Marketing a brand successfully is contingent on one thing: meeting your ideal customer where they are. As the world has begun going digital, a business’s marketing efforts have been forced to adapt from brand promotions on things like billboards, phonebooks, and flyers to the internet where innovation and connectivity are key.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a term used for all marketing efforts that take place online. To flourish, a business needs to connect with both current and potential customers. Digital channels are an avenue for businesses to promote their products and services. These channels include search engines, social media platforms, emails, and websites, to name a few.
Digital marketing is arguably one of the most vital steps a company should take in order to ensure the success of the business, as it not only allows the company to reach larger audiences than they normally would from more traditional marketing methods, but it targets potential customers more accurately.
What are the benefits of digital marketing?
There are several benefits to digital marketing:
- You can focus your marketing to target only the individuals who are most likely to purchase your product or service. There are several different ways to target your ideal customer. This includes things such as location, age, gender, and interest groups.
- It’s more cost-effective than other marketing methods.
- Digital marketing can allow you to compete with bigger brands. The world is your oyster when it comes to having an online presence, so you can take on bigger brands than you would ever imagine. For example, if you are a smaller company that sells cleaning products and you are marketing your products through paid search ads. You can include keywords in your campaign that larger companies like Clorox may be using. This gives you a chance to be on their playing field.
- Digital marketing is measurable. Data and metrics are used to measure things like clicks, impressions, and conversions. This information tells you what is working and what is not. If you see your impressions are not as high as you would hope for them to be, you can test new audiences, media, or copies to see if your impressions increase or decrease. The data is all at your fingertips.
- Digital marketing strategies are more adaptable and easy to make changes to. Changing campaigns on social media and search engines is much quicker and easier than removing a billboard downtown or taking down a listing in the newspaper.
- Conversion rates and lead quality are better with digital marketing. Because you can target potential customers and clients much more accurately, your conversions and leads will reflect that.
- Your audiences can engage with your company at every stage of the digital marketing effort. No matter if a campaign is brand new or very established, engagement is reflected in each step. This can be seen through things like clicks and purchases, or likes, comments, and shares. The importance of impressions is stressed yet attainable in digital marketing efforts.
Where should you start?
One of the most important platforms to have as a company is a website. Your website is likely the first place your target audience will go to find more information. A good website should be easy to navigate and contain the proper information, so the user will be encouraged to engage with the business and be more likely to convert.
From here, you need to find avenues to direct traffic to your site. Social media and search engine advertising are great places to start. These platforms help companies reach audiences that may be interested in their products or services but do not know about them.
These are important tools to create brand awareness. Instilling relevant keywords to search campaigns and targeting the right demographics can build the traction you need to drive traffic to your website and therefore increase your conversion rate.
Social media presence is key to new and old businesses. It is important to meet your customers where they are. Have you ever gotten an ad on your Facebook page for a company you didn’t know about but were selling just the thing you need? That is all thanks to social media marketing. Companies can modify the target groups in their campaign to reflect a potential consumer’s interests, behaviors, needs, and wants. This helps them expand their customer base and, in most cases, can increase revenue.
What if I don’t have the time or knowledge to have success in digital marketing?
Agencies, like ours, are full of experts to take a hefty project like digital marketing off your plate. At Set Fire Creative, our team specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), paid search advertising on search engines like Google, social media advertising, organic social media management, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
If your business is looking to create or maintain a digital presence, reach out to our experts at Set Fire Creative for a free consultation to get the ball rolling.
Raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California, Juliana left the golden state to attend Utah Valley University and completed a bachelor’s of science in psychology. After graduating, she began pursuing a career in digital marketing and client relations, which led her to Set Fire Creative. Juliana has a knack for all things creative, in and out of the office. In her free time, you can find her working out, traveling, studying interior design, or hosting dinner parties (of course, with charcuterie.)
