As a business owner, even as you’ve identified your target audience, you’ll soon find that they’re spread out over many different channels online. For this reason, digital marketing helps you and your brand connect with your market, to reach them in the proper time and manner.
Just like the importance of traditional marketing cannot be contradicted. The exponential growth in the scale of digital marketing neither can be ignored. Business owners should capitalize on this fact.
By considering the importance of digital marketing, companies can improve the visibility and reach of their business brand.
The Internet makes sure you have a global reach. With the right approach, a larger audience will discover your brand.
Many online platforms are free, such as Instagram and Twitter, and surely businesses must take advantage of that.
Also up on the LOJO Galactic Learning Center:
Table of Contents
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a phrase commonly heard during present times. It is possible that this term is being thrown carelessly, without much thought or understanding of it. However, as a business owner in the digital age, it pays to know more about the importance of digital marketing.
Digital marketing originates from the concept of direct marketing. In general, marketing is a process by which companies communicate with their target audience to sell or promote a product.
Before the world went digital, marketing was through flyers, posters, TV ads, and phone calls. However, as most people shift to personal devices for their needs, it has become essential for marketers to adopt new strategies.
This shift allowed digital marketing to come to the forefront of marketing and branding.
With digital marketing, companies’ efforts are target to land on personal devices for personal consumption. Advertisements and promotions are to elicit interaction from an identified market.
Before this, companies would have billboards printed and posted in freeways and building facades for everyone to see. People see ads based on their profiles and preferences.
The Role of Digital Marketing in Building Brands
Branding is not a new concept, it has been around ever since production began. Products come in packaging, bearing specific seals and labels, this is called branding. Essentially, branding was a way for business owners to mark a product to become easily recognizable.
While branding has evolved through time, it grew into a rather complicated concept. It suddenly involved the tone of the communication materials, the design aesthetic, the website interface, and much more. It became more than just a stamp and a seal. Branding is now an overarching concept that relates to anything communicated to your audience.
As digital marketing takes center stage of marketing efforts, it dramatically affects how branding is complete. It is through digital marketing that companies can communicate their branding efforts. It is the primary platform for them to showcase their brand.
Whether through making viral content, or a curated Instagram feed, digital marketing has become an essential tool for communication.
What is the Importance of Having a Brand?
Branding is all about positively reinforcing the image of your business to your target market. The goal is that your audience could never forget you and consider you when they need a service that you offer.
Brand equity is a premium value added to a product or service. For this reason, a pair of Ferragamo shoes or a limited edition of Air Jordans sell much better than less known brands. They’re all footwear. However, the well-known, positive brand image automatically raises the value.
Building Your Brand
Building your brand from the ground up is no easy feat. It takes years of knowledge and expertise to penetrate the over-saturated information highway -that is, the internet.
Sure, building platforms in social media accounts are accessible. You register, then you are done. But the main thrust of the work is putting your little online space at the forefront.
With millions of accounts and businesses trying to establish their brands online, it is easy to drown in all of the chaos. Without guidance and assistance, failure is imminent.
It’s not too late for you to take the plunge and drive your business to success! Discover the importance of digital marketing to grow your brand and embrace it.
The Golden Rule of Business
The root of all brand-building efforts was probably best articulated by Bob Burg – All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like, and trust.
To be a successful brand, you want your customers to know you, but you also need to make them like and trust you.
This holds particularly true as the marketplace grows increasingly more crowded and cutthroat. A brand helps a business, product, or a service better resonate with its intended target market — the stronger the connection, the stronger the brand.
The Importance of Digital Marketing in Building Your Brand
Growing a humble small business venture into a globally recognized brand is an aspiration for many entrepreneurs and managers.
Of course, such a process would take time, effort, and resources. And while many small business owners are aware of this fact, developing a successful brand-building strategy and subsequently carrying it through is a real challenge.
Learn more about LOJO’s “A Helpful Guide to Brand Development for Beginners“.
A good brand image separates you and your business from competitors. Experts believe that having a brand image is more important than having money. Profits come and go, but a substantial brand presence guarantees that your business will survive even the most challenging periods.
The best and the most cost-efficient way to accomplish this task is with Digital Marketing. With so much competition there, small businesses face the daunting challenge of cutting through all the marketing clutter to connect with the audience.
That’s the importance of digital marketing. Therefore, it covers many practices, such as SEO, PPC advertising, social media management, as well as others. Of course, each of them plays a role in the marketing mix and helps build a brand successfully.
Content Marketing
Start your brand-building efforts by creating a whole bunch of high-quality digital marketing content that helps reinforce your current brand message.
A good number of search-optimized, long-form articles will significantly benefit your marketing efforts in the first place. These articles of about 2,000 words will feature lots of great visuals, videos, links to your other pages, as well as trusted sources within your chosen topic. Content should be well written and express your authority in the niche.
This will help attract more visitors to your site who will keep coming back for your products and industry development updates. As long as you invest some time into creating content that will provide value to your target audience, you won’t have to spend a dime.
These days, it’s more important to develop unique, market-relevant, comprehensive pieces of content once a week or even once a month than pumping out mediocre content daily.
PPC vs Organic SEO
Here’s an interesting fact. 80% of people ignore paid search results, clicking only on organic listings. However, 64.6% of people who click on Google ads are looking to make an online purchase.
That said, both pay-per-click (PPC) and organic SEO digital marketing strategies are essential for your brand-building initiatives. But they each have specific uses.
PPC can give you a significant boost in brand awareness, online visibility, and short-term traffic. On the other hand, organic traffic will pay off in the long run with a steady, sustainable stream of new visitors via search engine optimization.
So it’s acceptable to run some ads if you have to. For example, you might have a special promotion or launching a new product. However, don’t forget to create the high-quality pieces of content we’ve mentioned in the previous section, as those could help your SEO strategy.
We recommend reading: “A Handy Beginner’s Guide to Understanding PPC” and “A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding SEO“.
Social Media
The main objective of social media marketing is to attract and engage potential customers. Identify three to four best platforms where your target audience is likely to hang out. Remember that you don’t have to be present on all social networks, just the ones that matter the most.
Make sure your profiles are complete, with your business information visible. When people take the time to drop a comment or review, you need to respond right away.
Engagement fuels social networks, and their algorithms can pick up cues from how your audience responds to what you post. Comments carry the most weight, along with clicking a “play” button or clicking through links.
Consider using chatbots to automate some of the fundamental interactions on your channels.
Video Marketing
We’d like you to pay particular attention to video content as a marketing means. It allows you to showcase so much about your brand — your brand image, products, how-to tutorials, and much more.
Use videos to tell your brand’s story and let your customers know what’s your business all about. In general, come up with content that can help showcase your expertise. Take the opportunity to show how likable, relatable, and accessible you are through these stories.
Videos work very well with other marketing channels, boost online visibility, engagement, search engine rankings, and ultimately, sales. These are all great reasons to use videos on top of your brand-building efforts.
If you didn’t realize, four out of five consumers believe that demo videos are beneficial. Almost half of all internet users look for videos related to a product before visiting a store.
Local SEO
One of the most overlooked areas that can give your brand a higher impact is, improving local SEO.
Around 50% of mobile users conducting a local search visited a nearby store within a day. It’s projected that searches for products and services “near me” will only increase with more people using voice search on their mobile devices and smart home assistants.
Sign up for Google My Business to claim your local listing, and fill up your profile as best as you can. Make sure your NAP info are consistent throughout all your online pages: your website, landing pages, social media channels, as well as online business directories.
Encourage your clients to leave reviews about your products and services, and acknowledge these with prompt responses.
Email Marketing
Do you remember the last time you received a letter? Whether it was written down or typed out, the words did not feel “cold” because you knew it was for you.
According to Entrepreneur, “the average number of emails sent and received daily has reached 269 billion.” This number alone shows you the fantastic potential of email marketing in improving your brand’s awareness and conversion rates.
Email marketing helps you identify the different data sets of your customers, specify your marketing content, and reach out with a personalized message. Your email subject is vital to them clicking on the email and opening it. The content is what will make them read it and, hopefully, click on the links.
Let’s look at the data:
- 66% of customers purchase due to an email marketing message, according to the Digital Marketing Association.
- According to McKinsey. Email is “almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping your business acquire new customers.”
- Email marketing yields an average ROI of $38 for every $1 spent. According to Email Monday.
Email marketing is an effective tool in brand-building. Temper the sales talk and approach it instead. Like sending updates to a friend, telling them you miss them, or telling them about this great deal that you think would help them.
Your care will come through and felt, and hopefully, your call to action will be heed again.
The importance of digital marketing, as you can see, is that it covers a good number of practices. Each has an essential role in connecting with your target market. Digital marketing has undoubtedly leveled the playing field. It allows small businesses to advertise, promote products and services, and communicate with potential customers. Just as larger companies with more substantial marketing budgets do.
However, small business owners already have quite a bit, with enough day-to-day operations troubles and weekly sales to worry about.
They can’t possibly know the importance of digital marketing and all its hacks. It is essential to focus energy and efforts on some of the key areas.
The Ultimate Goal of Your Digital Marketing and Branding Efforts
When people go to McDonald’s, they know that they’re not just getting a hamburger, but a specific dining experience. When people buy Beats by Dre, they’re not getting just a standard set of headphones. The same goes for those who shop at Amazon, book an Uber, or stay at Airbnb.
Branding is all about managing expectations. Companies that are aware of this fact take great efforts to ensure that their brands live up to their expectations. In addition, a brand that keeps its promises and stays true to its claims earns trust.
It’s also through digital marketing that companies determine if their branding efforts are translating into actual sales. In case you forgot: the end goal of all these things is to make a sale and establish your presence in the market.
Regardless of how pretty your Instagram and how many followers you have, it matters less if your buyer’s journey doesn’t progress at all. So, now you can see the importance of digital marketing. It allows you to pinpoint the reasons why your branding does not work.
The ability is to directly communicate with the audience, which digital marketing enables you to do. Discover the pain points through direct emails, Facebook comments, Instagram polls. You will have greater access to the information you otherwise do not have without digital marketing. After identifying these pain points, you can adjust and re-brand accordingly.
Expand your knowledge with: “Our Guide for Your Journey Through Digital Marketing Space!” and get An Overview of LOJO’s Digital Marketing Services.
A Final Word About Digital Marketing and Branding
In a world where people are constantly overwhelmed with advertising, promotional offers, and all sorts of sales pitches, branding still helps to stand out from the crowd. Again, it also allows companies to break through the clutter and get a chance to make a real connection with the customers.
Knowing the importance of digital marketing is a blessing for business owners. Indeed, it allows them to reach potential customers more effectively.
But with an increasingly competitive landscape coupled with a hectic schedule, the struggle to find time to build a brand can be a real challenge.
Thorough knowledge of digital marketing trends is vital in developing a good strategy for building your brand, as the bulk of your clients are already online. Knowing how to best connect with them is definitely crucial for sustainable business success.
The critical components of success include a consistent effort to create positive brand messages, develop genuinely helpful resources to showcase your expertise, connect with your market with genuine interaction and deliver on your brand promises.
