Why is Digital Marketing so Important?

Businesses spend more on digital marketing in an economic boom, but what about a recession? Is digital marketing so important during a recession? Yes, during tough economic times, marketing must continue. Therefore keep up with your digital marketing campaigns. In saying this, marketers must use different strategies to adjust to customers’ habits when everything costs more.

The starting point is understanding what customers need from you during a recession. Businesses can interact with targeted audiences on social media in real-time and learn about their current needs. Marketers can create digital marketing campaigns targeting customer requirements and use CRO (conversion rate optimization) to improve clicks, leads, and sales.

Another reason digital marketing has overtaken traditional marketing like TV and print is affordability. Good economic times or not, TV and print costs more than the leaner digital marketing strategies like email marketing. They can not compete for eyeballs or ROI. Startup businesses with small budgets can use digital marketing to get found and converse directly with targeted audiences. For example, an email marketing or social media campaign can reach more target customers for a fraction of the cost of a TV advert.

Today’s challenge is finding a successful brand that isn’t using digital marketing to generate leads, grow a community of followers and promote offerings. There are still a few businesses not using social media, but there is a lot more to digital marketing than social media, including:

• email marketing
• video marketing
• SEO and SEM
• PPC
• mobile marketing
• native advertising
• content marketing

Initial Questions

However, your business will need a digital marketing plan to get from here to there. Similarly, the first step to any successful marketing plan is to develop realistic goals and strategies to achieve them.

Be specific about your goals in each area of your digital marketing plan, including what you want to achieve using the website, blog content, email marketing, and social media marketing.

Having a clear set of expectations will not only help you see how your marketing tactics are working, but this will also be the benchmark by which you can set future goals.

Who is my target audience?

Before you can begin, you need to identify the specific key demographics with whom you specialize and on whom your efforts will focus.

Farmers, for instance, should pinpoint which healthy products are trending with customers in their vicinity and spread the word about their relevant offerings.

What metrics will determine success?

You will need to identify and track key metrics that indicate levels of success in different areas, and this may mean you include measurement of:

• The increase in website traffic
• Quantity of sales leads
• Quality of lead generation
• Rates of conversion

How often should your efforts produce results?

Many entrepreneurs harm themselves by making premature adjustments and unnecessary changes to their marketing efforts. To avoid these counterproductive mistakes, you must have realistic expectations and use calculations based on critical metrics. In addition, you must allow your efforts an adequate amount of time to succeed; otherwise, you will be chasing your own tail.

What is your expected return on investment (ROI)?

For the reasons stated above, you will have to avoid pulling out of your investments if they are not showing huge gains immediately. Set realistic goals about what you hope to achieve and how much you expect to earn in terms of ROI.

The Importance of Your Website And Its Content

In the minds of many Americans– especially younger generations– one’s website is an exact representation of oneself, and this is the case even more so with business sites.

Before you can smile at, speak to or shake hands with a potential client, they will have studied your business and likely made some decisions based on its site. Are you happy with the first impression of your site? Is it improving or harming your brand reputation?

Blog

Blogging not only makes your site more relevant and popular in the eyes of your target audience, but it is also crucial for SEO purposes.

Content marketing is a popular digital marketing strategy that pulls visitors and customers to your site and gives it a reputation – ideally, a favorable one with search engines like Google.

Content is your blog posts, page content, and comments. With AI, Google understands content and loves it when it is unique and relevant to your site and audience. Your site can rank higher in keyword searches when you commit to creating high-quality content.

Example – Footwear Store

On your website in the blog, you can have some fun with content marketing. Your articles should be well written, present knowledge and experience, be informative, maybe even entertaining, and most of all, specific to the needs of your visitors. But you can also add other types of content, like videos, images, and maybe a game or quiz. Let’s say your business sells footwear. Your blog should have content on topics closely related to footwear:

• Cleaning and maintenance
• Types of footwear
• Footwear design
• Footwear trends
• Footwear accessories
• Shoe or boot of the month

There’s no end to the categories or topics you can add; remember, it’s a blog, so you can have fun with it.

Use interactive content to improve engagement with your blog readers. Do you have a smartphone? Of course, you do, and it has a camera. You can film and edit short clip videos. Plus, take photos. Your own material is priceless, so share it far and wide and use copyright-approved images to support your broader content, like trends or gossip.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the most used digital marketing strategy, and it is low-cost with a high ROI. However, you need to know how to create professional emails with personalization so they are unique to get a high conversion rate. There is a lot of flexibility with email content. You can get the transactional experience you may use with your traditional marketing. Unfortunately, email marketing doesn’t excite many marketers like social media marketing and videos do. It is considered the poor cousin, yet email marketing is so effective.

Your marketer can use an ESP (email service provider), e.g., MailChimp, for Anti-Spam compliance and plug and plug design features. Emails are coded in HTML, so even with intuitive design features so you can create professional marketing emails, some coding knowledge will be required, or you can reach out to the ESP’s team for assistance. Email marketing is what you make it so it can be entertaining and informative. Include promotion but mainly use it to pull your email list subscribers to your site where they can take further action like make a purchase or contact you for details about your business.

Social Media

However, don’t write off social media marketing for your business. Creating your own community of followers who will engage and share your posts is free marketing you can not afford to miss out on, even if your business has a significant market share. Where your competitors are, your business must be too.

Statista has a breakdown of digital ad spend per industry. Unsurprisingly, most industries are now using some form of digital marketing, with email marketing, mobile marketing, and social media marketing as the most popular strategies.

Social media allows businesses to communicate with clients, followers, partners, and peers. Therefore the next logical step of full digital adoption for even the most reluctant companies is social media marketing. They will use content from their blogs to create conversations on their social media profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Once they have perfected this strategy, it will be short video clips on TikTok and a Youtube channel.

Summing Up

Is digital marketing important? Yes, it is, and prepare to spend more time and resources on content for your blog to share on social media and in your email marketing messages. Get handy with your smartphone camera for short clip videos, and have fun with an Instagram account. Wherever your audience is online, your business needs to give an excellent first and lasting impression.

Digital marketing doesn’t stop during a recession. Marketers know this is when businesses need to market more innovative by using data analysis to create campaigns that target audiences’ requirements when budgets and spending habits change to meet the rising costs associated with inflation and economic recessions.