Asking this question means that you have come to the realization digital marketing is here to stay and you are streamlining a marketing strategy that works best for your business. In short, we want to answer in the affirmative. Digital marketing marks the advent of a new era in how business will reach their target audience and you’re doing more harm than good by missing it. According to the recent estimate from eMarkerter, we will spend somewhere around $375.80 billion on digital ads and other marketing tools by the year 2021. That’s on a global scale. And it makes sense, because digital marketing works.
Take for example how much the proliferation of mobile technology has affected the way customers go on the Internet. Online shopping and research of businesses no longer takes place on laptops, but on smartphones and this trend has been on a dramatic upwards trajectory for the past five years. Don’t take our word for it. eMarketer also projects that roughly 72% of the money spent on digital ads will be allocated to the mobile sector on the territory of the US and that’s for this year alone. This shows a clear shift in interest from businesses and still, the landscape for mobile optimization and marketing is rather bare. Most websites have yet to adopt a mobile friendly design and figure out an ad strategy that works for the medium.
To expand your business means to keep up with the times (and if possible just a little ahead), but if there is one other tool to grow your market share and successfully cross over into new regions around the world, it’s attending trade shows. The trade event industry is a juggernaut valued at €3.9 million in 2016, and there’s currently close to 1,200 exhibition venues worldwide and 31,000 exhibitions held per year on average.
There’s a reason for this. Meeting with potential buyers in person creates stronger bonds, trust and keeps you in the conversation going around your industry. Yes, costs can be a prohibitive factor as air fare and accommodation can be a sinkhole for your budget, but fairly manageable if you know where to look for a custom travel plan for trade fairs.
Think of it this way – digital marketing allows you to be found (a considerable task in any sector) while attending trade events allows you to be experienced. Your brand and products cross over from being hypothetical into a tangible presence and that’s not to be ignored. But once you return home, you still have to go through all the leads you’ve gathered during the exhibition or trade fair and convert them into sales. What do you do? You send follow-up emails.
Email marketing has been a staple tool in the marketers’ arsenal since the early years of the Internet revolution and proved itself to be a reliable source of new customers or to leverage any personal contacts into sales. Whether it’s cold emails, promotional emails sent to existing customers or the follow-up sent after an exhibition, emails open valuable channels of communication that shouldn’t be neglected. You already know this. It’s an integral part of running a business nowadays and it’s also the foundation for digital marketing.
To think back on the matter of follow-up emails, you’re basically practicing a form of conversion rate optimization, which is one of the hottest topics in digital marketing right now. After all, what is the surest way to secure stable growth over a period of time other than consistent increase in the sales department. Due to competition and the fact that customers are now overwhelmed by options online, businesses look into CRO tools to boost performance and sales numbers. What we know is that there’s a 223% increase on the ROI on average thanks to the use of CRO tools. That’s not a statistic to take lightly.
All signs point towards digital marketing taking a significant role at the forefront in your marketing strategy overall, though it works best when augmented with strategic offline marketing practices (business trips are not going anywhere). Digital marketing can seem a bit daunting to approach the field, if you’re new to this, but it doesn’t need to be. Identify the lines of marketing that best align with your brand and limit yourself to those at the start. Thankfully one of the saving graces of digital marketing is that its implementation doesn’t cost too much and there are companies out in the wild that offer a bundle of services at affordable rates suitable even for small businesses.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post about whether digital marketing is always the best tool for expanding business and building a brand.
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