Top 5 Reasons Digital Marketing Is Essential For Startups
Published August 28, 2020
Startups often have a limited budget, but that shouldn’t stop them from creating an impressive marketing campaign. But the question most business owners ask is, “traditional marketing or digital marketing?”
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all online marketing endeavors. This includes email, display advertising, blog posts, and videos, among others. While traditional marketing had dominated the space for the better of a hundred years, digital marketing has all but caught up to its big brother.
One of the main issues startups in the past had was the lack of resources to compete with more prominent and established companies. That is, until the rise of digital marketing. Here are the top five reasons why digital marketing has become essential for startups:
Levels The Playing Field Against Big Companies
Many startups can’t afford to run a few seconds of television ads for a new promotion. But with the rise of all these different channels, running ads and promotional media has never been cheaper and more available.
Brand awareness is crucial for any company’s growth. With a few hundred dollars and the right strategy, any company can reach thousands of potential customers.
Target Specific Audiences
With traditional marketing, you can’t precisely target a particular audience. Sure, you can filter it down a bit by choosing when and where your promotions show up, but not to the extent that digital marketing does.
With digital marketing, you can target specific people based on their buying behavior, and this is called target marketing. Buying behavior refers to the series of steps a consumer takes before ultimately making a purchase. With the technology we have today, we can precisely zero in on potential customers based on a checklist of parameters.
What does this mean for startups?
Target marketing benefits all companies, big and small, that employ it. It enables companies to become more efficient in their advertising efforts. How? When using target marketing, you essentially filter who gets to see your ads. This is a stark contrast to traditional marketing, where anyone can see your ads.
In controlling who your ads reach, you can save on the costs associated with displaying your promotional media. This means you’re targeting the people searching for related products where they’re spending their money. With this approach, you have a much higher chance of turning strangers into potential customers, also called lead generation.
Excellent Return On Investment
Sure, indicators such as “user engagement” and having “viral content” can be promising for companies. However, to get to the bottom line, the ROI still remains your best bet in measuring a strategy’s efficacy.
Return on investment (ROI) is a performance measure that evaluates how effective and efficient your efforts are. The higher your ROI is, the better.
(Related: How To Become A Digital Marketing Analyst)
To put into perspective how lucrative digital marketing can be, here’s an image from Neil Patel, which shows the ROI of several strategies.
You read that right. For every $1 you spend in email marketing, you can earn up to 4000% from this effort! While many marketers believe email marketing is dead, it is far from it. It’s still the king when it comes to conversion and acquisition, dwarfing other strategies in comparison.
Digital marketing not only costs less than traditional marketing, but its growth potential is much more tremendous too.
Provides Instant And Highly Measurable Results
I know I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, telling you how much better digital marketing is for startups than traditional marketing. But the results are just too difficult to deny.
Another advantage digital marketing provides to startups is delivering highly measurable results instantly. With the help of various tools to measure key performance indicators (KPIs), marketers have all the information they need to make educated decisions.
But what are these KPIs? And why are they relevant to digital marketing?
Key performance indicators are elements that determine the success of a project. They’re quantifiable factors that measure how far off you are from the goals and expectations you set.
In digital marketing, KPIs between projects are not always the same. Different projects have different goals, and KPIs should vary accordingly. Companies must focus on the KPIs that align with their goals, or else they’re just wasting their time measuring them. Smart Insights came up with this useful guide in choosing the KPIs that have significant implications on performance.
To give you an idea of what KPIs may be useful to your digital marketing campaign, here’s a table that Smart Insights came up with:
Reaches Audience In The Early Stages of The Buyer’s Journey
Statistics show that 78% of people research online before buying products. This research is an integral part of the buyer’s journey.
What’s the buyer’s journey, you ask?
The buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential customer takes leading up to the purchase of a product. It starts with recognizing a need, assessing different options that solve that need, then selecting the best one among those options.
It’s basically realizing you have an itching problem, searching online for remedies, then applying them. Coming up with content that caters to each specific phase in this journey is vital for companies. Your web page is your best salesperson; thus, it should be optimized to draw traffic, create leads, and convert them.
Hire The Digital Marketing Experts
We take online businesses and turn them into online empires by employing smart digital marketing strategies. Our team of experts are trained in a myriad of marketing skill including SEO to help you rank higher in search results, and ad management to ensure your message gets seen by the people you want. Need a business website that attracts business? We also specialize in website design and online sales optimization to help your business grow like never before.
This Content Has Been Reviewed For Accuracy By Experts
Our internal team of experts has fact-checked this content. Learn more about the editorial standard for our website here.
About The Author
Judy Ponio is a professional writer and SEO specialist based in the Philippines. She works hard to cross check reputable sources to ensure her work uses accurate facts. She is the lead author for several prominent websites covering a variety of topics including law, health, nutrition, and more.
