Digital marketing has grown more important with each passing year for some time now. At this point, it can rightly be viewed as an essential component as any modern business. While this sort of statement is increasingly accepted though, there are still plenty of business owners and company leaders who don’t have a firm grasp on the topic. So for those who may still be exploring the concept of modern digital marketing, we’re going to provide a little information on both why it’s a worthwhile investment in 2021, and how you can get started with your own business’s effort.
Why Digital Marketing is a Good Investment?
In this article we’ll try to highligh as much as possible why digital marketing is a good investment.
Establishing Brand Identity
A lot of explanations of the importance of digital marketing in 2021 focus on small businesses. And the primary reason for this is that a strategic marketing operation can give a smaller company its best chance to compete with larger rivals. As a Business-2-Community piece on digital marketing for small businesses put it, the biggest challenge for smaller enterprises is to “earn people’s trust.” It’s not easy to persuade consumers to leave larger or more established rivals, but by building up recognizable and visible brand identities through digital marketing, smaller businesses can give themselves a shot. It’s an important point, and one that is also instructive for larger operations. You’re never too big to improve brand identity.
Reaching a Target Audience
Digital marketing is also the best means by which to advertise to specific audiences for specific reasons. Using your own internal research, you should ultimately be able to divide consumers according to whatever criteria are most relevant to your business. You can then identify which of those consumers are most likely to become first-time and/or repeat customers, and target them with marketing approaches specifically tailored to their demonstrated needs and preferences. All of this amounts to a digital marketing practice, and it’s ultimately a way of building up a steady and reliable customer base.
Reaching Mobile Users
In 2016, headlines sprung up proclaiming that mobile internet usage had surpassed desktop activity for the first time. Immediately, much of the response centered on how businesses would react. Tech Crunch’s write-up on the development stated that going forward, companies that hadn’t yet adopted “mobile-first” approaches would have to do so. And where outreach and brand exposure are concerned, this meant a more dynamic approach to digital marketing. It is essentially only through sound, modern digital methods (social media outreach, content optimization, etc.) that companies are able to reach users who, in the time since 2016, have begun to favor their phones even more
Feeding a Data Operation
Data is just about the most important word in modern business, and it will have a profound impact on how you design a digital marketing operation. However, the marketing operation will in turn help to feed your data efforts as well. A write-up on Big Data by a University of Michigan professor of computer science phrases the underlying idea nicely — stating that data analysis depends on “clean data points.” This is a simple way of articulating essentially that data needs to be clear and reliable, and it is exactly that sort of data you can glean from some of your marketing outreach. You’ll know which customers respond to what, and why. That information will then feed into a bigger data analytics operation, which will refine your strategies further, and so on.
How You Can Get Started?
There’s a couple of ways to get started on your digital marketing journey.
Hire an Expert
The simplest way to get started with a digital marketing campaign is to hire an expert in the field, if you have the means to do so. And the good news is that with marketing having become such a massive field, there’s no shortage of such experts! It’s actually become a busy area of study in a lot of online institutions in particular, in part because plenty of working adults see the opportunities of adding education and degrees in marketing to their résumés. At any rate, Maryville University’s online bachelor’s in marketing explainer has noted that digital marketing is now the “top sought-after skill set in the field,” with 61% of hiring managers seeking these skills in job candidates. This means two things. First, your competitors are likely looking to hire professional marketers. Second, the demand has given rise to more than enough talent to go around. Hiring someone from this specific field of study will simply hasten and improve the development of a strong marketing campaign, and thereby keep you competitive.
Prioritize Content
This is quite a broad suggestion, but it’s sort of the whole ballgame, so to speak. As we wrote in ‘5 Powerful Digital Marketing Hacks to Increase Sales’, digital marketing depends largely on “stellar content” that is actionable and which your target audience can consume. What the content actually is will depend largely on what you do, the size of your business, and so on. But anything from blog posts, to social media messages, to eBooks can count. The point is to make it a priority to keep the content relevant, clear, informative, and actionable, and to adjust it as needed according to data.
Prepare for the Long Haul
This is not a specific action, necessarily, but it is also important to approach digital marketing as a long-term effort and not a one-time obligation. When you’re just setting up your digital marketing operation, it can feel like a single project. If the operation is to be effective however, it will need to be maintained and adjusted over time. Taking this step is effectively adding a new branch to your business, and should be thought of and supported as such.
There aren’t many things, if any, that can improve a business in 2021 quite like a robust digital marketing effort. We hope our explanations above have helped to clarify why this is the case, as well as what you can do to get started with your own business’s operation.
Author: Rose Johnson