Major Benefits to Digital Marketing Agency Kitchener

There are a few major benefits to digital marketing agency Kitchener. Let's dive into four of them, now.


1. You can target only the prospects most likely to purchase your product or service.

If you place an advertisement on TV, in a magazine, or on a billboard, you have limited control over who sees the ad. Of course, you can measure certain demographics — including the magazine's typical readership, or the demographic of a certain neighborhood — but it's still largely a shot in the dark.


Digital marketing, on the other hand, allows you to identify and target a highly specific audience, and send that audience personalized, high-converting marketing messages.


For instance, you might take advantage of social media's targeting features to show social media ads to a certain audience based on variables such as age, gender, location, interests, networks, or behaviors. Alternatively, you might use PPC or SEO strategies to serve ads to users who've shown interest in your product or service, or who've searched specific keywords that relate to your industry.


Ultimately, digital marketing enables you to conduct the research necessary to identify your buyer persona, and lets you refine your marketing strategy over time to ensure you're reaching prospects most likely to buy. Best of all, digital marketing helps you market to sub-groups within your larger target audience. If you sell multiple products or services to different buyer personas, this is especially helpful.


2. It's more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods.

Digital marketing enables you to track campaigns on a daily basis and decrease the amount of money you're spending on a certain channel if it isn't demonstrating high ROI. The same can't be said for traditional forms of advertising. It doesn't matter how your billboard performs — it still costs the same, whether or not it converts for you.


Plus, with digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. Perhaps rather than paying for PPC campaigns, you choose to spend money on design software to create high-converting Instagram content. A digital marketing strategy allows you to continuously pivot, ensuring you're never wasting money on channels that don't perform well.


By and large, digital marketing is a more cost-effective solution and provides you unique opportunities to ensure you're getting the most bang for your buck.


For instance, if you work for a small business with a limited budget, you might try investing in social media, blogging, or SEO – three strategies that can give you high ROI even with minimal spending.


3. Digital marketing lets you outrank bigger players in your industry.

If you work for a small business, it's likely difficult for you to compete with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of dollars to invest in television commercials or nationwide campaigns. Fortunately, there are plenty of opportunities to outrank the big players through strategic digital marketing initiatives.


For instance, you might identify certain long-tail keywords that relate to your product or service, and create high-quality content to help you rank on search engines for those keywords. Search engines don't care which brand is biggest — instead, search engines will prioritize content that resonates best with the target audience.


Additionally, social media enables you to reach new audiences through influencer marketing. I don't personally follow any big brands on social media, but I do follow influencers who will occasionally showcase products or services they like — if you work for a small-to-medium-sized company, this could be a good avenue to consider.


4. Digital marketing is measurable.

Digital marketing can give you a comprehensive, start-to-finish view of all the metrics that might matter to your company — including impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page. This is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing. While traditional advertising can be useful for certain goals, its biggest limitation is measurability.


Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real-time. If you've ever put an advertisement in a newspaper, you'll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There's no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.


On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.


Here are some examples:


Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website's homepage in real time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms like HubSpot.


You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.


This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.


With offline marketing, it's very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people's behavior before they've reached the final stage in their buyer's journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.


Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you've created a product brochure and posted it through people's letterboxes — that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.


Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it's hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you're also generating qualified leads when people download it.


Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your business.


We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.


Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important — according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it's likely to reflect positively on your business's bottom line.



What types of digital content should I create?

The kind of content you create depends on your audience's needs at different stages in the buyer's journey. You should start by creating buyer personas (use these free templates, or try makemypersona.com) to identify what your audience's goals and challenges are in relation to your business. On a basic level, your online content should aim to help them meet these goals, and overcome their challenges.


Then, you'll need to think about when they're most likely to be ready to consume this content in relation to what stage they're at in their buyer's journey. We call this content mapping.


With content mapping, the goal is to target content according to:


The characteristics of the person who will be consuming it (that's where buyer personas come in).

How close that person is to making a purchase (i.e., their lifecycle stage).

In terms of the format of your content, there are a lot of different things to try. Here are some options we'd recommend using at each stage of the buyer's journey:


Awareness Stage

Blog posts. Great for increasing your organic traffic when paired with a strong SEO and keyword strategy.

Infographics. Very shareable, meaning they increase your chances of being found via social media when others share your content. (Check out these free infographic templates to get you started.)

Short videos. Again, these are very shareable and can help your brand get found by new audiences by hosting them on platforms like YouTube.

Consideration Stage

Ebooks. Great for lead generation as they're generally more comprehensive than a blog post or infographic, meaning someone is more likely to exchange their contact information to receive it.

Research reports. Again, this is a high-value content piece that is great for lead generation. Research reports and new data for your industry can also work for the awareness stage though, as they're often picked up by the media or industry press.

Webinars. As they're a more detailed, interactive form of video content, webinars are an effective consideration stage content format as they offer more comprehensive content than a blog post or short video.

Decision Stage

Case studies. Having detailed case studies on your website can be an effective form of content for those who are ready to make a purchasing decision, as it helps you positively influence their decision.

Testimonials. If case studies aren't a good fit for your business, having short testimonials around your website is a good alternative. For B2C brands, think of testimonials a little more loosely. If you're a clothing brand, these might take the form of photos of how other people styled a shirt or dress, pulled from a branded hashtag where people can contribute.

 


How to Do Digital Marketing

Define your goals.

Identify your target audience.

Establish a budget for each digital channel.

Strike a good balance between paid and free digital strategies.

Optimize your digital assets for mobile.

Conduct keyword research.

Iterate based off the analytics you measure.


1. Define your goals.

When you're first getting started with digital marketing, it's critical you start by identifying and defining your goals, since you'll craft your strategy differently depending on those goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you might want to pay more attention to reaching new audiences via social media.


Alternatively, perhaps you want to increase sales on a specific product — if that's the case, it's more important you focus on SEO and optimizing content to get potential buyers on your website in the first place. Additionally, if sales is your goal, you might test out PPC campaigns to drive traffic through paid ads.


Whatever the case, it's easiest to shape a digital marketing strategy after you've determined your company's biggest goals.


2. Identify your target audience.

We've mentioned this before, but one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the opportunity to target specific audiences – however, you can't take advantage of that benefit if you haven't first identified your target audience.


Of course, it's important to note, your target audience might vary depending on the channel or goal(s) you have for a specific product or campaign.


For instance, perhaps you've noticed most of your Instagram audience is younger and prefers funny memes and quick videos — but your LinkedIn audience tends to be older professionals who are looking for more tactical advice. You'll want to vary your content to appeal to these different target audiences.


If you're starting from scratch, feel free to take a look at How to Find Your Target Audience.


3. Establish a budget for each digital channel.

As with anything, the budget you determine really depends on what elements of digital marketing you're looking to add to your strategy.


If you're focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation for a preexisting website, the good news is you don't need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is on creating high quality content that your audience will want to consume, which unless you're planning to outsource the work, the only investment you'll need is your time.


You can get started by hosting a website and creating content using HubSpot's CMS. For those on a tight budget, you can get started using WordPress hosted onWP Engine, using a simple them from StudioPress, and building your site without code using the Elementor Website Builder for WordPress.


With outbound techniques like online advertising and purchasing email lists, there is undoubtedly some expense. What it costs comes down to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.


For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you'll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google's search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it's a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.


4. Strike a good balance between paid and free digital strategies.

A digital marketing strategy likely needs both paid and free aspects to truly be effective. 


For instance, if you spend time building comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you're likely to see strong results within the first six months despite minimal ad spend.


However, if paid advertising is part of your digital strategy, then the results might come even quicker.


Ultimately, it's recommended to focus on building your organic (or 'free') reach using content, SEO, and social media for more long-term, sustainable success.


When in doubt, try both, and iterate on your process as you learn which channels — paid or free – perform best for your brand.


5. Optimize your digital assets for mobile.

Another key component of digital marketing is mobile marketing. In fact, smartphone usage as a whole account for 69% of time spent consuming digital media in the U.S., while desktop-based digital media consumption makes up less than half — and the U.S. still isn't mobile's biggest fan compared to other countries.


This means it's essential to optimize your digital ads, web pages, social media images, and other digital assets for mobile devices. If your company has a mobile app that enables users to engage with your brand or shop your products, your app falls under the digital marketing umbrella, too.


Those engaging with your company online via mobile devices need to have the same positive experience as they would on desktop. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. It might also mean reducing the length of your lead generation forms to create a hassle-free experience for people downloading your content on the go. As for your social media images, it's important to always have a mobile user in mind when creating them, as image dimensions are smaller on mobile devices and text can be cut-off.


There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital marketing assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it's hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. By ensuring this is always front-of-mind, you'll be creating digital experiences that work for your audience, and consequently, achieve the results you're hoping for.


6. Conduct keyword research.

Digital marketing is all about reaching targeted audiences through personalized content — all of which can't happen without effective keyword research.


Conducting keyword research is critical for optimizing your website and content for SEO and ensuring people can find your business through search engines. Additionally, social media keyword research can be helpful for marketing your products or services on various social channels, as well.


Even if you don't have a full-time SEO strategist, you'll still want to conduct keyword research. Try creating a list of high-performing keywords that relate to your products or services, and consider long-tail variations for added opportunities. 


7. Iterate based off the analytics you measure.

Finally, to create an effective digital marketing strategy for the long term, it's vital your team learn how to pivot based off analytics.


For instance, perhaps after a couple of months, you find your audience isn't as interested in your content on Instagram anymore — but they love what you're creating on Twitter. Sure, this might be an opportunity to re-examine your Instagram strategy as a whole, but it might also be a sign that your audience prefers a different channel to consume branded content.


Alternatively, perhaps you find an older web page isn't getting the traffic it used to. You might consider updating the page or getting rid of it entirely to ensure visitors are finding the freshest, most relevant content for their needs.


Digital marketing agency Kitchener provides businesses with incredibly flexible opportunities for continuous growth — but it's up to you to take advantage of them.


I'm ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

If you're already doing digital marketing, it's likely that you're at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.


That's why we created Why Digital Marketing? The Essential Guide to Marketing Your Brand Online — a step-by-step guide to help you build a digital marketing strategy that's truly effective, whether you're a complete beginner or have a little more experience. You can download it for free here.


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