What is digital marketing and how can it benefit you?

As we all know, the way that we market products and services has changed dramatically with the advent of the internet. Digital marketing encompasses all efforts to market products and services that happen on the internet. Most businesses today rely on digital channels such as search engines, email campaigns, social media, digital advertisements, and connecting with other websites to attract their ideal customers.

There is no silver bullet to marketing.

Just as with more traditional methods of marketing such as printed mailers, print ads, billboards, etc., most businesses don’t invest in only one method (or “channel”) of marketing to connect with their prospective customers—for an obvious reason. The more potential customers you can reach, the more potential business you’ll attract, so it’s not a good strategy to limit it to one method. But digital marketing offers several advantages over traditional methods.

Digital marketing offers many benefits that traditional methods don’t.

Imagine that your main method of marketing was a print mail campaign educating 10,000 local potential customers about your business. Designing, printing, and mailing 10,000 brochures costs tens of thousands of dollars. Not only that—but what if the brochure accidentally has incorrect information, or what if the info on it was ephemeral (time-bound)?

And what if only 200 of those brochures reached people who would even have the slightest bit of interest in your product or service? That would mean that you spent thousands of dollars advertising to people who may have, for the most part, zero interest in your business. Who has that kind of money to waste?

There is a better way.

Digital marketing helps you connect with the target audience you want to reach with far better precision. Instead of mailing brochures to only a local geographic area, you could tailor your marketing efforts to a local geographic area, gender, profession, hobbies of interest, age—the list goes on.

Suddenly, your marketing budget is much more likely to be spent on prospects who are far more likely to be interested in your business. And if your business services or products have the potential to be digitally delivered, then your pool of potential customers is much, much larger with digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a long game. But it’s powerful.

Building a digital marketing strategy is not a short-term solution to building a business—but most business plans aren’t short-term anyway. Investing the time and effort to build a digital platform—that is, spending budget on a content marketing strategy with high quality blog, email, and social media content can organically attract the exact customers you’re looking for with the power of search engines.

This means that you can help users solve their problems posting a blog article on your website with helpful information. With this method, you bring the customers to you. This process of giving away high quality content builds trust, and establishes you as an expert in your field. Over time, if you consistently post good content (especially content that’s more helpful to users than your competitors) with the help from a digital marketing expert, your business will more than likely be an unstoppable force.