The world has gone digital, and people are spending more time online than ever before. They are reading, sharing, and recommending more than ever—and your business needs to be read about, shared, and recommended as much as possible.
In short, you need to have a digital marketing strategy in place.
Many CEOs still see digital as a distraction, perhaps as a way for employees to waste time updating social profiles. You may also get excellent results from your traditional marketing and see no reason to incorporate a digital strategy.
But smart businesses are making the shift to digital, many of whom combine their traditional and digital marketing. In short, you should ignore digital marketing at your peril.
SEO: An Almost Essential Requirement
SEO is where it all starts. Search is one of the most popular online activities, alongside emails, and the targeted leads it generates can be very affordable. According to SearchEngineJournal, inbound leads are 61 percent cheaper than outbound leads.
If you do nothing else online, at least put some work into your SEO strategy. The search engines are where people go to find information, products, and services, and this is where your business needs to be found. SEO usually incorporates other aspects of online marketing including content marketing, blogging, and social media, making it an excellent starting point upon which to build your overall digital strategy.
It’s Highly Measurable
One of the big problems with marketing is that you know you need it, but you don’t know exactly how good it is. How effective was that latest TV or newspaper ad? Sometimes it is difficult to know. But online marketing is different, and many forms of marketing are highly measurable. For example, you can measure:
- SEO by how many pages are ranking high in the search engines
- emails by how many opens and clicks you get
- landing pages by how many conversions they generate
- PPC ads by how much you are paying for every conversion
You can also use Google Analytics to find out a wealth of information about who is visiting your website and what they are doing on it. And you can often fine-tune your website to boost sales dramatically, sometimes through making very small changes.
Boost Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is something that you may have until now been improving from more traditional marketing channels like TV or print ads. But online marketing has the ability to expand your reach to more targeted audiences. Whether via search, social media, or content marketing, you can use digital to enhance your brand awareness considerably.
Digital Is Becoming More Important for More People
The migration to digital is in full swing. Where once it had a smaller audience, that has now changed and the digital audience is growing. For example, people now spend more time on digital channels than watching TV, a shift that has taken place since just 2012 according to eMarketer.
Do you really want to be missing out on this shift?
Avoid Losing Out to Your Competitors
If you do not have a digital strategy in place, the one thing you can guarantee is that your competitors certainly do. They may have been working on their SEO for years, and no CEO wants to type in a related keyword only to find the competition spread across the first page of results.
You are gifting them all that targeted traffic in the search engines for free without even putting up a fight—and that is nothing any CEO wants to be doing.
Do You Need to Hire a Professional?
You don’t need to hire an agency, but it can be useful. The digital marketing scene changes on a weekly basis, and what works one month won’t work the next. Staying on top of the game is a full-time job. You can also get results faster by hiring a digital marketing agency with experience like Ella J Designs, and this can help to avoid making potentially disastrous beginner mistakes.
Get Your Digital Strategy in Order
If you do not yet have a solid digital strategy in place, now is the time to sort one out. If all you are doing is sending out the occasional tweet and hoping for the best, start to ramp up your activities. Whether you hire an agency or just dedicate more time to digital marketing in-house, make this year the one where your digital strategy really gets going.
