When it comes to marketing your business, there are numerous reasons to move your efforts to the Internet. Among these reasons are higher return on investment (ROI), beating your competition, tracking your efforts more closely, prioritizing your ideal audience, and converting prospects to buyers more easily.
Regardless of your niche, you will benefit from moving your marketing budget to the web. It’s a modern-day necessity in order to stay top-of-mind for your dream clients. Keep reading for the top five reasons to increase your digital marketing budget.
1. Get a Higher Return on Investment (ROI)
The importance of digital marketing is clear–and small businesses have the most to gain from it. Research indicates that 82% of Americans read online reviews for local businesses, and 23% visit a business after reading a positive review.
The average American spends more than 24 hours online every week. Gen Z and Millennials spend about 10 hours online every day. In fact, another recent study showed that 47% of Millennials don’t watch traditional TV. And as of 2021, 22 million Americans had already dropped their cable TV subscriptions.
All of these statistics point to a clear reality: Americans are online more than ever. Your business needs to be there, too, if you want to maximize your efforts.
A recent study conducted by Forbes found that businesses using social media outsold 78% of their competitors without social media. Additionally, social media leads are cheaper to convert. For small businesses, cost-effectiveness is critical. Once you’re prepared with sales follow-up messaging, you can essentially get leads through social media for free.
Obtaining digital marketing success doesn’t have to be limited to free channels, either. Market research routinely finds that email marketing has an ROI of 3,700 to 4,400%–numbers that are typically unheard of!
2. Beat Your Competition
Having a solid plan to beat your competition is crucial for small businesses, and much easier with effective digital marketing strategies. When marketing offline, you’re trusting that word-of-mouth and a strong local presence are convincing. In an age where 55% of consumers check a brand online before making a purchase, you can’t afford to neglect digital marketing.
The first step to beating your competition with digital marketing is gathering intelligence from your own website and theirs. You can conduct an SEO audit for data on your own website and use our 10-minute SEO test to see if your competitors are investing in SEO.
The second step in crushing your competition is playing to your strengths consistently. Don’t try to launch ads, perfect your email list, post on social media, and become an SEO guru overnight. Identify the overlap between your competitors’ weaknesses and what you know best.
Then, create a content calendar based on your opportunities. That sweet, sweet traffic won’t start to roll in until Google has a reason to give it to you. Before you know it, you’ll be seeing leads and sales from your diligent transition from offline to online marketing.
3. Using Data to Your Advantage
Another benefit of a marketing plan refresh is all the data and analytics tools available to you. In offline marketing–like printed mailers, TV ads, and radio spots–it’s more difficult to know how many consumers interacted with your ad.
With digital marketing, like social media and SEO, you can track the results every effort is generating. These marketing channels often come with free dashboards and tools that allow you to see your current performance and compare it against previous posts.
However, all the information in the world doesn’t make a difference unless you act on it. Don’t merely glance at how many people saw your last Instagram video or blog post. Examine it in context: Was it posted at a high engagement time? Did the caption or headline provoke emotion in the reader? Use your findings to shape your upcoming content and digital marketing efforts.
4. Target Your Ideal Audience
The next reason to transition to digital marketing is being able to target your ideal audience. Various offline marketing methods require you to “hope” that your campaign will connect with the right person, at the right time. Such marketing methods include billboards, print ads, bus banners, flyers, and stickers.
Digital marketing gives you nearly limitless ways to capture and segment your ideal audience according to their interests and behavior. This strategy helps you tailor your messages for each group and improve your digital marketing ROI.
To segment your target audience, think of them like warm and cold audiences. Warm audiences are people who have visited your website, followed your social profiles, or even downloaded your app. They are interested in your brand, but they have not made a purchase.
Cold audiences are great opportunities to convert into paying customers, so you should consider nurturing these potential leads. A good way to do this is through social media and targeted ads.
Being able to fine-tune what you offer to different audience segments isn’t possible offline. Given enough focus and time, you can take your digital marketing campaigns from normal to extraordinary, because any audience responds well to custom offers.
5. More Easily Convert Prospects to Buyers
If you’re still struggling to convert your prospects into buyers, digital marketing can bridge the gap. Offline marketing often entails “mass marketing” efforts, which means one message is broadcast to as many people as a budget allows. Mass marketing creates a poor product-to-market fit, where your prospects are confused about whether or not your offer is for them.
By leveraging digital marketing, you both retain prospects’ personal contact information and have an easier time staying in touch with them. As an example, let’s look at offline versus online marketing for a bookstore.
If a bookstore is only using offline marketing, they may run a local newspaper ad for 20% off all purchases of $100 or more. A print campaign assumes that people will see the ad, but many people often overlook all printed newspaper ads.
If the bookstore creates an email list of subscribers to send the same 20% off coupon to, they’re much more likely to get a response. Their subscribers have agreed to hear from the bookstore and happily open emails that make an immediate difference for their purchases.
The Bottom Line
Statistics, consumer preferences, and technological trends all demonstrate that digital marketing is a must for the modern business owner. Transitioning your marketing budget to online marketing efforts is one of the smarties moves you can make.
Here’s a recap of the top five reasons to increase your digital marketing budget:
- Your ROI will be higher. The majority of offline marketing budgets are wasted. Achieve previously unimaginable ROIs with digital strategies like email marketing.
- It’s easier to beat your competition. Spot where your competitors are lacking and build a plan to beat them.
- Digital marketing offers unparalleled data. Say goodbye to uncertainty with digital marketing analytics dashboards like Google Analytics and Facebook Business Manager. Know what you need to change as soon as it’s uncovered.
- It’s simpler to target your dream customers. Digital marketing allows you to drive traffic and build relationships in ways relevant to your business. No longer throw money out there and hope it produces customers.
- Prospects are easier to convert to buyers. By staying in touch with prospects through your email or SMS list, they’re more likely to keep you top-of-mind and buy from you.
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