3.6 IMPORTANCE OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital marketing is becoming a priority for businesses around the world as more and more people are using internet. It is the process of integrating platforms and customers experience through a digital channel. Digital marketing offers the prospect of increasing and improving the interactions and relationships with current and prospective customers through, for instance, social networking sites, instant messaging systems and mobile applications (apps).

The main advantages of digital marketing over physical marketing are-
It helps businesses to develop a wider customer base as it does not rely on physical presence or interaction
It encourages customers to interact directly with businesses
It is not limited by conventional opening times – customers can interact at a time and place convenient for them.

Both forms of marketing are very important in the marketplace and each business has to evaluate their current and future customer base before embarking on digital marketing actions. Some key aspects of digital marketing are looking for gaining your attention before you launch digital marketing campaign for your business-

Greater Opportunity-
With the help of digital marketing, a company or an organization can explore greater heights of popularity and targets. This is because of the fact that digital marketing is not bounded to a particular region or a place like the traditional marketing. Online marketing gives the organizations a wider scope to expand their market or customer base. Online Marketing is essential as in today's time and age each and every person is connected to the internet. This could be made easy for the organizations to spread the awareness about their product to the masses. Hence giving them a greater opportunity to grow financially as well as in popularity.

Conversion Rate-
On the Internet the Conversion ratio is better than the traditional marketing. This is because if a person wants shoes, then he will type shoes in the search engine and then the search engine will show the related results only but on the other hand if a person is in the market and someone gives him the pamphlet of bags then that is useless for him as he was looking for shoes and not bags. So, with the help of digital marketing the failures of conversion reduce and increases the chances of sales.

Cost Effective-
Digital marketing is one of the most cost-effective way to promote the products and reach out to the customers. Marketing online is not at all very expensive till a certain point as this can be done by a trained digital marketer with the help of an organic SEO. Internet marketing includes on the cost of digital marketer unlike the traditional marketing which has printing cost, distribution cost, etc to make it expensive.

Easy to Communicate-
With the help of digital marketing, it becomes easy for the organizations to communicate with the potential buyers. This helps the organizations to increase the conversion ratio as they can directly communicate to the customers and solve all kinds of doubts which the customer has in his or her mind. Solving the queries is the best way to promote your product as if the product's information, benefits, etc are clear in the minds of the customer then they can buy the product with an ease.

Higher Earnings-
With the help of digital marketing, both sales and revenues increase for an organization. This is because of the fact that people are more interested in buying online rather than going out for each and every thing, this gives the companies a chance to sell their products more easily to the customers. As this platform is much cheaper than that of the traditional form, which makes it higher earning platform for the organizations.


Advantages of digital marketing- There are actually a multitude of reasons as to why one might choose or prefer digital marketing over conventional means:

More accurate data If you opt for digital marketing, chances are that your ad agency will provide you with very accurate data regarding your web campaign. This in turn can be used to pinpoint under performing areas of the campaign that need tweaking to maximize visitor flow and plan on capital investment.
Marketing Agencies that do SEO marketing in Miami like Webris can help you find out about the latest marketing tools and manage your site traffic.
Has a wider reach nobody can deny the fact that internet is a huge library sprawling with visitors and it makes for a very attractive platform to visit and advertise your product.
Better Return of Investment (ROI) When you start spending on an advertisement campaign, you expect it to yield more benefits than you’ve spent in the long run. Digital marketing has been shown to do just that. The facts that you can spend gradually expand or tighten your investments based on the data collected from your ad agency, give you absolute control over the investments.
More than one form This is perhaps one of the biggest USP of Digital Marketing. Your campaign doesn’t need to stick to one form of advertisement if you are using multiple web streams for the distribution of advertisement. You can make your campaign adaptable to different sites that use different forms for displaying advertisements. For example: When you advertise on Facebook, you can adapt the ad to a sponsored post that appears in-feed. This follows the format of native advertising. Similarly, in pages of where native advertising isn’t an option, you can switch to regular banner ads.

Uses of social media and Digital Marketing-

Social media and digital marketing activities are significant, not only for gaining revenue, but also reduce the cost of conventional marketing activities. It may be good if currently this company’s sales number still good, but will it last? Will this brand become the top-of-mind brand for the next five years without being lost or overshadowed by the competitors? That is what social media and digital marketing useful for; we can predict the future, do prevention of crisis, and create innovations; because by using social media and digital marketing we can track our brand’s competitors. The usage of having these online activities is also to know people’s opinion about our product, build our brand reputation, and to find the voices of our brand supporters or even the haters. These are things that conventional marketing hardly achieved effectively.

The big marketing budget originally for traditional marketing activities can be shifted to activate the digital marketing strategies, because by going digital we can check how much the frequency of the customer that get our advertisement, how their buying and lifestyle behavior, etc.
First of all, TVCs Advertisement, Sales Promotion and Below the Line (BTL) may be good and useful for the past generation, the budget that will be spent on those marketing channels will be huge, yet the effectiveness by the revenues number may be hard to check in detail because the evaluation is not really measurable. Those channels cannot really do direct targeting. People who watch television, come to the store or come to the event may vary; they who watch or come may not our product’s target market, and with those conventional channels we cannot track their database and their behavior. With digital and social media activities, we can track people’s behavior and create a database for us.

The advertisement can be targeted directly to the specific age, gender, location, and even their shopping lifestyle. Using digital, it eases us to know our consumers’ profiles. Checking our competitor will be also easier than past marketing activities. We can check their new promotions on their website, what content they create to engage with their customers, what is their latest product development; all of these elements can be tracked using social media and digital tools. Also, social media helps marketers reduce the marketing budget, placing advertisement on TV, Radio or even Printed Media need a huge budget, same goes with creating brand activation events. However, digital campaign through Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, YouTube Ads, or even placing ads on millennials-friendly sites like Webtoon, Line or IDN Times, this will be ‘low cost – high impact’ marketing. Also, social media helps marketer create more direct interaction with the consumers, because they can give direct feedback about our product in our social media. Even now there are Instagram Polling and YouTube Polling that can help marketer to launch survey about our product via online and targeted to our public market the millennial teenagers.

To advertise the product, digital channel could be used such as social media network, e-mail marketing, and affiliate marketing. One of the Digital Doughnut Contributor, stated on one article titled ‘4 Important Digital Marketing Channels You Should Know About’, said that E-mail marketing is very effective to make us gain new customers or improving or strengthening our relationships with the existing customers. With email marketing we can share the latest promo or blog stories of our product to our mail database, but this has weakness such as people will mark our newsletter as spam is, we keep send repetitive contents. We can also do online affiliate marketing, it can make more exposure of our brand because we put advertisement in our affiliate’s website, for our product we can affiliate with Line Shop, Shop back, Lazada, Tokopedia, etc. while we get more coverage, the consumer will be redirected to our website and that can give us more traffic and database. What the affiliates will get are Pay Per Click (PPC), Pay Per Sale (PPS), or Pay Per Lead (PPL).

Not only that, with Instagram nowadays many brands (especially online start up and e-commerce) have become active in creating mini quiz contents. This kind of product could be a quiz consisting of guessing missing picture or healthy trivia that can create teenagers engagement in the post and help subtly promoting the product, especially if the free product is given for the winners and since this is a new brand from the company, this can really helps to increasing the brand and product awareness.

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