With a steady flow of dynamic new trends, technology and tactics, the world of marketing is ever-changing. In the not-too-distant past, digital marketing was one of these new trends, providing new avenues for communication between a business and its customers. However, as the digital landscape has continued to evolve in recent years, digital marketing is no longer just a good tactic to consider. It’s a necessity for businesses and organizations across various industries and locations. As a business strategist with Clix, Mike Mueller understands the value that digital marketing can provide and why it’s a smart investment for companies of all shapes and sizes. In a recent discussion with him on The Ghidotti Podcast, he shared four reasons to use digital marketing in your own strategy.
Digital marketing is trackable
Like many marketing tactics, digital marketing is a trial and error process. Whether it’s pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing, optimizing your website for search engines or any other practice, digital marketing often requires testing to know if your practices are hitting the mark with your target audience. That’s not to say that blindly testing a number of different tactics will inevitably lead to success, but rather that digital marketing is not a “set it and forget it” practice. Fortunately, one of the key benefits of digital marketing is that it can be tracked and measured to determine what works and what doesn’t.
“Being able to track them is what differentiates digital marketing channels to a large degree,” said Mueller. “You have data points that are embedded in analytics, so you can extract those data points to learn something about the people that are consuming your marketing. I think that’s a hallmark of digital marketing.”
Digital marketing reinforces other tactics
While the rise of social media and consumers doing much of their business online has made digital marketing an increasingly successful tactic in recent years, it doesn’t mean that other strategies and tactics are now obsolete. Content marketing and traditional advertising with newspapers or magazines still have their place alongside digital marketing. In fact, digital marketing can work hand-in-hand to amplify your message when implemented into a comprehensive strategy that includes all aspects of marketing and public relations.
“Even what we don’t consider to be digital marketing has some digital marketing component attached to it and should, honestly,” Mueller said. “I know there are some businesses that still lean heavily on newspapers and magazines and those channels are absolutely useful, but even those have sort of intersections with digital marketing like QR codes and other things of that nature. You’d be hard-pressed to name any marketing channel today that doesn’t have some digital component to it.”
Digital marketing drives website traffic
For businesses of all shapes and sizes, a website is the centralized hub for all content and relevant information about who they are and what they do. From product or service details and employee backgrounds to gated content and ways to connect, a company’s website includes everything prospective customers need or want to know. Having members of your target audience spend time reading, watching and listening to the content on your website is the key to turning a visitor into a lead, and digital marketing is the key to driving traffic to your website.
“If you’re thinking that your website is going to drive traffic on its own, you’re definitely missing out,” said Mueller. “More and more what’s required is an interactive and engaging approach. There are lots of ways in which your potential customers are looking for you and want to engage with you, and a lot of times there’s multi-channel attribution. They’re on LinkedIn and they find you, but then they go to your website and that’s where they convert.”
Digital marketing generates new leads
Driving traffic to your website is one of the many benefits of digital marketing, but perhaps the most valuable for your business is lead generation. New customers are essential for the growth of any organization and you have all the tools to get them with organic and paid digital marketing tactics. On the organic side, optimizing your on-page and off-page SEO can go a long way toward improving your rank in results pages on Google, Bing and other popular search engines, while paid strategies such as pay-per-click advertising provide an opportunity to put your message directly in front of those you are trying to reach. When implemented as part of a comprehensive strategy, these tactics work hand-in-hand to generate new leads and customers for your business.
“We often talk about how it’s a combination of farming and hunting,” Mueller said. “You want to harvest as much of that prey as you can in the short run with pay-per-click ads while they’re out there searching, but you also don’t want to be paying for leads all the time. You want to be nurturing the long game with all the things that go into the SEO component of digital marketing. The sweet spot is when you have both.”