5 Reasons your Business needs to Invest in Digital Marketing
So are you having a pretty hard time trying to convince your boss to invest in the digital marketing of your business? If so, then keep reading because this post is going to be about just that! Below are some pretty interesting stats pooled together in five reasons why your company should invest in its digital marketing.
Right now, there's a lot of companies out there that are looking at ways to shrink their budgets or to become a little bit more cost-savvy with COVID-19 taking its effect on all economies everywhere, but digital media and digital marketing is one place that you do not want to decrease your spend or your time on as well. I explained a few key reasons why in my previous post.
COVID or not, it could be very tough for you to convince the stakeholders that actually sign the check that enables you to be able to digitally market your business. To make your case to get funding and to convince stakeholders, have a look at some of the stats outlined below about online consumer behaviour.
1. Online consumers are getting younger
Over 50% of the world's population is under 30 years old. Most uni students of today will have never licked a postage stamp. More than half of B2B researchers today, so the people that are assigned with the task to find a company that can provide the service that their company is looking to fill, are millennials.
What do these three stats mean to us? It means that the days of affluence, long lunches and personal connections to get a deal are starting to lose their shine. Your consumers are going to research your company on the internet. They’re going to look at your LinkedIn profile. They’re going to look at your social media, just to see what type of brand you are. So instead of you looking the part, your entire company, digitally, needs to look the part.
2. Digital marketing is highly cost-effective
You don't have to have a very intricate website that costs thousands of dollars to build. Nowadays, you can have a simple website or a simple landing page for your product that really just drives your case home about why someone should align their business with you, and it only costs a few hundred bucks a year.
People are steering away from brands that intrude on their lives. A radio ad, for example, is a very intrusive ad. It interrupts your music programme, it stops letting you enjoy that podcast. The same thing goes with TV ads. They stop you from being able to see the rest of the show that you want to watch. Radio and TV ads are also very expensive to create and can take a significant amount of time to produce as well.
Content marketing and digital marketing is much less intrusive. The ads can be on the side or they can be in between paragraphs. Your content marketing sits on your website and blooms over time, growing and helping your SEO on your brand. And content creation can be highly cost-effective. After all, your team is comprised of experts for their given fields. Shouldn’t you harness their knowledge and expertise somehow?
3. The world is going digital
50% of consumers start their research on a product or service online. They don't just go into the store, they don't call the store, they don't call the company, they go online to find out what they want to know. So how do you think they would feel about your business if they can't find out or find the question, that they need to answer off of your website?
As you can see from this table, according to Forrester's research, this year alone, 47% of CEOs expect over 50% of their sales to come from digital. Considering most of the world stayed home in 2020 due to COVID19, that stat is probably much higher!
Another interesting stat to help drive this reason home, half of all the sales in the US in 2018, were digitally influenced. Researchers expect by 2022 that percentage is going to go up to about 58 or even 60%.
4. We live in a multi-channel world
By multi-channel I mean we use several different channels to follow a brand, whether that is Instagram, whether that is going to Google and searching for them, whether that is going on Spotify and listening to their podcast. A 2017 survey found that only 7% of consumers were multi-channel shoppers, but they accounted for 27% of all sales in the world. Omni-channel shoppers as well spend on average 4% more when they're in the store and 10% more when they're online.
But the great thing about multi-channel shoppers, every age group is a multi-channel shopper some are a little bit more than others, but that's it every single age group is a multichannel shopper.
“If you are solely relying on social media for your marketing, you’re running on borrowed media. ”
5. You shouldn’t rely on social media as your sole digital marketing avenue
Your website is your biggest salesperson and it is the hardest working one because it is on 24/7. The internet never sleeps, there's someone that's always going to be online looking at your content. But more to the point also, if you were solely relying on social media to do all of your sales and marketing and advertising, you're running on borrowed media. While your accounts can be free, they are borrowed media. Social media platforms give your permission to use their platforms for your business, and they can easily take it away.
Social media channels could disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow and the only thing that you would have to be able to market your business online is your website, which drives the point home that you need to have a website that is catered to your target market, that is about your customer or client, not you. Most importantly your website should especially not run slowly. People are getting very impatient nowadays and if your website doesn't load, they’ll just move on to the next website that can answer their query or pain-point.
So do you think you’ll use some of these stats for your business case? I would love to know if you do and whether you win your argument! For more information, or if you need a consultation of how to up your marketing game, get in touch using the button below.