Online Presence and Digital Marketing
Are you already online? It’s great if you are, because your customers are too. Every business and organization should have their own virtual storefront on the internet. Nearly every Finn uses the internet, and most of them surf online with mobile devices. Online presence also enables two-way communication between the company and the customer, unlike traditional marketing channels where advertising was mostly static. You can’t ask a frozen pizza seen on TV if it comes gluten-free, can you?
The foundation of digital marketing should be user-friendly websites that support your goals. Good websites work in sync with marketing across all channels and move potential buyers further along the marketing funnel. Before creating websites, important questions to consider are: What do you want to achieve with them? Sales, inquiries, or something else crucial for the business?
Measurability and Data
Who saw, clicked, or bought? The biggest difference from traditional media, digital advertising offers a variety of metrics to examine whether a campaign was successful or not. In addition to relevant information for advertising success, platforms like Facebook and Google accumulate a tremendous amount of data about the people interested in the products and services of the advertising company. The aforementioned channels generate a vast amount of information about factors such as the age, gender, interests, and location of potential customers. Furthermore, the data produced by advertising allows you to distinguish between those who actually buy from you and those who simply like your content.
ROI
The absolute strength of digital advertising lies in knowing where every spent cent goes. In traditional advertising, for instance when producing radio ads, you only receive information about the times your ad was played on a specific channel and how many times. The impact of advertising on sales remains a complete mystery, and you never get to know them in a reliable way. Modern technology allows every single click, conversion, and impression to be documented for planning the next marketing move. For assessing the productivity of advertising, there’s a useful formula called ROI (Return on Investment). The goal of advertising should always be to increase sales as directly as possible. The image below illustrates how ROI is calculated.
Cost-effectiveness
Reaching a thousand people with an advertising message has never been this inexpensive! On Facebook, at its best, you can reach over a thousand people for about 20 cents. That’s quite an astonishing number when compared to the cost and reach of a newspaper advertisement, for example. Moreover, digital advertising can be effectively used to replace a sales department making cold calls, if there’s a need for collecting contact information from individuals interested in the company’s service or product, without hiring a sales team.
Efficiency
The final and most crucial reason to invest in digital marketing. It simply works. Many success stories have been built for even smaller companies through digital marketing. However, radical changes shouldn’t be expected overnight, but a month or two could very well yield results if the focus is on the right aspects.
Thank you for reading this far. This was my first article on the topic, and I will be publishing more in the future. If you’re interested in the ins and outs of digital marketing from both the consumer’s and marketer’s perspective, or if you just want to learn more, I recommend reading several more articles. Have a great day!
-Vili
