10 BENEFITS OF USING DIGITAL MARKETING IN 2018

The benefits of digital marketing on businesses are often overlooked. As the founder or CEO of a business making sales regularly, it’s understandable to conclude that you don’t need digital marketing.

After all, you’re making regular sales, and those digital marketing evangelists online are simply reciting well-rehearsed, cunningly-devised fables to suck you dry of your hard-earned moolah. In exchange for what? Social media handles for your business – something you can do yourself. Perhaps you even hired a digital marketing agency in the past, paid them, and then.

If you fall in the former category, it’s one of two things: you hired the wrong guys, or you weren’t patient enough to let the efforts accumulate. Now, I’ll be sincere with you; digital marketing results take time. This fact holds anywhere on planet Earth. Still, digital marketing truly works – better than traditional marketing in most cases. Here are 10 factual benefits of digital marketing – devoid of emotion or bias – for businesses of any kind.

INCREASED BRAND AWARENESS
When the average Nigerian has questions or wants to learn about a topic, he looks to search engines like Google and YouTube. In other words, the brand that educates the customer online the most – through text, images, and video – gets the biggest chunk of traffic. This isn’t just traffic, but a crowd of POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS. So if you wish to join the race, you need a well-designed and fully optimized website. The website also has to have a blog section, because this is where most of the magic will occur. You need to start creating free educative content to publish on your blog. This content can be in any form: text, image, or video. Irrespective of your chosen form, make sure your content is engaging. If your blog is search engine optimized (a.k.a. SEO), search engines will crawl the text on your web pages and include your website in search results.

This way, you can get potential customers to know about your brand and connect with them. If you succeed in getting them addicted to you, the moment they need the kind of service you offer, you’ll be the first person they call. Another thing to note is: the better the quality of your online content, the higher you rank in search engine results. The process of ranking high on search engine results is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

ACCESSIBILITY
According to Jumia Nigeria, Nigeria’s mobile phone penetration hit 84% in March 2018 – a huge rise from the penetration level of 53% recorded in 2016. It’s evident that mobile phones have come to stay. This also means almost everyone owns a smartphone connected to the internet.

Whatever your product offering is, there’s a 99.9% chance that your target customers are spending time on social media. The good news is you’re also allowed to create and promote your content on these sites. If you play your cards right, you can reach these customers, engage them, and convert as much as you can to loyal customers. You can also reach customers through paid advertising – which is up next.

LOW COST OF ADVERTISING
Digital marketing costs less than traditional marketing and, ironically, achieves more results. In traditional marketing, it’s difficult for small businesses to compete with larger businesses for ad space. TV ads, billboards ads, and radio commercials are expensive. Digital marketing enables small businesses to get more out of their marketing budget, as digital marketing packages come in different sizes. So no matter the size of your business, you can utilize any of these packages that fit your budget to expand your reach.

LASER-FOCUSED TARGETING
Another benefit that makes digital marketing powerful is the ability to target your ideal customer. In traditional marketing, advertising is a gamble. With every N10 spent on traditional marketing (billboard ad space, for instance), there’s a chance that 50% of the people who get your message will not be interested in your service. So, for every N10 spent, half – N5 – goes to waste. In digital marketing, you can ensure the people exposed to your ads are the right customers. If your Search Engine Optimization is done well, you can reach people searching the web for content related to your industry, while other paid-advertising programs like pay-per-click (PPC) ads, display ads, and social media advertising can help you reach your ideal customers – those most likely to be interested in your business. You can choose who will see your ad based on geographical location, age bracket, interests, and people who’ve interacted with your site previously.

MEASURABLE RESULTS
If you invest a huge chunk of money on TV ads, how do you know your marketing is working? The answer: no way. It’s practically impossible to track the success of traditional marketing campaigns. In contrast, you can track and see how successful your various campaigns are in digital marketing. You can know what’s working, what is not, and make appropriate changes. You can tweak your ad copy and other elements to see if the campaign will yield different results. You can also stop the ineffective ad to save money and capitalize on the ones that are working. Tracking can be done with Google Analytics and other online metrics tools. Google Analytics, for instance, can give you detailed information on how customers interact with your website, so you know which of your content is performing well and which one isn’t.

FEWER OBSTACLES TO PURCHASE
The more obstacles your customers encounter when trying to make a purchase from you, the lower your chances of making sales. Traditionally, customers first need to make time out of their busy schedules, take a ride to the market, walk past your competitors who are desperately trying to entice them, purchase, and return. In digital marketing, all these obstacles do not exist. With a diligently designed and fully optimized website, customers and potential customers are a few clicks away from making a purchase.

PERSONALIZED SELLING
Another advantage of digital marketing is if your website is fully optimized, you’ll be getting real-time information about your customers’ behavior, based on their interaction with your website. So the next time they log on to your website, you can greet them with offers customized for them because you already know which product they checked out the last time. This is called personalized selling. Personalized selling increases your chance of making sales; and the more customers buy from you and interact with your website, the more you can fine-tune their customer personae and the more you can offer and sell to them.

STRONG CUSTOMER LOYALTY
Social media is a very powerful tool if you want to build a strong community of customers who are loyal to your brand. However, not all social media handles achieve this feat, because they’re not well managed. By not just getting involved with social media, but creating well-crafted content that your potential customers can engage with, you can outdo your competitors and build a cult-like following of customers who love your company and will tell their friends about your product or service.

INCREASED SOCIAL CURRENCY
The term social currency was coined by Vivaldi Partners Group. They defined social currency as “the degree to which customers share a brand or information about a brand with others.” Social currency can be measured by how many people a brand’s content reaches. However, to ensure that your content is worth sharing, it shouldn’t just be content but rich-media content (podcasts, eBooks, white papers, video, and infographics, to mention a few). Digital marketing gives you the opportunity to create campaigns using different types of rich-media content. If the content is rich and engaging, these campaigns will be shared by people and can easily go viral – getting you more customers.

GLOBAL REACH
Digital marketing, if properly done, helps you engage potential customers anywhere in the world. Traditional marketing is limited to your geographical location, but digital marketing affords you the opportunity to reach anyone, anywhere on the face of the Earth. One-third of the Earth’s population uses social media platforms – regularly – and that number is bound to increase, daily. According to Chukwuemeka Afigbo, Manager, Developer Programme at Facebook, 26 million Nigerians log in on Facebook, in Nigeria alone, every month. If you’re not investing enough resources in quality digital marketing for your brand, your competitors surely are.



If digital marketing seems like a lot to you, or you wish to take advantage of digital marketing the right way, don’t bother, we’re here to help. At Res-q Digital, we help small, medium, and large businesses increase their visibility online by implementing digital marketing strategies that will align with your goals and objective. We’ll create your ideal customer profile, determine which digital marketing strategies to implement, implement them, and track results.

If you also need help with social media management, content creation, developing a digital marketing strategy, SEO-optimization, email marketing, or PPC ad management, our creative team at Res-q Digital is here to help.

Take your business online the right way;
Visit our website: www.res-qdigital.com
or shoot us a mail: info@res-qdigital.com
Phone no: 08170145927