The Top 7 Reasons Your Business Needs Digital Marketing in 2020

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The Top 7 Reasons Your Business Needs Digital Marketing in 2020

Most of us do research online before we spend our money on something.

In fact recent data suggests that 87% of customer journeys begin online. With this knowledge, there’s never been a better time to invest in Digital Marketing.

  1. Great marketing is the first step in forming a lasting relationship with your next customer.

While the traditional customer experience begins when we enter a shop and ends when we leave it, Digital Marketing has changed that.

Digital Marketing can connect with a customer before they even know about your company and effective remarketing and post transaction engagement can turn a satisfied customer into a fully committed brand ambassador.

Some of the ways Digital Marketing connects you to your customers and helps you build and maintain lasting relationships with them are:

Using online reviews and testimonials and social media posts to replace traditional “word of mouth”.

Normally, a customer would tell a few friends about a good business but impress the right customer with a big enough social media presence and they could be telling 1000s of followers about your brand – for free!

Automated but personalised “thank you” and follow up emails can forge positive associations with your business and lead to repeat customers and are far less expensive than traditional print marketing like sales letters.

  1. Effective marketing doesn’t just tell customers about what you offer, it learns what they are looking for.

Marketing is a two-way method of business communication, or at least it should be. Far too many companies just use their marketing to shout offers and sales to their customers.

It’s much more effective to use your marketing to not just speak to your customers but to listen to them.

Through surveys, quizzes and online polls. Your customers, both existing and potential, can tell you directly what they are looking for, what excites them, what bores them, what inspires them and what motivates them to choose your brand over another.

Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can tell you which pages on your website attract the most interest, which channels are sending you the most traffic and what makes a visitor most likely to convert.

This information can help you adjust your service offering to match the desires of your target market and to refine future marketing to specifically target these demographics.

  1. Multichannel marketing reaches your potential leads in several locations boosting the chance for them to convert into a customer.

There are 3.2 billion social media users in the world

There are 1 billion Google users

36% of desktop searches are made on Bing

85% of customer interactions online now occur through automated chat bots

With this knowledge, why only focus on one marketing channel? An effective Digital Marketing campaign will target potential customers on multiple platforms and at multiple points of the customer journey.

A customer might first search for a product on Google Search, then research it on a website, then look for directions on Google Maps, then post about their purchase on Instagram.

By “tapping” this customer at each point in their journey, you increase their chances of completing the sales funnel journey to a purchase and of becoming a return customer.

Different customers also respond to different marketing methods. By diversifying your marketing strategy and reaching the customer on their preferred platform, you can capture more leads.

  1. Well produced marketing keeps you competitive with the biggest players in your field.

Digital Marketing is a far more level playing field than traditional marketing channels like print or billboards.

Some tools and software are required but the main resource is having knowledgeable marketers working with you that understand the processes, strategies and customers involved.

This last part is key, knowing who your customers are and what motivates them is worth more than any single marketing technique or channel.

Genuine content that connects directly with your customer will pay huge dividends for your business.

Despite what most advertising executives will tell you, people connect far more with the actual faces behind a brand than with a multimillion-pound CGI advert or an A-List celebrity endorsement.

  1. Digital Marketing is more affordable and easier to refine than traditional marketing channels.

Traditional marketing takes a large upfront cost before you even know if the marketing is effective.

Because Digital Marketing is an editable process, adjustments and refinement can be made instantly without waiting weeks for printers to deliver new posters.

Digital Marketing can start at any budget, even £0. There are free Digital Marketing efforts you can start today with no technical knowledge required.

Start by making sure your Google My Business (GMB) profile is set up correctly and features accurate, up-to-date information. Doing this will:

Increase your local SEO visibility

Increase your foot traffic from customers looking for directions

Help to gather reviews, which both help your ranking and can be repurposed for other marketing material in the future.

  1. The return on investment (ROI) of your Digital Marketing can be tracked down to the last penny.

Advertising used to involve a lot of guess work. Guessing what a customer wanted, guessing if your advert was addressing this in the best way, and then guessing whether it had been successful based on subsequent sales or footfall.

But this was all guesswork, you had very little way of telling if a customer had purchased from you because of word of mouth, a £300 radio advert or a £10000 TV ad.

You can ask them, but when advertising work well, we’re not even aware of it so customer’s own recollections can be unreliable.

Think about your favourite soft drink. How did you discover it? It’s unlikely you’ll be able to remember. Did a friend recommend it? Did you see an advert at a bus stop? Did someone offer you a free sample in a town centre?

With Digital Marketing, every customer interaction is tracked and logged.

When a customer makes a purchase online, you’ll be able to track their customer journey back to the very first interaction they had with you.

With smart tracking numbers, when a customer calls, you’ll know exactly whether they’re calling your number from a google ad, a print ad, an Instagram post or anywhere else.

A/B testing can let you try out new strategies and compare the results. For example, small changes like altering the colour of a button on an email newsletter signup form can boost the signup rate by 30%.

Extensive customer tracking is included as part of our PPC Google Ads packages.

  1. Your competitors are probably already using Digital Marketing, don’t get left behind!

Humans are impulsive and often will go for the first option presented, that’s why it’s important to be ahead of the competition when it comes to marketing.

Even if your website has great content, if it’s poorly optimised for SEO and ends up on page 2 of Google no one is ever going to get a chance to read it.

If your competitors are top of Google, they will be stealing your business away. In fact 75% of all clicks on Google go to the top three search results.

Remember, your potential customers can’t choose you if they don’t know about you.

Dave King

Dave King

Dave King is the Co-Founder and Director of Carden Digital and the wider Carden IT Group. Dave’s background is in IT services, but he has experience across the online space. His love of all things digital lead him to create a digital marketing branch of the business, with a focus on paid advertising, SEO, web development, social media, graphic design and content writing.