If your budget is tight and you’re pressed for time then you may be tempted to reassess whether digital marketing actually delivers the right level of ROI. In today’s tech-driven world that is constantly being moulded and remoulded by consumer expectations, digital marketing provides a way for businesses to keep up. If you’re still on the fence, these are just some of the reasons why digital marketing has become so essential for every business today.

Find your customers where they spend their time and money

22% of the population of the planet is on Facebook. 76% of Facebook users and 51% of Instagram users are on it every day. The average person spends at least two hours a day on social media and 37% of this is interacting with branded content. Social media has a crucial role to play in digital marketing, which is all about ensuring that your messaging and products are placed where your target consumers are most likely to see, and engage with, them.

If you’re an SME it’s a huge opportunity

Digital marketing is a great leveller because you don’t necessarily need a huge budget to get real results from it. That means that smaller businesses can achieve real growth with digital marketing without the resources of a brand like McDonalds or Amazon.

More effectively targeted resources

Effectively targeting the right consumers can be transformative for any business. While this can be achieved to a certain extent with traditional advertising, only digital marketing allows large demographics to be broken down to focus purely on delivering the most effective content to those most likely to respond to it. Social media advertising, for example, allows you to narrow down your audience based on factors such as behaviours and interests, not just location or age.

The impact of segmentation and personalisation

Segmenting customers is possible down to the tiniest level with digital marketing and this allows for highly effective personalisation. Customers today have begun to expect a personalised approach in business communications. That doesn’t just mean using names or remembering birthdays but delivering relevant content and useful ideas that align with the customer’s own. The use of segmentation from collected data and automation to send content at exactly the right time can be incredibly powerful (automated emails are 70% more likely to be opened). Personalisation really works too – 14% of people are more likely to open a personalised email and 101% are more likely to click on the Call to Action.

The impact of analytics

Working with digital marketing gives you access to deep insights from analytics that can be fed into ongoing strategy to make it more successful. For example, you’ll be able to see who is most interested in your ads, what they like and who is the easiest to convert. You’ll also be able to understand how ads are interacted with e.g. who lingered on them and who shared. The results provide opportunities to streamline marketing to optimise results.

Giving consumers what they want

Today’s customers are shying away from traditional advertising – they are blocking pop up ads, deserting physical publications, refusing to sit through channels with a lot of commercials and abandoning websites that don’t cater to the preference to browse via mobile. Digital marketing allows your business to align with the way that consumers want to shop and engage, whether that’s in providing online reviews or via a responsive site design.

Every business needs digital marketing today – if you’d like to discuss your specific requirements please get in touch.