With over 5 billion internet users worldwide, we’re truly living in a digital age. Not only are the overwhelming majority of people spending time online every day, but the number of internet users continues to rise each year. This has created a fundamental shift in the way people shop for the products and services they need. Regardless of the industry you’re in, your audience is spending a great deal of their time online.
In order for your marketing efforts to be successful, you must connect with your audience at the right time and in the right place. Today, the place where your audience is most likely to find you is where they’re already spending most of their time – the internet. As a result, digital marketing is now a critical component to any marketing strategy you implement at your business.
Digital marketing is highly complex and encompasses a wide range of different tactics. It’s critical to work with an experienced digital marketing company to ensure your business utilizes the right methods to deliver the best ROI and maximize your lead generation efforts.
Digital marketing leverages a wide range of online channels to reach consumers who may be interested in your products and services. Businesses that engage in digital marketing typically incorporate multiple methods in order to maximize their ability to connect with their audience.
There are a multitude of digital channels and platforms available to reach your target audience. This is the most effective way to build awareness for your brand, establish your business as a trusted industry expert, and give your audience an opportunity to learn more about your company. It has become the primary approach used in modern marketing, as it provides the greatest opportunity to target the qualified leads that will turn into the most lucrative long-term clients or customers.
Because people spend so much time online, digital marketing allows you to reach a much larger audience than is possible through traditional marketing methods. In addition, digital marketing delivers a variety of important benefits that allow you to maximize the ROI on your efforts.
Many traditional marketing channels, such as advertising on TV, radio, magazines or billboards, limit your control over the audience you reach. While some TV shows or magazines have more clearly defined demographics, it’s still challenging to identify exactly who will come across your ad. As a result, it’s common for traditional marketing efforts to reach a lot of people who simply have no interest in your offerings.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to target the specific audience that is most likely to be interested in your products and services. In addition, you have the ability to create highly personalized messaging that increases your likelihood of conversions. This will deliver a significantly greater ROI than is typically possible with traditional marketing.
You Generate Measurable Results that Allow You to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Efforts
One of the greatest limitations associated with traditional marketing methods is a lack of measurability. It’s virtually impossible to obtain data regarding the number of people your campaign reached, the number of leads it generated, or any other metric that allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, provides you with a treasure trove of data that allows you to identify which strategies and campaigns are achieving the best results, and which strategies need to be adjusted or abandoned. You can receive highly accurate data for your digital marketing efforts in real time, allowing you to make the adjustments necessary to maximize your ROI.
You have the ability to track just about any data that can help you improve the performance of your marketing efforts, including:
You also have the ability to trace your sales back to a prospect’s initial digital interaction with your business. This process, called attribution modeling, allows you to better understand the ways in which your target audience researches and buys your product or service. This provides the insights needed to identify which aspects of your marketing strategy should receive greater emphasis, and which aspects of your buyer’s journey need to be refined.
Most traditional marketing methods come with a fixed cost, regardless of the results generated. For example, it costs the same amount of money to run a TV commercial, a magazine ad or a billboard for a month whether it converts at a high level or doesn’t generate any leads for your business. Furthermore, since you aren’t able to generate any performance data, you have no way of identifying which of these campaigns are delivering the best ROI.
Because you’re able to track the day-to-day performance of every digital marketing campaign, you have up-to-date data on which initiatives are performing well and which aren’t delivering your desired results. This allows you to allocate more resources to the higher performing campaigns, allowing you to maximize your ROI.
In addition, digital marketing gives you greater control over how you spend your marketing budget. You can pivot your spending instantly if you determine your money isn’t being spent in the right places. For example, if your data shows that your Facebook ads aren’t converting at as high a level as your PPC campaigns, you have the ability to shift money from your Facebook ads budget to your PPC budget to take advantage of the additional traffic and higher conversion rate being generated by this method.
Since the success of your digital marketing efforts are easily measured, you’ll have the ability to improve your conversion rate. When you know the effectiveness of each strategy in your campaign, you can make adjustments to these tactics in order to achieve better results. This continuous refinement will help you optimize each campaign for the highest number of conversions.
In addition, digital marketing gives you greater control over the audience you target with your campaigns. This allows you to focus on the segment of your audience that will provide higher quality leads that are more likely to become customers and are more likely to spend a greater amount of money with you over the lifetime of your relationship with them.
In most instances, you won’t be able to convert people into a new customer the first time they come into contact with your business. There is a process most people go through when purchasing a product or service, called the buyer’s journey. There are three primary stages of this journey:
Digital marketing allows you to make a connection with your audience in the awareness stage so that you can guide them through the other steps of the buyer’s journey. Because you’re able to create content targeting each stage of the journey, you also have a greater ability to get recognized by people farther along in the process. In addition, you have access to data showing you how your audience moves through the journey in each of your digital marketing channels, allowing you to optimize your conversion rate.
One of the challenges facing small businesses is that it is often hard to compete with larger brands that have vastly more money to invest in their marketing. This is particularly true with traditional marketing methods, where a greater budget directly equates to reaching a wider audience.
Digital marketing helps small and medium sized businesses level this playing field by being more strategic with their initiatives. For example, you can create quality content targeting long-tail keywords which may be less competitive, but deliver an audience that is more ready to purchase. You can also focus your limited ad budget on the channels where your audience spends their most time, increasing the conversions generated from these efforts. With a savvy digital marketing strategy, you have the ability to compete with larger companies, even if your budget is much smaller.
The following digital marketing channels represent the most common ways businesses target their audience online. Keep in mind that the right mix of channels for your marketing strategy will depend on your specific industry and the unique characteristics of your target audience. In most instances, multiple channels will be used to maximize the ROI on your digital marketing efforts.
Learn how we can help your digital marketing success >>Your website forms the foundation of all your digital marketing efforts. It is the place your audience goes to learn more about your company and the products/services you provide. Your website is a powerful tool that helps you convey your brand messaging, establish your business as an industry thought leader and communicate the ways in which you’re different than your competitors.
In addition, your website provides a variety of other lead and revenue generation capabilities:
Your website is only an effective marketing tool if your audience can find it. The way you’re able to increase your organic (free) website traffic is with SEO. SEO involves optimizing your website in order to rank higher on search engines such as Google.
You can still reach your target audience even if you’re struggling to rank well on the search engines. Pay per click (PPC) allows you to create paid ads that will require you to pay every time the ad is clicked by a user. You can use paid ads on search engines such as Google, and you can also create similar ads on many social media platforms.
Pay per click campaigns give you the ability to target users based on a variety of demographic categories such as age, gender, location, or interests.
The widespread use of social media makes these platforms an ideal way to reach your target audience. Social media marketing gives you the ability to promote your content and your brand on these platforms to build trust, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website and improve your lead generation.
Producing new content is one of the most effective ways to connect with your target audience. The purpose of content marketing is to improve brand awareness, educate your audience, establish your business as a trusted industry authority, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads.
The content you create is typically published on your website. You can then expand the reach of this content by promoting it on social media platforms and in your email newsletters. An effective content marketing strategy utilizes a variety of content types, including:
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to nurture a relationship with a potential lead. Many people aren’t necessarily ready to make a purchase when they first discover your business. Email marketing can be used to follow up with these people to provide them with additional information that they’ll find useful as they conduct their research. You can also use email marketing to educate your audience on the benefits they’ll receive when they purchase your products/services.
You can grow your email list by creating lead magnet pieces which offer valuable information in exchange for a person’s contact information. These contacts can then get added to email campaigns, allowing you to create an irresistible journey and move them through your marketing funnel, increasing the likelihood that they’ll become a customer.
Digital marketing has replaced traditional marketing methods as the primary way to reach your target audience. Therefore, it’s an effective solution for any business in any industry, and it should be the primary focus of your marketing efforts.
In many ways, digital marketing relies on the same foundational building blocks as traditional marketing, such as identifying your target audience, developing detailed buyer personas, establishing your unique industry market positioning, and creating valuable content that helps grow your business. However, these building blocks are used to create a strategy that relies on an online medium to reach your audience.
Just as with traditional marketing strategies, there are a set of best practices for digital marketing that will set you up for success. As Denver’s leading digital marketing company, Webolutions leverages all of these best practices to make sure we maximize the ROI of your efforts. In addition, we’ll always customize our recommendations regarding the right mix of digital marketing services to achieve your goals.
The following best practices should be followed when establishing a digital marketing strategy:
It’s impossible to provide you with an accurate estimate for digital marketing services without performing a deep dive into the nature of your business and your overall goals. However, there are certain industry averages you can reference to determine whether your ideal budget is going to be appropriate to achieve your goals.
In general, most businesses allocate 10%-20% of their revenue to their marketing budget. Whether you are on the high or low end of this range will depend on your industry, the size of your business, and your growth goals. While some of this marketing budget can go towards traditional strategies, it’s critical to allocate the vast majority of it to digital marketing, as this is where you’re likely to experience the greatest ROI on your efforts and maximize your lead generation results.
Our team is happy to discuss more concrete figures regarding an appropriate digital marketing budget for your business during a free consultation. Give us a call or contact us to find out how we can help your business become more successful.
It’s important to work with an experienced digital marketing company that possesses the expertise necessary to deliver results that will maximize your ROI, generate quality leads, and help you grow your business. When considering potential agencies to work with, make sure you evaluate the following factors:
Webolutions has been Denver’s top digital marketing company since 1994. During this time, we’ve earned numerous awards and recognitions for our work. We’re consistently recognized by Clutch as one of the top B2B companies in Denver, and the Denver Business Journal ranked us as a top digital marketing company in 2022.
We offer comprehensive digital marketing services to address just about any need you may have. In addition, all of our recommendations will be customized based on your specific goals. We are a truly data driven company, and we’re always monitoring your results to identify ways to improve and maximize the ROI of your marketing efforts.
You’ll benefit from our transformational Intrinsic Multiplier™ Approach which helps you grow your business faster, smarter and easier. This approach leads you on a collaborative journey to identify what is special about you as a company, including:
We’ll then conduct extensive market research to clearly understand what your competitors are doing and saying. Based on our deep dive into your business and our competitive research, we’ll establish your industry leading market positioning to clearly differentiate you from your competitors.
This marketing positioning will drive the development of a Brand Platform™ and your key brand communications elements. We’ll help you integrate your Brand Platform™ into your culture and your overall service experience. Then, we’ll develop and implement a customized strategy to achieve your goals and provide Real-Time Performance Intelligence Dashboards™ that track your results in a way that is easy to understand. Based on this data, we’ll continuously make recommendations on ways to improve your results over time.
The more you know about the digital marketing process, the more likely you are to get the results you need to grow your business. The following resources will help you round out your digital marketing research:
Contact us today to schedule a consultation. Webolutions provides digital marketing services to clients nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
There are 4.76 billion social media users around the world in January 2023, equating to 59.4 percent of the total global population.