Why is digital marketing important?

8 min read

Whether you’ve been in business for a day or a decade, you must effectively reach your customers and prospects, engage with them, and convert them. This is where digital marketing comes in.  

Today, customers consume information and make purchases on their phones, tablets, and laptops. Due to this, your business needs to be readily available online, at almost any time. That way, you can use digital marketing tactics to promote and market your products and services to your customers no matter where they are online.

In this post, we’ll answer the question ‘why is digital marketing important?’ In doing so, we’ll take a look at how the term is defined, why it’s increasingly important in 2022, and the key benefits you can expect to enjoy.

How do we define digital marketing?

Before we discuss the benefits of digital marketing, we first need to define exactly what we mean by the term.

Generally speaking, digital marketing (which is sometimes also referred to as online marketing), refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the internet. Types of digital marketing activities include:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Pay-per-click (PPC)
• Affiliate marketing
• Native advertising
• Marketing automation
• Email marketing
• Online PR
• Inbound marketing
• Sponsored content
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Instant messaging marketing

By marketing on these channels, businesses can connect with current and prospective customers on a global scale in a cost-effective manner.

Why is digital marketing important in 2022?

Today, the internet seems omnipresent. But, although it’s incredibly accessible, the number of people who go online every day is still increasing. In fact, data shows us that in the 12 months to July 2022, the world’s connected population grew by almost 180 million. Overall, internet users continue to increase at an annual rate of close to 4 percent, and current trends suggest that two-thirds of the world’s population should be online sometime in the second half of 2023.

As internet usage has grown, the way that people shop, interact with their friends, and engage with businesses has also changed. This means that offline/traditional marketing strategies aren’t as effective as they used to be – especially when they’re used in isolation.

This is exactly why digital marketing is so important in 2022. Remember, at its core, good marketing has always involved connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending their time: on the internet.

What are the benefits of digital marketing?

If you employ digital marketing strategies, you will receive a number of benefits, including the ability to:

• Interact with your prospects and learn exactly what they’re looking for from their user behaviour. This means that you can get to know your customers better
• Remove geographic boundaries so that you can reach out to any customer or prospect anywhere in the world
• Create personalised and individual campaigns based on your user behaviour analysis. This means you’re always targeting the right audience at the right time
• Communicate with your prospects at every stage of the buying process
• Save money and reach more customers with less spend
• Drive engagement and promote brand loyalty after getting inspiration from your customers and brand loyalty schemes
• Track and monitor responses to your marketing efforts easily and instantly
• Build powerful reports and visualisations that show how each campaign is performing and how changes are affecting ROI

With this in mind, let’s look at four of these main benefits in greater detail. 

1. Improved targeting

When a business places an advert in a magazine or on a TV show, they have very little control over who sees that advert.

Although you can perform an analysis of the magazine’s typical readership or a TV show’s usual audience, there’s very little you can do to confirm that your ideal target customer will see the advert and will then respond positively.

However, by contrast, digital marketing activities provide you with the ability to identify and target a highly-specific audience. Once you’ve identified this audience, you can then send them personalised, high-converting marketing messages via the channel they prefer.

This is because, with digital marketing, you have the ability to conduct the research necessary to identify your ideal customers and build buyer personas that you can target. With the help of all this information, you can then refine your marketing strategy over time to ensure you're only reaching the prospects who are most likely to buy.

For example, in the world of social media, you can take advantage of a platform’s targeting features. In doing so, you can ensure that your social ads are only shown to audiences you’ve selected based on variables such as age, gender, location, interests, or behaviours.

Alternatively, if your audience isn’t necessarily engaged on social media, then you can instead deploy pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies to serve ads to users who’ve shown an interest in your product or service, or to those who’ve searched for specific keywords that relate to your industry and its products.

On top of this, digital marketing also helps you reach different subgroups of your ideal target audience simultaneously. This means you can run multiple campaigns that effectively target the right people rather than trying to deploy one catch-all campaign.

2. Multiple platforms

Leading on from the above, digital marketing makes it easier than ever to display your marketing materials on several different platforms simultaneously. This means that you can engage your audience as early as possible in the sales process and then guide each prospect through the buying funnel.

By deploying your efforts across multiple platforms and engaging in the many different types of digital marketing we outlined earlier, you can follow the entire customer journey.

As well as helping you improve your conversion rates, this strategy also helps you understand and analyse how your customers move between touchpoints. This, in turn, helps you identify popular pathways and highlights friction points that you can then iron out.

3. More cost-effective

Many digital marketing activities are cheaper to run than traditional marketing campaigns. For example, a Facebook advertising campaign or email campaign will cost you a lot less than printing leaflets would.

On top of this, because you can track digital marketing campaigns at every turn, you can continually monitor your activities and ensure you’re receiving the best possible ROI. This means that you can 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.

Linked to this, with digital marketing, you have complete control over where you choose to spend your money. If one platform doesn’t perform, you can continually pivot. This means you’re never wasting money on channels that don't perform well. This is one of the key benefits that digital marketing provides over traditional marketing. After all, a TV ad or a billboard costs you the same amount of money regardless of how well it performs.

Similarly, with digital marketing, businesses with small budgets have the ability to advertise while keeping spending low. Social media, blogging, and SEO can all be done with a minimal level of outlay and can provide incredibly high levels of ROI. This is particularly important if you’re a small or medium-sized company, as digital marketing can put you on a level playing field with a much larger corporation.

4. Better reporting

Finally, when you employ digital marketing strategies, you gain a comprehensive start-to-finish view of all your KPIs, including impressions, clicks, and time on the page. While traditional marketing methods can be useful for tracking certain goals, digital marketing activities can be measured much more closely.

This is because, unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing activities allow you to see accurate results in real time. This means that you can accurately measure the ROI of any aspect of your marketing efforts whenever you need to. To give you a better idea of just how powerful digital marketing reporting can be, let’s look at a few examples.

Website traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed any landing page on your website in real-time by using a piece of digital analytics software. You can also see where they came from, how many pages they visited, how long they spent on your website, and the device they were using.

With the help of this data, you can then prioritise your marketing activities accordingly. For example, if you see that only 5% of your overall traffic is coming from organic search, then you should increase your SEO budget in order to improve that percentage.

On top of this, all of this data can also help you identify trends and patterns in people’s behaviour. You can see exactly how a customer interacted with your brand across their entire journey. As a direct result, 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

On top of this, with digital marketing, you can see exactly how well your content is performing. With traditional marketing materials such as leaflets and brochures, companies are unable to tell how many people opened the brochure and how many others simply threw it away without engaging with it.

However, with digital marketing, this brochure can be placed online and every interaction can be measured. Not only are you able to see how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, but you can also collect the contact details of those who download it. This means that not only can your business measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you can also generate qualified leads.

Attribution modelling

In order to truly be effective, your digital marketing strategy must be combined with the right tools and technologies. This way, you can trace all of your sales back to a customer's first digital touchpoint with your business.

Known as attribution modelling, this process allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product. As a result, you can make informed decisions about which parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and which parts of your sales cycle need refining. This means you can continually improve your marketing and boost your ROI.

How Apteco can help with your marketing

So, we now know that digital marketing is important because it allows businesses of all sizes to market to users in more targeted and personalised ways.

However, to take your digital marketing activities to the next level, you need the help of a platform that will provide you with actionable insights. By enlisting the help of Apteco Orbit™, you can connect people and channels, analyse data, target your audience, and manage campaigns – all on one intuitive platform.

In one place, you can create audience lists, visualise your data, and activate and optimise high-performance marketing campaigns. Whether you’re looking to access all your connected data sources to make smarter, data-informed decisions or better target your customers and monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns, Apteco Orbit™ makes it possible.

To see exactly how Apteco Orbit™ can power your digital marketing activities, try it for free today. Alternatively, book a demo with our experienced team and witness the power first-hand.