The reason why you should invest in digital marketing is quite simple – you wouldn’t open a physical store without advertising, so why would you launch a website without marketing it online? Even if you don’t actually sell anything online, digital marketing is a great way to promote your offline business.
Instant Results
Marketing online doesn’t require printing, mailing, or transportation. Emails and messages can be sent and received within seconds, while traditional direct mails and unnamed flyer drops take much longer to arrive at their destinations. It also takes prospective customers longer to respond to marketing campaigns. To give you an idea, to do a Canada Post neighbourhood mail drop, you need to submit your creative 2 weeks ahead or 3 weeks for western Canada. Another limitation of traditional marketing is that once the creative is produced, it’s hard to change. What if you need to fix a typo in the flyer or change the detail of the promotion? With online ads, you would be able to do so with the click of a button.
Scalability
You don’t need to commit to a big budget to get started or make it worthwhile. With digital marketing, you can set your own budget, whether it’s $10 or $100 a day, it’s completely up to you, and you can change that limit at any time. In addition to your budget, you can also modify target areas, demographics, and even promo details on the fly during the campaign. Few days into your campaign, you can make adjustments based on the results collected to improve.
Affordability
It’s much cheaper to send emails than to send physical snail mails. On social media platforms such as Facebook, you’ll be able to reach out to thousands of prospective clients without breaking the bank. On other pay-per-click platforms such as Google Ads, you don’t even have to pay unless a user clicks on your ad. Think about how many flyers get thrown out without being even looked at, and they’re paid for. As a comparison, in 2019, it costs approximately $2,100 plus HST to do a Canada Post neighbourhood mail drop in Kelowna for 5,600 households. With that kind of budget, you can make quite a bit of impact locally with digital marketing.
Targeted
With social media platforms, marketing can be much more targeted than traditional marketing channels such as TV, radio, and direct mails. That means you’ll be able to reach more qualified leads that are actually interested in your products or services. Think about all the personal information you voluntarily provide to digital marketing platforms such as Facebook and Instagram; that info becomes data points marketers can use to target certain types of consumers. You want to reach an audience that is single, between the age of 18 and 35, live in Kelowna, have higher than average income? No problem, social media ads can be targeted personally, whereas traditional methods are more at a household or neighbourhood level.
Predictable Results
Since digital marketing is done using computer systems, campaign information can be easily tracked to provide insights for future campaigns. So before you even start your online marketing campaign, you would know how much return to expect. Not only can these insights help predict campaign results, but they can also be used to improve ROI over time by letting marketers know what worked and what didn’t.
Environmentally Friendly
Digital marketing doesn’t require printing many marketing materials, most of which will eventually end up in a recycling bin or landfill. Delivering a digital ad creates way less greenhouse gas than producing flyers, shipping, delivering them house to house, and then recycling them afterward. Also, as people become more environmentally friendly, you just might upset some people by sending them direct mails. We would be one of those people because we’re tree huggers at Project Pi. Even our business cards are made out of recycled cotton shirts.
Summary
Digital marketing is more predictable, instant, scalable, affordable, targeted, and environmentally friendly than traditional offline marketing. If you don’t advertise online, you are doing yourself a disservice by not capitalizing on the opportunities. You can ignore the digital space all you want, but your competitors won’t. If you don’t want to fall behind your competition, it’s time to start taking it seriously. Not sure where to start? Here at Project Pi, we provide different digital marketing services from Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads to search engine optimization. We would love to help you grow your business online.
