Why Digital Marketing Matters

We all know digital marketing is the future. The Internet revolution has been slamming into legacy media with the force of Hurricane Katrina for more than a decade now.

But aside from the obvious fact that old media like newspapers and magazines are on the decline, why does digital marketing matter?

Because your customers are in the digital space. And they expect you to be there alongside them. Fortunately, that space provides a bounty of goodies that were unheard of in the past.

Dirt cheap ads. Digital ads are, or at least can be, cheaper than print ads. You can aim them precisely at your target demographic rather than using the spray-and-pray approach of traditional media that blasted your ads to the universe.

They’re also scaleable. Rather than paying full freight for a flat fee, you can cap your costs as low as you want to keep your campaigns under budget.

Everything is forever. Magazine ads are thrown into recycling bins after a month or even a week. Today’s newspaper ads are tomorrow’s fish wrap. Radio spots evaporate instantly, as if they weren’t even there.

Content you publish on your web site can linger forever if you want, and it costs virtually nothing.

Potential customers can and will find your content years after you’ve written it just by Googling. Two years from now, you can get paid thanks to work you did last year.

Two decades have passed since Bill Gates declared that content is king, and it’s still true. And Google agrees.

Your customers would hate you, of course, if you just dumped a bunch of keywords on your business web site and called it a day, but you wouldn’t have many customers anyway. They wouldn’t be able to find you. You’re dead to both Google and potential customers if you don’t produce authoritative, credible and relevant content.

It’s a requirement, yes, but it’s also an opportunity to turn your web site into a magazine for your products, your services, and your industry and start hoovering up some new prospects.

Reach customers everywhere. According to Smart Insights, technology users now spend more time on mobile devices than they do using desktop computers.

Almost everyone has a mobile device in their pocket except when they’re showering or asleep. That won’t change until we start wiring technology directly into our eyeballs and brains, and since that’s not happening any time soon, your marketing strategy had better be mobile.

Mobile is where you want to be, though. If someone tells you about an exciting new product or service that sounds interesting, odds are good that the first thing you’ll do is tap it into your phone. Your customers do the same thing. That’s where the conversion process begins.

Which brings us to:

Easy-peasy calls to action. Calls to action are always a long shot, but they were over the horizon back in the old days.

How many times have you seen an ad on TV for a product that looked interesting and followed it by actually calling the 1-800 number to buy it? Compare that to the number of times you found something awesome on Amazon and added it to your shopping cart.

Amazon makes it even easier now with one-click ordering. Returning customers can skip the whole shopping cart thing altogether. Just one click and, boom. They’re done.

You can’t built that functionality into a newspaper ad.

The Internet is still littered with struggling business sites without any buy buttons, which is like having empty shelves in a strip mall. But if you do everything right, your digital ads, your social media strategy, your content marketing and your buy buttons mean you can attract new customers and sell them your products while bypassing brick, mortar and legacy media entirely.