In the Digital Age, it’s difficult to create a marketing strategy for your business without part, if not all, of it being focused on digital. While traditional methods may still have a place in some companies’ marketing game plans, at best, a traditional campaign will only hold up with the support of digital means.
As a digital marketing agency, we know we’d be nothing without the Internet, but we might take for granted just how important multi-channel digital marketing is to the consumer and the positive impact it’s had on businesses.
This Thanksgiving season is a great time to reflect on why digital trumps traditional every time – thus, why we’re grateful for the Internet and all its bells and whistles. Let’s take a moment to look at what’s truly great about being part of the digital marketing industry, and why we owe to it our success as an agency.
1. Visible Results
As opposed to traditional media, the closed-loop capabilities of digital marketing mean that we can see how well our campaigns are ticking along.
We’d prefer not to keep throwing money at something without being certain it’s working, so we should firstly thank technological advances for the fact that we no longer have to shoot a campaign into the dark and rely on guesswork.
Traditional methods may have the advantage of a vast reach, but it makes for unnecessary expense if you can’t see where interest is actually being generated. Digital campaigns, however, allow for clearer, better aim on the whole.
2. Befriending Our Audience
Speaking of reach, the ease of connecting and engaging with people online makes us better at identifying their needs and motivations. You know your hard work isn’t going to waste when you can see that people appreciate it, but how much of your audience is actually spending time online?
According to a survey conducted by Google and Millward Brown Digital, nearly half of B2B researchers are millennials, and 41 percent of them are spending 15 hours a week online (2015 State of the User Experience report). Digitally-minded millennials are the ones we especially want to impress after a recent report by IBM shows they’re the new decision-makers and thought leaders in the B2B market.
3. Etch-a-Sketch Campaigns
As digital marketers get to know their audience, they’re often forced to get rid of assumptions that may have been the driving force behind their campaigns and tweak their message accordingly.
Traditionally, once your campaign is released, there’s no turning back. But digitally speaking, with the click of a button we can pretend our marketing mishaps never happened and simply try something else. That said, once we get it right, we can eke as much as possible out of it. The creation of evergreen content is a critical strategy that, when posted in the digital ether, can drive traffic for generations. Traditional campaigns are less fortunate: with the permanence of a printed campaign comes the impermanence of consumers discarding that flyer and forgetting all about it.
4. Getting Social
Once your social media marketing is down pat, you’re most of the way there. HubSpot suggests that social media has a 100 percent higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. And social is also overtaking search when it comes to referral traffic.
Thanks to social media, there’s no better way to engage with our audience and even let them do the work for us. With word of mouth spreading across social platforms, audiences are helping to communicate brands’ messages quickly and effectively.
5. Creative Flow
In digital, the possibilities are endless. With a range of digital marketing platforms and the ability to A/B test, our creativity knows no bounds when it comes to how we design and distribute our content. Rather than limiting ourselves to print or a 30-second commercial, the Internet gives us an infinite universe of digital space, to which one-third of the planet’s population has access.
We should also be thankful for resources that make our ideas come to fruition even easier – like HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Free Content Creation Tools & Resources. Not only do we get more free reign with digital marketing options, but also our customers get greater choice and control.
6. Cash Flow
Of course, there’s the small matter of finances. We’re all aware that digital strategies are much cheaper than traditional ones. But it’s not just great working in digital marketing – more specifically, B2B digital marketing is where it’s at.
In the US, the B2B e-commerce market is twice as large as its B2C counterpart, and Forrester Research predicts that B2B sales will expand to $780 billion by the end of this year and surpass $1.1 trillion by 2020. So we’re not just spending less money, we’re making more – one thing we can certainly be thankful for.
7. A Bright Future
When it all comes down to it, we should be thankful that working in a flourishing industry means that we’re part of something great that can only get greater.
According to Gartner, digital marketing budgets increased 10 percent in 2015 and are set to increase again next year, forging opportunities for career growth. As fast as technology evolves and companies race to keep up, new jobs are being created for people who really “get” it and can utilize their knowledge of the field to improve clients’ online presence.
As customers lean more toward digital experiences and use the Internet to research where to take their business, the lines between online and offline marketing are blurring. Being digitally minded in our marketing ventures means being able to use multiple channels to build connections with our leads and clients, allowing for numerous opportunities to create value for them.
Ultimately, we can be thankful that in 2015, being part of the digital marketing world has never been more exciting.
