Prioritise Your Digital Marketing
Prioritise Your Digital Marketing
By: The Media Clique
Internet Marketing, Digital Marketing, E Marketing – so many names for one seemingly insignificant but exceedingly important global force – the force that shapes and influences consumer behaviour and impact business everywhere in today’s world.
Digital Marketing and its BFF’s, Social Media and Content, plays an ever-increasing role in shaping today’s consumer behaviour, but how exactly does it positively impact businesses? Why spend money on something that can’t really be measured and isn’t quantifiable?
Well, for starters…
It actually IS quantifiable – we’re talking analytics
When printing flyers or running radio ads, it’s hard to determine your successes. With Digital Marketing, you can determine the success of each ad or social media post by looking at your analytics – easily determining which ads perform better. Analytics can be traced from the get-go, allowing you to make changes to advertisement wording or artwork before spending large amounts on non-performing ads. The best part – it can all be done in seconds.
It’s cost-effective
Traditional advertising is expensive! Television ads, radio ads, ads in magazines, paid for PR – all carry a hefty price tag. Today, these mediums have equivalents online. There’s social media instead of flyers; great services like Fiverr that can create videos and other animations to be used on Youtube or Vimeo; there’s blogs instead of magazines. Some of these are free or available at a fraction of the cost. It should just be managed and your strategies developed.
Location, Location, Location? Not anymore…
The biggest consideration when opening a business used to be the perfect location. While location is still important when you need feet off the street, the age of Digital Marketing has levelled the playing field. Today’s consumers are tech-savvy and are much more likely to look you up on the web for referrals, before just popping in. As such, you need to be easily findable on the web, have high search rankings and updated information to reach your desired clientele.
You’re reaching customers on their mobile devices
The majority of South Africans (84% to be exact) access the internet via their mobile devices. It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3 to create websites that are mobile friendly. PPC, Google’s expanded text ads ensures that one format adjusts across devices, as such creatives for all your advertising campaigns can be created to be scalable and optimized. Your Digital Presence and local SEO will only become more important as more people rely on their mobile devices to access the internet.
Stay ahead of your Competitors
With the right strategy and high quality, valuable content – you will always be able to stay ahead of the pack. You want the customers that are searching for you and your services to reach you at the click of a button. With active social media accounts and a little bit of PR (and some SEO tweaking!) your business will be highlighted through any local or organic search.
Engagement = Trust
When your business is digitally aligned, you can pick up on any negative press before any damage turns into a real issue. If you engage with your customers, showing the appropriate amount of concern, consideration and care, you will gain their trust, respect and repeat-business (in addition to more customers via word-of-mouth referrals). We all love great customer service. Seeing a business go the extra mile and add that personal touch can often make the difference between a celebrated reputation and an inferior one.
You can save a lot of time on educating your customers
Digital Marketing gives brands the ability to educate their customers and share additional information about their products - enabling a richer and more satisfying customer experience. By sharing additional information online, businesses can save on operational costs while ensuring that customers get information on what they want, when they want it.
Brand awareness – no problem
The potential for Digital Marketing is immense. Whether you want to take a shotgun approach (focussed on a wide target-market) or a rifle approach (focussed on a narrow audience with a very specific message) – getting out the message out about your Brand is easier than it has ever been before. When in the process of building your Brand, it is however important to note that a good story, coupled with a strategic campaign could be a better investment than a single ad campaign.
Digital Marketing will bring your Brand’s story to people who might otherwise never have known about it. Make sure your story is unique, worth hearing and adds value. Marketing online is your best chance to be heard and seen, literally bringing your product/s to the fingertips of people that might need your product/s or service or those that would like to learn more about it.
