The Importance of a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy

Everywhere you look, marketing companies go on at length with their tips and tricks for augmenting your digital marketing performance. While the advice is generally accurate, applicable, and widely useful, it does little to address the one burning question that is in the back of the minds of many SMEs—why is digital marketing important to begin with? Well, today’s article is going to answer just that by providing a detailed look at the biggest reasons why a comprehensive digital marketing strategy is so critical to the future of your enterprise. Ready? Let’s get started.

Comparative Efficiency

For many businesses, the question is not about whether marketing is important at all. Rather, it’s about whether turning to digital distribution platforms is worth it when compared with traditional advertising approaches. Well, we can say without a fraction of a doubt that that answer is a resounding yes. In particular, digital marketing offers a clear advantage in three key areas—affordability, efficiency, and reach. Let’s look at each of these in greater detail.

Affordability. Traditional advertising approaches—think of television commercials, billboard displays or radio spots—are constrained by their limited accessibility. After all, there is only so much time that can be allocated to commercials for each broadcast, much like there is only so much physical advertising space available to businesses. This relatively low supply combined with the high demand for immediate visibility to an audience of millions of consumers has quickly priced out small businesses in favour of the biggest players. In contrast, digital marketing offers a wealth of opportunity to companies of all sizes—impressions, clicks, shares, and conversions can be acquired for just pennies on the dollar.

Efficiency. The major downfall of traditional marketing approaches has always been efficiency—your ability to target specific sets of consumers is limited when marketing to an entire geographic region. With a digital marketing strategy, this is a thing of the past. Thanks to a wide array of available platforms such as social media, pay-per-click advertisements, search engines, and more, you can tailor your approaches to an extremely granular degree. You simply need to conduct an initial analysis that will profile the customers most likely to convert, and then identify the platforms used most frequently by that specific demographic. This way, you can abandon a scattershot approach entirely in favour of something that you have a much greater degree of control over, ensuring the delivery of an optimal ROI.

Reach. We touched on this briefly in the previous section, but it’s worth repeating—there are an inordinate number of platforms available to marketers in the online space, and there are more and more consumers making use of them each and every day. Consider this as an example that illustrates our point—more than 20 percent of the world’s entire population uses Facebook alone. With a userbase that’s not only distributed globally but also has constant access to their feed, digital marketing platforms offer businesses a considerable advantage when it comes time to improve their awareness and engagement metrics, greatly facilitating market penetration and expansion efforts. Moreover, these efforts are easily scaled to smaller, more regional platforms as well, giving you a great deal of control over who, precisely, has access to the content that you’re putting out.

Impressive Success Rates

On top of the efficiency increases you can expect to experience with a switch to a digital marketing campaign, there is another advantage offered by the approach—personalisation. Since digital marketing strategies are, on average, much cheaper to conceptualise, create, and roll out, they can be customised to a large degree to the tastes and interests of different customer profiles without incurring exorbitant expenses. By customising the calls-to-action of your promotional emails, colours of your display advertisements, and ways that information is presented to your audiences, you can easily appeal to the unique tastes of all of your target demographics. Some studies have suggested that these personalisation efforts improve conversion rates by up to 10%, an impressive jump in success rates indeed.

Data at the Fore

While a great amount of care goes into marketing in order to ensure that campaigns have an immediate positive impact, the outcome is by no means assured. Traditionally, a failed campaign would have to undergo extensive analysis to determine its shortcomings, which would then need to be addressed and refined in subsequent iterations. In contrast, your digital marketing efforts can be easily monitored across all of your channels through comprehensive dashboards that track engagement, impressions, and much more, giving you a real-time look into the effectiveness of your campaigns. In addition, the digital nature of the content means that it can be quickly updated to implement any changes that need to be made. This abundance of data ensures much shorter feedback loops, improving flexibility when it comes to your marketing even if your campaigns fail to find immediate success.

Digital marketing has become one of the great equalisers in the business world. Its low cost, efficiency, and impressive success rates have allowed even the smallest businesses to compete for consumer mindshare with global giants. Knowing now why digital marketing is so important for modern businesses, you’re prepared to start conceptualising a striking campaign that puts you on the map—contact us today to find out how.