework, socializing, shopping, and eating and drinking. Almost everyone has the internet at their fingertips, literally, so why not market where they are? Bill Gates wasn’t kidding when he said “if your business is not on the internet then your business will be out of business”.
Versatile
The definition of digital marketing according to Investopedia is “the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach consumers.” Simply put, digital marketing is marketing online. Since people can be online just about anywhere, digital marketing can be used almost anywhere and through multiple channels. Digital marketing is super mobile friendly since almost everyone is accessing their social media through their mobile devices. Digital marketing can be used with blogging, content marketing, social media marketing, and e-mail marketing to name a few. With digital marketing being used across multiple channels, you can reach your customers almost everywhere they go.
More Growth Opportunities
The fact that everyone is online and viewing social media for hours per day allows your business to reach a wide yet targeted audience through multiple channels. You can run your business from small town America and reach a worldwide audience with digital marketing. Reaching this global audience will allow you to scale your business faster than ever before and lead to much higher conversion rates.
Since digital marketing is much more cost effective than traditional marketing, you obtain faster economic growth and return on investment. According to Google, companies who have incorporated digital marketing plans have 2.8 times higher revenue growth expectancy. The increased potential for growth opportunity and the versatility of digital marketing levels the playing field for small businesses compared to large companies.
More Effective Than Traditional Marketing
Social media and digital marketing gives your business more engagement opportunities with potential and loyal customers alike. You’re able to interact with leads and customers without delay. When you’re able to give your customers more interaction and immediate feedback to questions, complaints, or positive reviews, you’re able to address customers needs and build their trust. This kind of connection allows your customers’ voice to be heard and makes marketing more personalized to their needs.
Analytics
Now that you’ve put out the effort to market your business online, you want to be able to track the results of your efforts. Digital marketing makes it easier to track, since everything is online. Traditional marketing effectiveness is harder to track, because you have to rely on customer surveys for information.
Website engagement can be tracked using tools like Google Analytics, which allows you to, “Get insight into every step of your customer’s journey on your website, then use analytics to elevate your impact.”
With Google Analytics, you can:
- Measure traffic sources to determine where your website audience originated
- Get insights into aggregated audience demographics like age, gender and country
- Compare results by channel to see which marketing channels perform best
- Make more informed decisions for your business by getting a better understanding of your customer journey.
Take a look at our guide on How to Use Google Analytics for an abbreviated instruction on setting up website analytics for your business.
Another way to measure results is by tracking your social media followers, shares, comments, and other content engagements. With this tracking, you’re able to determine what digital marketing efforts are working and where you may need to pivot your methods.
Remember: This is real-time data that you’re able to track using Google Analytics and social media, so you’re able to pivot your methods very quickly when necessary.
Digital Marketing Courses
The rise of digital marketing courses displays how important digital marketing is to the future. Digital marketing continues to evolve and grow, so new and continued education in this field is very important. Many colleges and universities are offering digital marketing courses on campus and online.
The array of digital marketing courses opens up new career and learning opportunities for interested students, professionals, and individuals looking to change their career path. Courses found online through colleges, universities, and large marketing agencies will help students and individuals in gaining knowledge of new trends and practices in the digital marketing field. Courses range from beginner to advanced, so individuals can continue to build on their digital marketing expertise. The multitude of courses proves that digital marketing is here to stay and will only grow bigger with time.
Ready to get started? We’re here to help! contact@orionglobalmarketing.com
Keep reading!
There’s still so much more to learn about digital marketing!
Keep reading!
There’s still so much more to learn about digital marketing!