Digital marketing is generally more affordable than other forms of advertising and is often the most effective way to reach your audience. It’s also a great way to expand your audience and brand awareness. There are tons of reasons why you should consider digital marketing, but here are our top 5!
5. Affordability
For someone who might be new to the digital side of marketing, they might think that it would be expensive to get started. The beauty of digital marketing though is that there is not a minimum budget to get started. Other than some initial setup and time, you can get started advertising online for as little as $5.
Traditional advertising methods are still great and effective in some cases but are often much more expensive. Traditional print advertising requires graphic design costs, printing costs, and sometimes placement or mailing costs. Similarly, radio and TV advertisements require production costs and more expensive placement costs to the station that will be broadcasting your message.
Using Facebook or Instagram ads you can use content that you’re already creating to promote your business and there are no hidden fees. You can spend as little as $5 to boost a post. Also, Google AdWords has no minimum budget requirements, although we would suggest having a slightly larger budget to get the best bang for your buck because it’s a longer strategy.
4. Targeting
Digital marketing is unique in that at any given moment, you have access to hundreds of thousands of people, and of those people, many of them are the specific customers you need to reach. So how do you limit it to just the ones that are most likely to complete a call to action? Just like in hunting anything else, you target them.
The average person in 2020 spent 145 minutes or just under 2 and a half hours on social media. People have access to their media platforms no matter where they are thanks to their phones. Your brand, message, and name could be, quite literally, at the tips of their fingers at any given moment.
While using these devices, they are constantly freely giving information about themselves, their spending habits, their location. All of these are things we can use to target your ad directly at them.
When using traditional advertising however you don’t have as much control over who is seeing your message. You can send out postcards to people who live in a certain area, or to a specific mailing list, but you can’t control who is listening to your radio ad, or who is watching tv when your commercial comes on, and you definitely can’t control who drives past your billboard on the road.
3. Flexibility
There are several different forms of digital marketing including search ads, display ads, video ads, and more. Not to mention countless platforms including Google, Facebook, and even email marketing.
Because they are digital, you have the flexibility to quickly start and stop campaigns at any time. With the click of a few buttons and from anywhere you are, you can effectively market your company. When you use your online presence as a line of communication as well, you can also quickly and efficiently respond to those interacting with you.
Need to pivot quickly to take advantage of a new opportunity? Your digital ads can easily be swapped over! Unlike traditional marketing where if something changes you have to create a whole new commercial or design, print, and send a new mailer.
2. Tracking
Tracking refers to the process of monitoring your marketing campaigns and how your audience interacts with your posts. By using digital ads you have more metrics at your fingertips to track how your ads are performing, what change they might benefit from, and who you’re reaching.
- With print advertising, you are paying for access to the people who have subscribed to that publication.
- With a billboard, you are paying for access to the people who live in a geographic area along with approximate counts of eyes in vehicles that may see your ad daily.
- With radio and television, you are paying for access to listeners and viewers based on reported estimates of who listens or watches to that station.
All of these are amazing ways to reach a large number of people but they are unable to tell you how a person led to making a purchase. You are left to ask “How did you hear about us?”.
With digital advertising, we can follow how the person interacts with your ad, where they click, and whether or not they make a purchase or attempt to contact you for a service. Using tracking, we can even use this information to show another ad to encourage a person to complete their purchase, commonly referred to as retargeting.
1. Your Competitors are Doing it!
In case you needed one more reason to give digital marketing a chance, let’s turn on the peer pressure. You should know that most of your competitors are already using digital marketing strategies to engage those in your market and influence their decisions. Digital marketing allows you to remain competitive in the industry and keep up with those in your field. Don’t let the competition get ahead of you without putting up a fight!
We stand ready to help you at Dogwood from start to finish with your digital marketing campaigns. We work closely with you using real-time analytics to make sure you’re successful and see results. We can help by making changes at any point in time to improve campaigns or advertisements faster so you don’t have to.
Each month we analyze the statistics of our client’s digital media presence to determine what is working well and what needs to be altered. We send all of this data over in an easy-to-use report so that you stay in the loop with our efforts.
If you’re ready to get started marketing your business online, give us a call. We are ready to get to work!
