As a business owner, your aim is to connect with customers, grow your brand, and advertise your products and services, all with the goal of increasing your profits.
To achieve this in a modern business landscape, you simply can’t ignore digital marketing.
Digital marketing is the process of connecting with your customers and selling your products/services using a range of online channels. This includes social media, search engines, email marketing, and of course, your website.
If your business has an online presence but it lacks digital marketing, you’re missing out on a range of opportunities. And if your business doesn’t even have an online presence, you’re missing out even more!
Want to know why digital marketing is so essential for your business? Check out the five points below for some undeniable evidence.
5 Compelling Reasons Your Business Needs Digital Marketing
1. Organic Search Is a Force to Be Reckoned With
If you want to know the answer to a question or you’re looking for a local café, what’s the first thing you do?
For most people, the answer is “Just Google it”, and when customers are looking for your products and services, that’s what they will do too.
Research by BrightEdge shows that 51% of all website traffic on the internet is the result of organic search. That is, people searching on websites like Google and Bing, and clicking on a listing that’s not an ad. The same research shows that 40% of revenue is driven by organic search, proving that search engines generate money, and not just clicks, for businesses.
With page one of search results swallowing up more than 90% of all traffic on Google, you can’t afford to appear on page two.
So how do you appear on page one of search results for relevant queries? You use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), arguably the most important digital marketing strategy in your arsenal.
SEO is all about optimising the on-page and off-page factors of your website to appear at the top of search results. To get started with SEO, check out The Beginner’s Guide by Moz.
2. Paid Search Is Perfect When Customers Are Looking to Buy
People aren’t just using search engines to find out how old a celebrity is or when the local restaurant is open. Many people are also using Google, Bing, and other sites to look for products that they can buy today.
If you want to be the business they buy from, you need an online store and you need customers to be able to find it. That’s where paid search like Google Ads and Bing Ads come in.
While organic search results chew up the majority of traffic, when people are ready to buy, they often click on ads. This is backed up by the fact that people are 66% more likely to click on paid ads when they search using buying-related keywords. As well as this, paid ads convert clicks into sales even more often than organic search results.
While you need to pay for ads to appear in search engines, Google says that businesses make $2 revenue on average for every $1 they spend on Google Ads, making it a cost-effective investment.
For a crash course in paid search and how this digital marketing technique can help your business, check out HubSpot’s ultimate guide to Google Ads.
3. Your Customers Are Waiting for You On Social Media
Between them, Facebook and Instagram have nearly 4 billion monthly users. While a lot of those people are looking at cat memes, plenty of them are also connecting with their favourite businesses on social media.
Establishing your brand and connecting with potential customers through social media can go a long way to increasing your sales. Research shows that 71% of people recommend businesses based on a positive social media experience, while 37% are inspired to make a purchase because of what they see on social media.
When it comes to customer service, 2 in 3 people have bypassed every other avenue and gone straight to a business’s social media profile to get in touch.
If you want to take advantage of social media for your business, here’s the good news. Social media marketing is one of the most targeted and measurable digital marketing techniques available. Through paid ads on Facebook and other social media platforms, you can target potential customers in a way that grows your brand and helps you sell your products and services.
For a guide on building your social media marketing strategy, read this article by Sprout Social.
4. You’re Being Talked about Online
Whether you like it or not, your business is probably being talked about online. This is true even if you don’t use digital marketing or have an online presence for your business.
Why is your business being talked about? Because it’s being reviewed. Happy and unhappy customers alike will go on forums, social media, online directories, Google Reviews and beyond to voice their opinion about your business. When people search for your business online, they will see all this feedback, especially if you don’t have an online presence or you have a website that’s not backed by digital marketing strategies.
If you do use digital marketing, you can take back control over how you’re perceived online. Here are just a few ways digital marketing can boost your online reputation:
- SEO ensures that websites you control appear when customers search for your brand
- Digital marketers can respond to reviews on Google, social media and other websites on your behalf
- Digital marketing strategies can help you generate more positive reviews using tools like the Supple Reviews Tools
- By building backlinks, your brand can become associated with authoritative online publications, helping to enhance your business’s reputation
5. Your Competitors Are Using Digital Marketing Strategies and Services
You should be using SEO, paid search, social media and other digital marketing strategies because they are effective. But you need to be using them because your competitors already are, and without your own strategies, you will fall behind online.
According to a survey, 95% of all small businesses were committed to increasing their digital marketing spend in 2019.
However, with 71% of people doing their digital marketing themselves and only 44% of businesses investing in SEO, there is room for your business to not only compete with but surpass your competitors.
What’s Your Approach to Digital Marketing?
The five points listed above only just scratch the surface of what digital marketing could do for you. If you’re interested in pursuing a digital marketing strategy, you could pour time, money, and research into doing it yourself, or you could hire a digital marketing agency Such as Supple to get you to the top.
Either way, for all the reasons listed above and more, digital marketing should be one of your main priorities when it comes to growing your business.