We are all living in the digital age, so it should be no surprise that if you are a business owner, you need digital marketing to promote your business. Without digital marketing skills, your business is not only missing out on golden opportunities to reach out to more customers, but it will probably not survive among the thousands of other businesses out there that do use digital marketing.
It doesn’t matter what size your business is, be it small, medium or large, to take advantage of the many benefits digital marketing can offer you. As a business owner, you want your business to grow and you want to be able to build good relations with current and potential customers or clients. It has never been easier to do that than during the era we are living in. Digital Marketing Belfast can help you do that with its team of professional and friendly people.
If you’re new to digital marketing, here we’ll give you a deeper look into it and what it does, and explain why it is important to use for your business to thrive.
There’s no doubt that the reach of this type of marketing is far and wide. It literally can reach globally. Reaching an international audience is difficult to do with traditional marketing if your business is more on the local side and just reaches a specific geographical area. Through online marketing, you will reach an audience you never thought possible before, and you can do it with less cost than with traditional marketing means. Because everything is done online, you will spend, but you will not spend the same amount that it takes to print out flyers, brochures, or any other type of print.
A second point concerning the reach is that there are no barriers. If you are situated in Belfast, there are no barriers to enter into a Chinese audience, for example. If you try to do this with traditional marketing means, you might not be allowed to in the first place, and secondly, if you are allowed, it will come with a very hefty price tag. Radio adverts, TV or billboards and other print material are all types of traditional markets, and they are not cheap by any means.
Another important factor in the reach is that you can choose who to reach for. It’s a scalable system, so that means you can reach, according to your budget. If your business is not equipped enough to handle a global level, you can limit it to nearby geographical areas through effective means.
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is that it is measurable. You can see, measure and analyze the results. When you have the ability to do that, you can know what is working for you and what is not, and adjust your strategy accordingly. When you place an ad on a billboard, for example, you have no idea how many people saw it and there is no way to find out. At most, you might be able to come up with some sort of rough estimate that might not even be correct. There’s no guarantee that just because a car or pedestrian is passing by it, that they actually saw it.
Yet, with online marketing, you can know how many people clicked on a link you posted, or how many people did open up an email you sent, for example. This measurability means you can follow through better on strategies and see what needs to be changed, modified, or done away with altogether. This is not something that works overnight, and it would need patience and daily monitoring to know the best path to take.
Digital marketing is usually accompanied by Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The optimization is what happens when you are able to measure and analyze results. Search engines depend on SEO which, generally speaking, is the wording people use when searching for something online. A professional digital marketing company will know the best words that your business needs to use to be found easier online. Through this, you will become more visible to potential customers.
The entire setup of digital marketing coupled with SEO will bring in more traffic to your site. And if something is not working as best as you expected, it can be changed. You are not stuck with one method that either works or doesn’t. Digital marketing is flexible, which is great news for any business. Besides optimizing words, other online contents that businesses use can also be optimized, be it images or videos. All these advantages and more lead us to a further point.
This point cannot be stressed enough. People want to feel special and want to feel that you are talking to them on a personal level. Whether you are trying to sell a product or service to new customers, or want to deal with customers after sales, online marketing is perfect for this as you can talk and receive direct feedback from customers. It is absolutely crucial in any business to know and understand what your customers want, what they need, and what they like or don’t like about your product or service.
The worst thing you can do to damage your business is to ignore customers, especially when you have the means to be in contact through the online marketing strategy. Digital marketing simplifies for you the means to build good personal relations and trust between you and customers.
The beauty of digital marketing is that it not only increases traffic to your website, but it gets you the right people. At the end of the day, you want the right people to get to you. The right people are your target audience. They are the ones who are looking for what you are offering. So naturally, the chances of purchasing or using your service are higher than those who are just passing by. Though a passerby can lead to what you want, through digital marketing you do not leave everything up to chance. The strategies used, though it could involve trial and error, are not haphazard decisions. They are based on real time facts and statistics. Digital marketing reports are analyzed by marketers to know not just what is working, but how it is working also.
You can get more traffic to your website, but to the business minded person, traffic is not enough. At the end, you want that traffic to take a specific action towards your business. Whether that action is to buy something, click on a link, or share a post, this is the conversion rate. Anything someone does that leads them to become a potential customer is a conversion. Conversion means that a customer doesn’t have to make a call to reach you, or drive to get to you as long as they have the means to do so online. So you are basically conversing all the traffic to do something to benefit your business.
It is important to mention here the condition of your site, which is also digital marketing. Sites that load too slowly or is too difficult to navigate through lose customers quickly. An obsolete website is as good as no website at all. While the objective is to have customers take an action, they more than likely would have left the site if it’s not updated and user friendly. Even sites that are up to par, hanging around to know more about what you offer is not guaranteed, so imagine where customers go when dealing with a poorly designed and slow moving site. Always keep in mind that clients or customers are just a few clicks away from making or breaking your business.
Within every strategy of digital marketing, there are several tactics that are used. Besides customers, you also want to know what the competition is up to. There is nothing illegal about this, just in case you are wondering! It is all part of the strategy. You will benefit a lot when you know what kinds of strategies are being used by competitors who are doing better than you. Because digital marketing results in reports, marketers can find out in what areas your competitor is doing well in or in which platforms. These findings all play out to your advantage as marketers will be able to better pinpoint what you are lagging behind in and what needs to be paid more attention to.
Social media is nearly taking over the online world if it hasn’t already. Through proper digital marketing, this is your chance to break through and reach customers by speaking the language they speak. Most likely, every person you know and the millions of people you don’t know have at least one account on one social media platform, and usually, use more than one platform. Your social media profile is what is reaching customers. This is what they see and base their decision to reach out to you or not. And this is across all industries. Whether it’s a tweet, or a Facebook post or an Instagram picture, people are looking and if they like what they see, the tide can turn in your favor.
It should also go without saying that the content has a great influence. Is your content addressing the needs of the people? It is engaging? How can you improve it? These and many more questions are things you should be asking yourself. Content is never only in the written word, though words work better for search engines to find you, it is also in videos, pictures, and links. Your content speaks for you when you can’t and content is what the consumer engages with before they engage with you.
Statistically, 47 percent of people deal with 2-3 pieces of content before they consider dealing with you. This shows you how important content is because there are basically three stages on the consumer journey: awareness, consideration, decision. Digital marketing plays a major role in the three stages by first allowing you to be visible (awareness), by giving you the platform to present your content in all areas you need to address (consideration), and by providing the right solution the consumer needs (decision). It’s an entire journey and digital marketing is the leader.
Every business person’s dream is to rank on Google’s first page. The ones that have done it through digital marketing because simply put, there is no other way to do it. Links on your site or page are not just placed there to do nothing. Search engines thrive on links. In Google’s eyes, these links are a vote of confidence as they establish you as an authority in your industry. Content brings people to a site, and great content earns you links from other sites. If someone just mentions you or your business with a link, this earns you a higher status as an authority in your area of business.
In layman’s terms, it is telling people that you know what you are talking about and know what you are doing. Those extra links, if you have them, will put you ahead of your competitors. Your site doesn’t have to be a massive one to gain success in ranking. Digital marketers understand that and work accordingly to give you that competitive edge in the industry your business is in.
This has been just the tip of the iceberg. Digital marketing is a time-consuming practice with a variety of tools used to increase the growth of your business. Digital Marketing Belfast has the professional marketers and expertise needed to set the stage properly for substantial business growth. As a business owner, you would not have the time to attend to your business, your employees, your customers, your product and above all that, the digital marketing process. It is much wiser to leave that in the hands of professionals while you take care of business.
If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels then we have a lot to choose from.
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