Digital marketing has been around since the early 90’s – in fact, the first internet advertising was a banner ad by AT&T in 1994 (it frightens me a little that 1994 was the year I graduated from high school). And let me tell you, it showed immediate potential! Within the first 4 months of the ad going live, 44% of the people who saw it, clicked on it! I’d say that’s a pretty impressive success rate, even by today’s standards.

As the online phenomenon grows and changes, so do the ways in which we share our information; television bows to YouTube and Netflix, radio is replaced by Sirius or Spotify, and even newspapers have online versions. Our obsession with digital media requires an immediate marketing shift to online platforms to obtain the highest reach!

Here are 5 ways developing your digital marketing strategy will help take your business to the next level!”

• Mirror Consumer Behaviour
Consumers are not shopping or buying in the same ways they used to. Ask any retailer who doesn’t have a great website or online purchasing as an option; it has created the need for businesses to adjust how they sell! According to freightpro.com, here are some interesting (and yet somehow hardly surprising) facts about e-commerce vs brick & mortar shopping:

• Overall, some 51 percent of Americans prefer to shop online, while the remaining 49 percent would rather go to a store

• E-commerce is growing 3 times faster than traditional retail, with a growth rate of about 15 percent compared to 5 percent growth for brick and mortar stores

• In the US, customers make an average of 19 purchases online per year, the second most in the world behind Asia

• However, people spend 64 percent of their shopping cash in stores, compared with 36 percent online
Even those who prefer to purchase in store want to do their research on your brand before they buy from you! So, now more than ever, it’s a must that businesses have all their information available online for their customers to do their research on their own.
If your content addresses all their questions or leaves them wanting to know even more, they will connect with you.

• Loyal Customers Will Market FOR You!

Shareability. Is it an actual word? I’m not 100% sure, but if it isn’t it should be – at least when it comes to digital marketing.

How many times a day do YOU send links to friends or family to content posted by a business you are a customer of? I’d bet that it’s at least once. Considering there are billions of people on the planet doing the very same thing, I’d say making sharable content should be higher on most businesses’ priority list. After all, there’s a good reason why every digital platform has a “share” option – they want you to share our content with everyone you know and bring more people to the party!

Creating funny, interesting or heart-warming content can encourage people to share with others they know who may not already be part of your consumer database. So if your goal is to expand your audience, then remember that word… Shareability.

Global Reach at a Fraction of the Cost

Okay marketing professionals – this one’s for you.

Think back to the days where print collateral (signs, posters, flyers, window decals, bounce-back cards, mail-outs, etc), television, radio and newsprint were the only ways to get in front of customers.

Think now, about the COSTS associated with those forms of advertising. Designers, copywriters, videographers, printers, material costs, shipping, delivery… (I can almost feel my bank account draining just typing about it!) Marketing budgets were exorbitant, and most of that money would go to CREATING the assets themselves. By the time it came to delivery, there would be little left in the budget to put all that hard work in front of your potential customers.

Now fast-forward to today. The best and most affordable way to market has arrived – online media. All you need is a marketing team (in-house or outsourced), a quality camera, editing software and a laptop (or even just a mobile device!). Every dollar spent once you have these things in place goes directly towards getting your content in front of people that want to buy from you or work with you.

All this, AND you can now affordably market to people from all over the globe! Back in the “good ole’ days”, the shipping costs alone to market overseas would have made you literally GAG.

Turning Marketers into Data-Nerds

Gone are the days when marketers rely on data analysts to assess the ROI of their campaigns! Hallelujah! You never have to wait for the reports to come in again. You can confidently build and run your own reports daily, weekly, monthly and annually (or for any time frame you desire, really), and have a better understanding of what all that information actually means to your business.

As a marketing professional who has lived through the transition from old school to new school marketing tactics, I can confidently say that I am now also a self proclaimed “data-nerd”.

We can pull detailed data from a website, or Google or Facebook, and we can speak to what all that data means to our clients’ marketing strategies. We can also monitor the pulse of all the campaigns we’re running to see if any adjustments are required to make them even more successful. We can dig so deep into the numbers that we can know whether we need to change the copy, the creative or the targeting to improve the reach, impressions or conversions of a specific campaign. We can even safely estimate these numbers before campaigns even launch so that we can build accordingly.

In my honest opinion, the ability to tangibly quantify the success rates of your marketing campaigns is literally invaluable to any marketer. So grab your laptop, pull a report, and get cozy with your data… or outsource your digital marketing to someone who will!

Having the most up to date knowledge to maintain successful digital marketing campaigns isn’t as common as you might think. We work with many businesses who are still relying on those “old school” tactics because that’s what they already do well, that’s what they have the manpower for, AND they can still generate the results they want.

However, a smart business will understand that there is no better way to increase the reach of any on-the-ground campaign than to couple it with a solid online strategy. If you want to quadruple your ROI – take it to the internet!

Not sure that your business has the time or knowledge to pull it off alone? That’s exactly why The Social Formula is here! Contact us today to learn about our services, and how we can help your business grow in the digital space.