Marketing on the Web3 Reasons Your Business Should Invest in Digital Marketing in 2020
No matter how much of your 2020 budget is allocated to marketing, you will want to spend every dime on only the most effective methods. To be effective, you have to get your company’s message to the right prospect, reaching them at the right place at the right time. In 2020, there is no better way than with digital marketing channels.
Digital marketing encompasses all online channels, including websites, email, social media, search engines, apps, text, and advertisements. Digital advertising is more targeted and effective than traditional methods like newspapers, billboards, and direct mail. Consider these three reasons to go digital in 2020:
1) Digital targets qualified prospects.
When you buy billboard space only a small percentage of the people who need your service or product will drive or walk by the billboard, let alone notice your message. Despite the estimates provided by the TV station or news outlets you don’t know how many qualified prospects see your ad.
But let’s say you put an ad on Facebook, through digital targeting you can ensure that only people who live in a certain geographic area, of a specific age or gender, who have expressed an interest in products or services like yours will see your ad. Your ad will appear wherever that person is — on their Facebook app on a mobile device, on their desktop at work, or on their tablet at home. Did you know that in 2019 71% of American adults used Facebook, 2.41 billion monthly users — an increase of 8% over 2018.
2) Digital is cost-effective.
Sure, television ads can be powerful. Just think about those highly-anticipated Super Bowl commercials that are shared and replayed for weeks after the game. However, each of those 30-second spots can cost more than $5 million — well outside the marketing budgets of most businesses. Locally, each 30-second ad costs a minimum of $5,000 per one million viewers. Radio is similarly priced at about $3,000 per one million listeners. Reflecting back on our first point, you’re still not exactly sure if someone is watching or hearing your ad, and if they are, there is no way to know if they have any interest in what you’re selling.
Targeted digital advertising is cost effective. With Google Ads you can pay anytime someone clicks on your ad to get more information (thus the term “pay-per-click”). As of late August 2019, the average cost per click for an ad in Google’s search engine was $2.69, while a display ads on websites that target specific topics or interests was only $0.63 per click.
Another way to pay for ads on Google is cost-per-action, or cost-per-acquisition. This means you only pay when someone actually becomes a lead by completing a form for a sales contact, requesting a demo, signing up for your newsletter, etc. The average cost-per-action, or CPA, in 2019 ranged from $48.96 for search ads to $75.51 for display ads. However, this is the actual cost for a lead — people who are actively reaching out to your company for more information. That’s a bargain!
3) Digital marketing is measurable.
Do you ever wonder at the end of the fiscal year where your marketing budget went? And can you really tell which methods resulted in sales? With digital advertising analytics, you know exactly where your money goes; plus, you get instant feedback on exactly what’s performing best.
Virtually every digital advertising channel has an analytics dashboard for real-time details on how your ads are performing. If you see that one ad is performing better than another, you can shift emphasis to that ad to show it to even more people. Some channels even offer tools to automatically move your budget where it’s going to be most effective.
At the end of your digital ad campaign, you know what messages resonated with your potential customers, which ads resulted in the most leads, which websites where your ads appeared were the most popular, and much, much more.
While tare the top three reasons you should consider Digital Marketing, they’re certainly not the only reasons. There is also the flexibility to start, stop, or switch ads on the fly, the opportunity to post video quickly and easily, and the ability to re-target interested customers.
Digital ads drive people to call you or visit your business. Digital is definitely the way to go in 2020!