Marketing and advertising have come a long way.
Once there was a time when marketing campaigns were just limited to running ads on television, radio, newspaper, and magazines. However, as the world is moving towards digital marketplace, businesses are expanding their reach and connect with the audiences through digital marketing tactics.
Digital Marketing is promoting or creating brand awareness using the INTERNET.
The whole concept of digital marketing is-
CREATE CONTENT — PUBLISH CONTENT — AMPLIFY CONTENT
REPEAT!
Using digital marketing tactics along with traditional marketing strategies, you can optimize and maximize the results of your campaign.
Before coming up with a plan first you need to know why you need it?
Irrespective of the industry, and the work I have outlined the top 5 undeniable reasons that why your brand needs well defined digital marketing strategy to get more visitors, leads and convert them into customers.
1. Strategy Gives Direction And Goals
While building a strategy what will you do?
Learn- Get to know what to do?
Plan- Build a plan of action
Do- Follow the plan
Grow- Grow your business
Thus, by building a proper strategy to run digital marketing campaign you will get direction and goals. Companies who do not have a proper strategy defined will not have a sense of what they want to do online and what will they do to handle some of the essential elements.
Without specific goals, it becomes hard to know exactly what you want to campaign for online.
Writing a well-defined marketing strategy will help the companies tackle crucial questions, will know how to sell to whom, define your target audience and construct an effective digital programme and run a successful online campaign.
2. Consumers Are Going Digital
60% of the consumers agree to “I cannot live without my smartphone”.
As the consumers, these days are looking for more digital content and want each of their purchases to be unique. Search engines like GOOGLE, YAHOO and BING are the most popular channel for search.
A study shows that 82% of the consumers use websites and check reviews for search. Around 25% of consumers use social media and blogs to find new solutions, products, and brands.
From all these stats it should be clear how digital marketing strategies can shape up your businesses. If you do not engage your brand with right digital marketing strategies then you may lose potential customers. It becomes vital that companies work is visible through searches and they can engage well with customers.
3. Digital Campaigns Are Easy To Track And Monitor
TRACK YOUR SUCCESS ANYTIME ANYWHERE
Want to know the reach of your campaigns? Digital Marketing wins it all!
With all the campaigns running you need to keep track of the digital marketing metrics. With this metrics you get the accurate measure of ROI, also define the areas of improvement and work to make things better in future.
With the use of analytics tool, marketers can check for different ad content and manage how audiences react to each campaign. Check the number of visitors on your website, the number of page views, average time a user spends on your website, bounce rates, conversions and analyze your growth over time.
By analyzing all these aspects you can work to optimize your marketing strategy and get the best results.
4. Your Brands Becomes More Interactive
Digital marketing is here, now and evolving daily.
With certain digital marketing campaigns such as social media marketing, blogging, improving search results, text messaging, online advertisements, email marketing and affiliate marketing, you can give your customers a more personalized experience.
With short online videos, businesses grab attention of their audiences. Stuff like images, infographics, short video, client story keep your audiences informed, entertain them and engage ideal customers. Cisco predicts that by 2019, around 80% of the Internet’s traffic will be video.
Remarketing on social media shows consumers what they have left behind and give a constant reminder of your brand. With personalized ad content, you become more interactive with your consumers and can stay at the top of their mind and encourage them for future purchasing.
5. Increases Reach
With digital marketing, you can strategically focus to reach and increase the visibility of your brand.
Traditional marketing comes out as an effective tool to reach a target audience, but if you are looking beyond this segment then digital marketing can help you increase your overall reach.
Also, digital marketing provides you with new ways to target your audience and gives a great exposure and build an effective brand recognition.Through blog content, social media and search engines reach out those customers who you have missed and need to make the engagement.
Planning digital marketing strategy is not that complicated. You just need to define your goals, tactics, and KPIs and document them down the line.
Businesses not only have well defined strategies but they are continuously spending on these strategies. E-Marketer forecasts that by 2020 the digital ad spending will reach $23 billion. If you do not work on building digital marketing strategies then it is obvious that your company will be left behind your competitors.
This article was written by Arpita Gupta and originally appeared in Medium.com