(Updated: 24 June 2023)
Digital marketing is an essential part of any business’ marketing strategy, especially in our ever-evolving digital marketplace. Entrepreneurs in South Africa need to know the benefits of digital marketing and understand how to best utilize digital marketing to benefit their business in such a competitive environment.
Let’s take a look at what digital marketing is and the benefits digital marketing can offer entrepreneurs entering the marketplace in South Africa
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing refers to the process of promoting products and services online through various digital channels. These channels can include search engines, email, websites, social media, paid marketing etc. that can help your business connect with current or potential customers.
Digital marketing, when used correctly, can help you reach a larger audience and target specific customer groups who are most likely to engage with your brand. With online presence being at an all-time high, digital marketing has become the go-to method of marketing versus traditional marketing methods.
With this new reality, businesses around the world are setting up effective digital marketing strategies, to maximise their marketing efforts with the end goal of reaching and converting potential customers into paying clients.
Top benefits of digital marketing
Utilising multiple strategies
Entrepreneurs looking to start their digital marketing adventure first need to establish a strategy that would work best for their business type. For example, a B2B type business may use a different digital marketing strategy to a B2C type business, as they have different goals.
The benefit with digital marketing is that you can try multiple strategies and analyse the data gathered to determine which strategy works for your business. After all, a well-executed digital marketing strategy is one that allows for changes and adapts quickly to the ever-changing needs of the business.
What are some of the most common types of digital marketing?
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click Ads
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
- Remarketing
- Search Engine Optimisation
Increased Reach
Without the geographic restrictions of traditional marketing methods, businesses can set up digital marketing campaigns that can reach a wider audience. This ability to connect with a targeted audience online can save businesses thousands, if not hundreds of thousands on print marketing campaigns associated with traditional marketing.
By using structured digital marketing campaigns, businesses can improve their brand visibility, reach a larger, targeted audience, increase brand interaction, and drive potential clients to acting and converting. This opens a variety of growth opportunities that businesses whether big or small can explore.
Reduced Costs
Digital marketing provides businesses with more cost-effective marketing solutions compared to traditional marketing. It gives small businesses the opportunity to compete with larger corporations by leveling the playing field so to speak, especially when these smaller companies utilize highly targeted strategies. These strategies can include or focus on optimizing your websites’ SEO, marketing your products or services through social media, or creating good user-focused content.
However, as we’ve mentioned before, businesses need to determine what marketing strategy would work best for them based on their business’ marketing goals and objectives. It is also worth considering the type of budget you would like to allocate to your digital marketing efforts, as some strategies may require a bigger budget than others.
Determine Your Target Audience
As a new business owner, you may have a vague idea of what type of audience you want your business to attract. Although “Paying Customer” is the ideal target audience for any business, there is a big difference when considering if you are a B2B or B2C company. Digital marketing enables you as a business owner to extract vital data from your marketing campaigns, to determine which audiences engage with your brand.
Armed with this information, you can easily optimize your campaigns, adapting them to the ever-changing needs of your audience. This data can help you stay on top of your customers’ ever-changing needs, thus increasing the success rates of your campaigns.
Increase Customer Engagement
Customer engagement can be described as a customer taking an action that engages with your brand in a variety of ways such as sharing an article you wrote, liking a post you created, reacting positively to a photo, saving a video, or clicking on your ads to view and interact with your website. The benefit of digital marketing is that these actions can be captured and analysed. This valuable data enables you to create attractive and more engaging posts, thus increasing brand awareness and boosting sales potential.
Reviewing Data and Optimising Campaigns
Knowing which channels your online traffic is coming from, what media receives higher customer engagement, or what product is in higher demand are some of the questions digital marketing reports can answer. With real-time analytics available, you can review and measure the results of your digital marketing campaigns too determine what works best for your business.
With these results, you can quickly optimize your campaigns, adjust target or platform focus, fix any identified mistakes, and take control of your sales funnel to drive more relevant traffic to your business.
Conclusion
Whether you’re starting out or perhaps an established business looking to market your business creatively, consider the power of digital marketing. At Cognite Marketing, we’ve helped hundreds’ of businesses with their digital marketing journey, if you are interested in digital marketing but do not have the time to get into it yourself, contact us today.
