Why Digital Marketing is Important

The obvious answer is that your potential customers are all online, so shouldn't you be? Try and think of another marketing channel where all your potential customers are, I bet you can't. They're not all listening to commercial radio or watching commercial TV; they're not all reading the same newspapers or magazines; they're not all driving past the same signs. But they are all browsing on the internet and searching for stuff they need; even my 80 year old Dad. So that's why digital marketing is important. But let's delve a bit deeper.

Why Marketing Is Vital For Your Business

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0:01 Why is marketing so important to your business? I would argue that **marketing** is one of the most important things in any small business.

0:06 Without marketing and without sales, without leads coming in, you don't have a business.

0:12 You can get by; you may have staff issues; you may be short of staff; you may have staff that aren't performing as well as you could, but you can still push through that.

0:20 You may have some operational issues; you may have vehicles that are breaking down, or you may have, you know, not the right tools or the right equipment that you need to do the job efficiently, but you can still push through.

0:29 But if you haven't got sales coming through, you don't have a business.

0:33 I'd also argue from a stress point of view, having been a business owner for 15, 16 years now, there's nothing more stressful than knowing that you've got a big bill coming up next week and you haven't got sales coming in to make the money to pay for those bills.

0:47 It can be more stressful. Yes, I've had stress with staff, I've had stress with operational issues, keep falling behind on stuff that we're meant to be doing.

0:54 I've had all that sort of stress as we all do as business owners, but nothing is more stressful than knowing that you've got a big bill coming up and you haven't got sales.

1:02 So, if you're serious about growing your business and serious about trying to minimize your stress and have a very successful small business, I would argue that **marketing** should be your first priority and where you should be focusing your time at the very start.

Let's start with some current digital marketing stats

Google tracks pretty much everything and their stats below are from 2021, the year of COVID and Lockdowns. Admittedly some of these stats would have been driven by people being locked at home, but at the same time, many of the people having an experience online will most likely continue in some form. So let's look at some stats:

eCommerce sales grew 20%, with 9 million households shopping online
9 in 10 Australians searched online before buying in person
61% are searching for store related information
8 million Australians streamed YouTube to their connected TV
83% of Australians watched YouTube
1 in 3 consumers will choose their second choice brand because it showed up in search

Now we can keep looking for more stats, but I feel we've made our point. Australians are going online and using online more and more, so if you're serious about growing your business through marketing, you have to be online. So this means you must be doing digital marketing.

Find out what is digital marketing .

Why else is Digital Marketing important?

Maybe you're still on the fence about digital marketing. After all, you've been doing radio and local paper advertising for years and it still seems to work. So let's go through some other reasons why you should be doing digital marketing.

Digital marketing is great for tracking

The biggest issue with traditional marketing strategies is that they are hard to track. When you ask most businesses how many sales they made from a newspaper advert, they can't tell you. How do you know if a marketing channel is working for you and giving you a return on advertising spend (ROAS) if you don't know how many sales it generated?

Most forms of digital marketing can be tracked in many ways. Using a simple tracking measure as clicks let's you know how many people click on an advert etc to find out more. Add in some conversion tracking (eg. webforms, phone calls, online sales etc) and you have a fairly complete picture.

Digital marketing is synonymous with inbound marketing

Inbound Marketing is where you market your products and services to people who are actively looking for them. For instance, making sure that your website comes up when someone searches for a product or service you provide. As you can imagine, this form of marketing has a lot higher conversion rate than pushing your products or services on people not currently interested in them, like when they're listening to the radio.

Digital marketing is affordable

There are lots of ways you can start marketing online for very little spend, unlike say developing a video for a TV advert. You could do something as simple as fill in an online profile with "Google My Business" and other online directories.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is extremely affordable in the long term. It may take a while to get it working, but once you are ranking well, the cost per leads and sales is lower than most other forms of marketing.

Digital marketing is extremely flexible

Most digital marketing strategies can be started and stopped whenever it suits you and can be tweaked at any time. For instance, unlike a brochure, a website can have the design changed at any time and your adwords can be stopped whenever you have enough sales.

Digital marketing has many different strategies that can all work together

There are a lot of different digital marketing strategies that you can choose to use and support the success of each other. A great example of this is by running an SEO campaign to drive visitors to your website and then a retargeting display campaign to keep your products and services in front of these visitors after they leave your site. Or maybe an Adwords campaign combined with marketing automation to send an email series to prospects on why they should use your products or services.

Digital marketing has a strategy for every stage of the marketing funnel

The marketing funnel explains how a customer works through the various stages before actually purchasing something. They move from finding out about a new product or service, to researching to find out more about them to deciding whether to buy from your business. Digital marketing has a strategy for each of these stages.

Does your business use Digital Marketing?

After reading the above you should now be aware that you need digital marketing in your business. Sure, there may be some great offline marketing strategies that are worth using, but not at the expense of a good digital marketing campaign.