In my last blog, I outlined what digital marketing is. However, business owners and marketers are often unsure what are the ACTUAL benefits of digital marketing, compared to offline or traditional marketing which previously dominated the marketing space.

Unlike most offline marketing methods, the main benefit and advantage of digital marketing, according to Digital Marketing Institute (DMI) is that it allows marketers to see accurate results of their campaigns. And not only are these results accurate, they are available in real time!

Imagine when you placed an advert in a print edition of a newspaper or a magazine. Apart from getting information on the newspapers’ estimated distribution and circulation, did you get any statistics on how many people have actually seen or read YOUR advertisement? Probably not. So, most of the time you will not know if that particular ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the return on investment (ROI) of almost any aspect of your marketing efforts.

Here are some examples:

Traffic To Your Website

When you embark on your digital marketing journey, having a website is critical. To get full value from your website, it needs to be linked to digital marketing analytical tools such as Google Analytics. Then when you plug-in various digital marketing channels, you can see, for example, the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage and any other promotional or product pages you created. You can also identify which pages visitors to your website visited, what device they were using, where they came from and other useful and insightful data.

This marketing intelligence helps you to prioritise digital marketing channels to spend your resources on, based on the number/percentage of people those channels are driving visitors and potential customers to your website. For example, if only 10% of your website traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on optimising your website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools to increase that percentage.

This level of analysis and the ability to adjust mid-campaign, is in stark contrast with offline marketing, where it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they engage with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can make faster, more accurate and informed decisions about how to attract visitors to your website right at the top/awareness stage of the marketing funnel. You can identify trends and patterns in people’s behaviour on your website before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Another important aspect of digital marketing is acquiring new customers, better known as lead generation. Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and distributed it manually at road intersections, trade shows or the latest event you attended – that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem with this method is you have no idea how many people even read your brochure or binned it without even looking at it!

But if you learn how to create good digital brochures, also known as landing pages, with related info on your website, you can view and measure how many people visited that page with your product/services brochure. You can also employ other savvy digital marketing techniques and collect contact details from people that download your brochure in order to move them along the sales funnel. In this way, not only do you measure the quality of the content you provided, but also identify how many people are engaging with your content and generating qualified leads when people download your brochure.

I Am Ready to Try Digital Marketing. What Next?

If you already have a website, ensure that it is fully functional for digital and social media marketing. If you don’t, develop your website with the guidance and support of a qualified digital marketer who will ensure your website is on the right track to serve you well in developing your business in the online sphere. Good Luck!