July 8, 2022 •Tamzin Walters
Digital marketing encompasses all of the online activities undertaken to promote your business. From hiring influencers to creating email campaigns to online ads, this type of marketing has become a mainstay for many businesses. It’s easy to confuse digital marketing with content marketing—after all, they are closely related. So, what is the importance of content in digital marketing? We’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s take a look at digital marketing and why businesses rely on it so heavily.
5 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Is Important
- You can meet your customers where they are.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that more and more activity is shifting from the real world to the digital realm. Even in-person shopping is affected by online, as reported on by Forbes: research has shown that 82% of consumers conduct research online before making in-person purchases (in addition to the 56% of people who do their shopping online). In short, people are online a lot (let’s not even go into the time spent on TikTok or other social media sites). It’s essential to create an online presence so you can be in the same space as the people you’re trying to reach.
- You can seek out your customers effectively.
Speaking of the people you want to reach, one of the biggest reasons that digital marketing is important is that it allows you to easily target your audiences. With the proliferation of data and personalization efforts online, you have a host of tools to send your campaigns directly to the people you want to target. Let’s look at Facebook ads, for example—whenever you set up a campaign, you can easily select from a wide range of demographics, interests, and online behavior to match your ads to the people viewing them. Just remember, with great power comes great responsibility. There are some digital targeting practices that are unethical, immoral, and illegal.
- You can leverage modern technology to know what works and what doesn’t.
Gone are the days of sending out an ad to a newspaper and hoping that people are reading it and paying attention. With today’s tech, you can have access to all the metrics and measurements you desire—as long as you take the time to set it up and analyze it. With the ability to do things like observe where your web traffic is coming from (and where they go after they leave your site), you can tweak your marketing to try to capture attention quicker and keep visitors on your page longer. And, you’ll be able to see if it works since many digital marketing measurements can be taken in real time.
- You can create a strong brand identity.
With so much competition out there, your digital marketing strategy is vital for differentiating yourself. With the vast opportunities for customization (from the color palettes of your online presence to the keywords you select for your blogs), you can craft a brand identity that is recognizable and strong.
- You can level the playing field.
With old school marketing techniques, one of the biggest challenges was being able to afford to get your company in front of the right people. With digital marketing, you can play ball with the big team in town since you can do a lot with a small budget in an online space. With low-cost, hyper-targeted campaigns, you can (and should!) compete with bigger businesses easily.
What Is the Role of Content in Digital Marketing?
Simply put, the role of content in your digital marketing is to give customers something they are looking for. For example, if your business manufactures and sells skateboards, you might have a blog dedicated to the latest news in the skateboarding world. While this may not directly translate into skateboard sales, your content is reaching your target audience and familiarizing them with your brand. Sometimes content in digital marketing is more of a straightforward sales pitch, but it will usually include informational elements. For example, you may want to produce a whitepaper on choosing skateboard trucks and why your trucks are the best quality. This will naturally be more sales-driven, but people can still read it and come away with a lot of valuable information.
How Do I Know What Content To Write?
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here at DemandJump, you’ll find all the tools you need to create a Pillar-Based Marketing campaign. This digital marketing strategy is focused on content (we are obsessed with content, after all!) and will help you create a comprehensive digital network of content around a topic that your customers are searching for. To learn more about Pillar-Based Marketing, check out DemandJump University.
So, Why Is Content Marketing Important for Digital Marketing?
First and foremost, content marketing is vital for bringing in organic traffic. Other forms of digital marketing are more naturally focused on paid traffic, missing out on this source of revenue. When you do content well, you are essentially establishing yourself as an authority in your industry to search engines and potential customers as well. As a trusted authority, people will gravitate to your content and enter your pipeline as an organic lead rather than having to pay for those clicks.
We know firsthand how transformational content marketing can be in your digital strategy, when done well. Here at DemandJump, we specialize in helping your content jump up onto page one of Google. After all, 92% of search traffic on Google stays on the first page. When your content falls on page two or beyond, only 8% of searchers will stumble across your content, meaning you’ve lost your organic traffic opportunity.
We’ve flipped the script on this. For example, let’s say for your skateboard business you want to rank for a keyword with a monthly search volume of 50,000 with an average cost-per-click of $5.00. In this scenario, with DemandJump you have the potential to increase your monthly search traffic by 14,450 visitors and save $867,000 annually on paid search ads that would be required to generate the same traffic. Ready to experience this type of incredible result with your digital marketing? Let’s get started together.
