We live in a digital world, which means Internet marketing or digital marketing is more important than ever for businesses. If your business doesn’t have an online presence, you’re missing out on valuable interactions between you and your customers. And on top of that, you could be losing business to your competitors. Furthermore, this marketing is important for E-commerce businesses, real estate businesses, or any non-e-commerce business. If you’re still not sure whether or not to bring the Internet into your marketing strategy, I have multiple reasons why you should. So, in this post, I will discuss some major benefits of digital marketing.
Just to make sure we’re on the same page here, I will tell you what digital marketing is and what strategies are a part of digital marketing.
Digital marketing is the umbrella term for a bunch of online strategies that help promote a business online. You can break it down into a ton of different strategies. However, some of the most basic aspects of Internet marketing are:
Digital marketing strategies
- Search engine optimization (or SEO), deals with optimizing your website so it shows up in search engines.
- Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC), is online advertising that you only pay for when people click on your ads.
- Social media marketing uses social media to engage with potential customers.
- Content marketing is creating written content, videos, photos, graphics, and more to engage with your target audience.
Well, these are the foundations. Now let’s build on it with reasons why you should use digital marketing, and why internet marketing matters for businesses?
Benefits of digital marketing
Internet marketing reaches people when they’re looking for information.
With traditional advertising, your billboards, radio ads, and TV ads are seen and heard by a lot of people…with a good portion of the audience not interested at all in what you’re pushing. It’s not targeted very well. With Internet marketing, you don’t have to push. The goal is to have the content, the landing pages, the product pages, the videos, etc. ready when people want to find your business or something your business offers.
For example, you have an e-commerce store that sells car parts, and you publish a helpful guide that helps match people to the right part for their needs. Someone looking for advice on what car part to buy finds your guide with a quick Google search and in the end, sees that you have the exact part they need.
What a coincidence! Your business was in the right place at the right time and ended up getting a sale because you used Internet marketing to have content on your website that converts. Just magical.
You can engage people at every stage of the buying process.
With internet marketing, you can reach people at the beginning of their journeys, all the way to after they’ve made a purchase. We like to use the digital marketing funnel as a way to gauge where people are in the buying process.
First stage
Start with TOFU. At the top of the funnel, people are in the awareness phase usually looking for answers to some general questions, like, “What is a muffler?” or “How do I change my oil?” You might not immediately get a sale from a TOFU customer, but you do get your brand in their minds. If you have the resources a TOFU customer needs, they’re more likely to trust you and come to you when they’re ready to purchase.
Second stage
Next, we move to the middle of the funnel, also known as MOFU. In this part of the funnel, customers are considering their options, and it’s your job to help them make the right decision. Hopefully, ending with a purchase from your business. So maybe someone’s not sure what type of muffler their car needs. If you have content that goes over the benefits of different mufflers types, that’s a big help in their search. You can also use remarketing to get ads for mufflers in front of people who are actively looking, helping your brand stay top-of-mind.
Third stage
And then finally, there’s the bottom of the funnel (BOFU for short) where people are ready to make a purchase. Things like testimonials, reviews, and case studies can help guide people through the rest of the funnel. They should give people confidence in your product or service.
So maybe someone’s almost ready to buy a muffler from your company, but they’re not sure about the quality. They see some positive reviews on social media and a case study about how your mufflers last longer than the industry standard and finish their purchase.
Key point:
If someone doesn’t completely make it to the purchase stage or starts a purchase but jumps ship halfway through, you can still use remarketing ads to remind them that your business is there for them. Maybe they got to the final price and it was too much, so you serve them a coupon code or share a special sale. With some key touchpoints, your business can guide people from awareness to purchase.
Data lets you adjust campaigns for maximum effectiveness.
The beauty of digital marketing is that you can take advantage of the data from each of your campaigns. This is one of the biggest digital marketing benefits.
In the research stage of your strategy, so many tools exist. They help you find the right keywords, look at your competitors’ data, and put together the best action plan. Once your campaigns are in place, you can see which pages on your website are driving the most conversions, which ones are causing people to go elsewhere, how effective your ads are, how many people are looking at your social posts, and so much more. Plus, if you see that your strategy isn’t working, you can make adjustments. Maybe your blog post would be more effective with a different headline, or your bids aren’t high enough for your social ads. After the end of your campaigns, you can take a look at all of the data that has come in. In this way, you can make informed decisions about where to take your business next.
Internet marketing works for your budget.
If we’re talking digital ads, you can set a budget and choose a bidding strategy based on your campaign goals so you see the best results for your business. With a platform like Google Ads, you can even use smart bidding to automate the bidding process. You can choose from options like target cost per action, target return on ad spend or maximize conversions—depending on how much data your account has with the platform.
Things like SEO, content marketing, and social media management don’t necessarily have an associated cost unless you assign a value to how much time you spend on them or purchase any tools. Of course, hiring a digital marketing agency to do SEO, content marketing and social media management comes with a cost. However, it definitely saves you time since a lot of work goes into each strategy.
Nonetheless, all of these strategies can pay off in the end. And that’s why you should use Internet marketing. Indeed, the benefits of digital marketing cannot be denied, and working on it is fruitful.
The bottom line: Benefits of digital marketing
Well, these are the digital marketing advantages. For surely, it is worthy. The Internet marketing umbrella is huge, and while you don’t have to take advantage of every aspect, you should at least do some form of Internet marketing for your business. It’s proven to drive business growth and generate revenue. If you decide to partner with an agency for your digital marketing, don’t hesitate to contact our team of experts at contra-tec.com.
