However, if you want to grow your business in today’s competitive environment. Stats show that nearly 60% of small businesses use digital marketing and 56% of marketing budgets are used for digital channels.

With this in mind, let’s have a look at the five reasons your business can’t afford to ignore digital marketing.  

1. Offers a cost-effective marketing solution 

Digital marketing provides a cost-effective marketing solution for a number of reasons. 

Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing 

Before we get into it, let’s clarify what we mean when we talk about digital and traditional marketing.  

Digital marketing is any marketing that happens online through channels such as the Internet, email, or mobile devices. On the other hand, traditional marketing is any marketing activities that are completed offline such as print advertising, TV adverts or radio adverts. 

Digital marketing often provides lower entry costs to businesses that are just getting started compared to traditional advertising methods. For example, you can start running ads on social media channels or Google for as little as £50-£100. A TV advert will cost much more than this, and it will be much harder to track how many people have seen that advert or taken action from it.

Cost is much less of a barrier to businesses that want to run digital marketing campaigns than to those who want to use more traditional methods. 

Highly Targeted 

When you do decide to spend on digital marketing, the highly targeted nature of the campaigns means your spend is much more efficient. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google allow you to choose exactly who you want to target. This means you’re spending your marketing budget on reaching the most relevant audience to your business. 

Over time, you will notice that some people engage with your ads more than others, so you can invest more in these audiences and avoid wasted spending on people who are just never going to engage with your ads or buy from you. 

Reducing costs and increasing ROI through digital marketing 

At Logica Digital, we worked with an ecommerce business in the UK that had seen a period of significant decline in sales and profitability. 

They had been running paid search campaigns for a while, but they simply weren’t driving the results they wanted and were costing more than they were providing in ROI. 

We provided the following improvements to campaigns to improve targeting, reduce spend and increase ROI: 

• Implemented ROI bidding 
• Implemented time-of-day bidding 
• Created highly targeted ad copy 

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We saw an uplift in revenue, an increase in ROI and conversion rate, all while making the most of the company’s current spent. 

‍You can find out more about the results we achieve for Eurofit here.  

2. Extend the reach of your business 

By investing in digital marketing, you increase the reach of your business to a much wider audience. Not only will this help you to boost brand awareness, but it opens the doors to an audience who may never see or interact with your brand otherwise. 

National and Global Reach 

Whether you have a local or a national business, digital marketing can help you to target a much wider audience without having to physically expand your business or open premises in other locations. 

If you’re a business with a brick-and-mortar store, you can drive local people to your store to buy. Research shows that 98% of consumers use the internet to find information about a local business, and 80% of local searches convert to a sale. If you can improve the visibility of your business locally through channels such as search engines and social media platforms, you’re going to be much more likely to drive footfall to your shop, along with driving sales. 

On the other hand, if you have an online business, there’s no limit to the number of people who can buy from you, and their location isn’t a barrier when it comes to digital marketing. Optimising your website for the right keywords and selecting the right targeting for your ads allows you to reach people all over the UK and even internationally, helping you to increase brand awareness and sales for business growth. 

Marketing anytime, anywhere 

Digital marketing allows you to deliver your marketing messages or ads to your audience at any time of the day and on any device. 

What does this mean? 

You can capture potential customers when they’re ready to buy. You might find that you drive the majority of your sales at a certain time of the day - you can adjust your ads to only show at these times of the day so you’re not wasting ad spend when your customers just aren’t spending.

This expands the reach of your business by allowing you to ensure your brand is in the right places at the right time - making sure your brand appears in front of them when they’re ready to buy. 

3. Enhances Customer Insights 

Not only is digital marketing more cost-effective and allows you to reach a wider audience, the insights provided by the various tools available is invaluable when it comes to refining your digital marketing campaigns, knowing who is engaging with your brand, who’s buying, where they are and more. 

Analytics and Data 

Digital platforms allow you to see exactly who is engaging with your brand, where they’re located, their key interests and so much more information. 

Channels such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads all provide this data, and not just when you spend money with them. This data is invaluable because it allows you to understand exactly who your customers are and what they want. 

This data can be constantly fed back into your campaigns and activities to ensure they’re always targeted towards the most relevant audience for your business.

Adaptability 

Not only does this data allow you to see who’s engaging with your campaigns, it means you can be much more agile when it comes to marketing for your business. 

If you set a campaign running and quickly start to see that a certain group of people just isn’t engaging, this real-time data allows you to move this budget into an engaging audience. This helps to drive results much more effectively and without wasting budget, something that simply isn’t possible with traditional marketing.  

Driving therapy room bookings and location capacity 

We worked with a business called Brighter Spaces that rents out therapy rooms to therapists who do not want to pay for a permanent location. 

The business wanted to increase the occupancy of each of their rooms in three different locations and were using a mix of paid search and paid social campaigns to do so, but they were not as effective as they had hoped. 

We restructured the campaigns based on data that told us which campaigns were performing well and which weren’t. We adjusted the targeting and creative for each campaign based on location data to ensure we were targeting the right people. 

Data also told us that visitors to the website were not converting straight away so we developed paid social lead generation campaigns to collect data and provide users with an email journey to nurture them to purchase. 

The business has seen the following results from these campaigns:

4. Builds customer trust and loyalty 

Customer trust and loyalty are more important than ever in such a competitive landscape. If you can earn the trust of your customers, you’re more likely to win them over if it comes down to you and your competitors, and they’ll remain customers over the long term. 

Engagement and personalisation

Digital marketing allows you to engage directly with your potential customers on the channels they prefer. The data available to you allows you to personalise your ads and communications based on customer pain points, interests and preferences. Research from Google shows that 90% of leading marketers say personalisation significantly contributes to business profitability. 

By personalising your communications, you build a much stronger relationship with them, which leads to longer-term loyalty and repeat purchases from your customer base. Remember that it costs much less to drive repeat business than it does to convert a new customer completely from scratch.  

There are a number of ways you can foster engagement and build trust with your customers but if you want to run an effective digital marketing strategy, content marketing should play a big part. 

Content marketing 

A huge part of digital marketing is your content marketing strategy. Creating content that keeps potential and existing customers engaged, informed and entertained is key to establishing authority and trust with your potential customers. 

At the top of the funnel, ensuring you’re producing SEO-optimised content that answers potential customers' key questions and solves their challenges can help drive them further down the funnel. It also sets your business as an authority in your industry and keeps them coming back time and time again. 

You can read more on this in our blog: Why is informational content essential for a successful digital marketing strategy? 

Further down the funnel, you can keep providing informative content such as product demos or videos to ensure that customers are getting the most from your business and to further gain their trust and drive loyalty. 

When you create a content marketing strategy, always think about how you can provide content at each stage of the funnel to keep driving potential customers through their journey. 

5. Puts you ahead of your competitors 

Digital marketing is no longer a nice-to-have for businesses looking to grow over the next few years. It’s now a must-have in most industries. 

68% of all online experiences start with a search engine, and 63% of all shopping begins onlin, even if the purchase takes place offline. 

So, if your business is not online and meeting your customers while they’re looking for your products and services, your competitors will be. If your competitors are yet to get up to speed with digital tactics, even better because it gives you a chance to solidify your position online before they’ve had chance to even understand what SEO is. 

If you can understand digital marketing and how it can help you grow your business, you’ll be able to drive more visitors to your website and convert them into customers. All of this equals sales and growth for your business. 

Key takeaways 

Investing in digital marketing will: 

• Save on costs or help you get more from your existing budget 
• Reach a much wider audience
• Help you to understand who your customers are and their preferences 
• Build long-term customer relationships and loyalty 
• Set you miles ahead of your competitors 

As you can see, digital marketing can provide a huge number of benefits for your business and help you to drive growth. Ignoring digital marketing in the current landscape could mean missed opportunities to get in front of new customers and mean you could be missing out to your competitors. 

If you want to know more about how digital marketing can help you to grow your business this year, book a free call with our team and we’ll be able to discuss your goals and the activities that could help you achieve them effectively.

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