Digital Marketing as a Strategy for Innovation

Digital Marketing brings in many benefits compared to traditional marketing and thus drives innovation in business. We shall see how digital marketing helps in several aspects of campaigning in the sections below.

Before we dive into it, let us explore what digital marketing is in comparison to traditional marketing. We shall also go through the benefits of digital marketing over conventional marketing.

What is Traditional Marketing?

Traditional marketing involves using conventional channels of promoting a product like billboards, print media, and television commercials. Traditional marketing reigned the roost up until the 1990s when the internet showed up.

Traditional marketing involves relatively less creativity. Creativity stopped at the ad agency that was tasked with developing the advertisement of the product.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing took flight in the 1990s when the internet started showing up on home desktops. Digital marketing involves using digital channels like websites and social media as marketing tools to promote your product to a larger audience. Digital marketing today continues to coexist with traditional marketing efforts depending on the product and the target audience.

It does not make absolute sense to market something like Bluetooth headphones on a traditional marketing channel in today’s world. The reason is the target audience is tech-savvy and is easily reachable through digital media.

• Digital Marketing channels include
• Mobile apps
• Company website
• Product social media pages
• Popular search engines
• Television advertising
• Email automation
• Digital partnerships with other companies having a digital presence

Traditional channels of marketing are not yet out of the system. For genuinely successful marketing campaigns, digital marketing techniques should be integrated with traditional channels like print, TV, and snail-mail or even pamphlet distribution (local marketing).

Benefits of Digital Marketing over Traditional channels

Here are some benefits that your business can take advantage of if done the right way:

• Increase and maintain customer loyalty

In today’s world, any period of disconnect with your customer will result in losing your customer to the next competitor waiting in line. It is essential to keep the communication channel open with the customers unless they decide to opt-out.

Digital marketing allows you to create and operate communication channels with customers via frequent communications through email marketing. If you can find the right balance of communicating new products and offers and stay out of the spam filter, you might have just done well enough to retain your customer.

Digital Marketing in this way allows you to bring in innovation in the way you retain the loyalty of your customers. You could do this the traditional way too, but for the high cost of traditional methods to reach a larger audience.

It lets you easily personalize an experience for the customer through email marketing channels that can be customized for different customer groups. For example, your marketing strategy can be easily tweaked to suit customers who are in their teens.

Social Media channels are another great way to keep the communication going with the customer and retain the customer’s attention for a longer time.

Once again, it brings in innovation by allowing direct connection with customers using social media channels. Any seriously negative feedback can be quickly responded to, and any further damage could be mitigated by customer care teams quicker.

• Engaging your customer at every stage of the sale

Digital marketing allows you to follow your customer at every step of the marketing campaign, from the moment the customer gets to view your ad to the online purchase of your product.

It again brings innovation in tracking the customer, making for a compelling customer journey story. This journey will give you all kinds of insight into how effective your ad or marketing campaign is. This also allows you to figure out any serious flaws in your marketing campaign that result in losing your customer’s attention somewhere during the journey.

• Targeting the right audience

With digital marketing platforms now allowing you to segment your customer bases into several marketing segments based on demographic data and browsing or purchase behavior, you can market your product differently to each target audience group. Digital marketing lets you bring in innovation in the way you handle your customer base. You are now managing your customer base in a more customized fashion instead of one campaign for all.

• Consistent lead pipeline

Digital Marketing allows you to create an online sales funnel that is explicitly designed to generate consistent leads. It again brings in innovation by letting you stay in touch with your loyal customers through various channels and generate consistent sales over a while.

• Better conversion rates

With Digital Marketing, your spend on marketing campaigns is considerably lesser than traditional channels. Even so, your conversion rates are higher than the conventional methods of marketing. With Digital Marketing, you can innovate and achieve better conversion rates than traditional channels.

• Accurate measurement of marketing efforts

In Digital marketing, you can clearly say how much of your success arrived from which marketing channels. You can also identify channels where the conversion rates are low and allow you to make changes to better your marketing efforts. Digital marketing brings in innovation by accurately tracking the performance of all your digital channels and taking course corrective actions where required.

• Brand credibility

With Digital Marketing, your online presences help you generate brand credibility. An online presence allows you to establish trust with customers by tackling any customer doubts and issues at the onset.

As you can see, it brings in innovation in every aspect of marketing that eventually leads to product innovation. Digital Marketing is thus an indispensable part of any strategy for innovation.

Conclusion

Digital Marketing in today’s digital world is an essential and indispensable tool for further the reach and brand value of your product and services. It helps in lead generation, brand awareness, customer engagement, and many more.