In today’s world, with the current customer behavior, asking why online marketing is important is asking why marketing is important. This answer is simple. You should market where your customers are, according to We Are Social and Hootsuite 2019 Global Digital report worldwide we spend an average of 6 hours and 42 minutes online a day, that’s 27% of a year! In Canada this time is 5 hours and 51 minutes, 1 hour and 17 minutes of this is spent on social media.
Reach people where they are and where they spend
The top three visited sites worldwide are Google.com, Youtube.com and Facebook.com; Instagram is 10th, Amazon is 11th, Reddit is 20th according to SimilarWeb. Thus these sites are prime locations for online marketing placements.
76% of the US shops online, 25% do so monthly, 16% do so at least once a week. In many cases, North Americans, in general, browse online stores on their mobile but buy from their desktop. Social Media plays a key role in this shopping behaviour for it influences 87% of online shoppers. The standard cart abandonment is 69%, but cart recovery marketing can help, 50%+ recovery emails are opened.
When we look at more local stores/services online still plays an important role. Search ads can increase a brand’s awareness by 80%. 78% of mobile searches result in offline purchases (Search Engine Land) since more than 70% of people find local and helpful information online are more likely to visit the store.
People use online for every point of the sales cycle, to gather information, compare products/services, research providers, compare providers and make their final purchase decision. It is important to be in front of your customers at all of these points to build trust and be top of mind when they are ready to buy. By being a valuable resource, creditable and having a good post-purchase strategy you can evolve that trust into a loyal customer relationship.
Trackable
One of the things that any business owner wants to know is their return on investment (ROI). Historically we could tell if marketing worked if there was an increase of visitors and sales during and right after an ad/ campaign ran. And unless you had a guy counting visitors before, during and after it was hard to have an exact dollar to dollar number. But online marketing can give you this.
With advertising platforms and online site tracking you can see how many people saw your ad, how many clicked it, how many called you: filled in a form: made an online purchase: looked for your location address, and more. No matter your campaign purpose you can get a clear ROI on your ads across all online ad placements.
This trackability also allows you to quickly see what is and is not working allowing you to refine and improve the strategy and messaging quickly, making your marketing efforts more effective overall.
More Targeting & Personalized
Traditional media like Direct Mail, Television, Billboards, Newspapers, or Radio allow you to target your ads based on geographic areas and in some cases an idea of household size and/or income. This allows for a wide reach into the market but also means a high-cost investment.
Digital, on the other hand, allows you to target based on geographic areas but also by interests, point in the sales cycle, buying behaviour, internet use behaviour, device use, age/ gender, household size/ income, parental status, and more. With such in-depth target options, you are able to segment your marketing audience into groups, allowing for a more personalized and targeted message to be delivered. This, in turn, will be more relevant to your market, see a stronger response and in the end a higher ROI.
Affordable & Scalable
Traditional media can cost anywhere from $2,000 to $25,000+ for three-week ad placement or a single flyer in the mail. Online marketing, on the other hand, can be as little as $500 a month for ad placement.
As you refine your messaging and audience, see growth in your goals and business you can easily scale your online marketing by increasing your daily spend (reaching the largest percentage of your audience) and add new placement locations (gain a presence on other sites your audience uses to reach more people and increase your messaging visibility).
Even Playing Field
In a world where small business has to compete with big-box companies like Walmart, it can be hard to drive traffic away from their parking lots. But online the gap is a lot smaller. Small businesses and big box stores have the same opportunity to reach their audiences. Even though the big box guys will most likely have larger budgets for marketing it does not take away from the small and medium business allowing them the chance to build brand awareness and grow.
Why is online marketing important? It’s marketing in a place your audience already is, where they spend money and use to find services/products like yours. It is affordable and scalable for your business with a clear trackable return on investment. It lets you compete fairly with not just your competitors but the big box stores. As well it lets you hyper-target your customer and talk directly to them with personalized messaging they can relate to strongly intend of sending out a one-size-fits-all message.