There are a lot of advantages of internet marketing over traditional advertising.
With the advent of the internet, marketing has gotten cheaper, more accessible and highly targeted.
This allows even business owners with the smallest of budgets to compete in the online marketplace.
However, the world of online marketing can be a confusing place with all of the different advertising options out there.
In this article, we will break down the many benefits of digital marketing so you can understand why so many businesses are making the switch from traditional to digital in 2020 and beyond.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Definition:
Digital marketing is the act of advertising a product or service using digital means, namely the internet, using channels such as social media, search engines, banner ads, and more.
This is opposite to traditional advertising, which uses forms of marketing such as radio, newspaper, billboards, and so on.
Traditional marketing is the old school and digital marketing is the new school.
To get a deeper understanding of the difference, please watch the following video:
Now, let’s discuss the advantages of digital marketing.
Digital Marketing Benefits And Advantages
There are dozens upon dozens of benefits and advantages when it comes to engaging in an online advertising and digital marketing campaign.
Below is a list of 28 of the top advantages of internet advertising.
This list contains benefits that can be applied to many different digital marketing elements.
1. Works 24 Hours Per Day, 7 Days Per Week
Unlike most businesses, your digital marketing campaign isn’t open only from 9am-5pm.
It works 24/7, 365 – it works while you sleep!
This is quite contrary to a traditional advertising method of having one of your employees stand by the street twirling a promotional sign.
When done right, online advertising can make you money while you snooze – which is unheard of just a few decades ago!
2. Ability To Reach Anyone In The World, Globally
One of the greatest aspects of the internet is that it is borderless.
No longer are you bound to just the customers within your local vicinity.
With digital marketing, you can target people globally – from different States, countries, and even continents.
3. Measurable Results
You can track everything with an online advertising campaign – literally everything!
You can track impressions, clicks, likes, shares, conversions, sales, ROI, and more.
Having this kind of information allows you to make better, more informed decisions about your marketing, and it allows you to understand what ROI results from which specific ads.
This allows you to cut your losing advertisements and scale your winning ones – improving your ROI and profitability over time.
4. Real-Time Reporting
The beautiful thing about the tracking benefits of digital marketing is that they are reported in real-time.
Meaning, you don’t have to wait to make changes and improve your campaign.
If something isn’t working, you can stop the campaign right then and there so you don’t lose any money.
Or, if something is working, you can scale it up immediately to increase your ROI.
5. Tweak And Split-Test Your Marketing As You Go
As mentioned above, real-time reporting allows you to split test your marketing as you go.
Optimizing your campaigns in real-time has many advantages – including saving you and increasing your profitability.
6. Can Optimize And Improve Over Time
One of the other great advantages of online marketing is that there is no perfect ad set or marketing campaign.
Meaning, as you test and tweak your campaign in real-time as you go, your ads can always be improved.
And with the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning, marketing platforms are slowly able to better understand your target market and ideal customer over time.
This allows your marketing to become laser targetted, which will increase your ROI over time.
7. Infinitely And Easily Scalable
Digital marketing is infinitely scalable.
If you have an advertising campaign that is working, it is as easy as simply clicking a button to scale that specific campaign to more people.
There are companies that have created massive businesses off of simply scaling a single working ad set.
This is one of the most powerful benefits of marketing online.
If you get it right, this could be you.
8. Low Barrier To Entry Costs
Digital marketing isn’t just for large corporations.
It’s for everyone.
There is no minimum amount that is required for you to begin an online marketing campaign.
You can start a campaign with as little as $5 if so desired.
9. Cost-Effective
Another advantage of internet advertising is that it is extremely cost-effective.
Not only is it cheap to start, but you can generate leads for a fraction of the cost that it would take with traditional advertising such as television or radio.
Now that there are cheaper alternatives to renting out huge billboards or expensive TV ads, you can begin to see why small businesses are starting to use these online marketing platforms more and more often.
10. Automate Your Lead Generation Process
When you have a campaign that works or have invested in an online marketing channel that does not need a daily watchful eye (such as SEO), then you have essentially created an effective lead generation machine on autopilot.
This allows you to focus on the most important part of your business: service fulfillment of your clients.
This will also help you to scale your business with peace of mind.
11. Do More With Less
Telemarketing is one of the most expensive and inefficient marketing tactics known to mankind.
Companies that once had dozens of telemarketers cold calling other businesses day-in and day-out have been able to scale down their employee count from dozens of employees to very few, and are now even more profitable after doing so.
This is because of the benefits of the internet and marketing automation.
They have allowed businesses to get much more done in a much less amount of time.
12. Timely Marketing
Another great advantage of online marketing is that it takes very little time to create and start a campaign.
There is no waiting on media buying companies, employees, middlemen, or any other third party.
You can simply do it all yourself in a matter of minutes.
This has lead to the emergence of “growth hacking”, which is a new school marketing style that rapidly tweaks different ads on multiple ad platforms to see what works quickly.
When a winning ad set is found, it is merely a matter of scaling this ad set to the moon.
13. Multitasking Capabilities
You can create automated marketing campaigns and funnels that do many things at once.
Your website can host thousands of visitors all at the time while your email drip campaign sends out emails to new subscribers and your embedded calendar automatically books new sales calls to potential customers.
Only a few decades ago, this would take a large team and huge capital to achieve.
Nowadays, this can all be done by one single tech-savvy individual.
14. Lots Of Different Options
There are many digital marketing options for you to explore and test for your business.
There’s social media marketing (SMM), search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, and much more.
There is no one-size-fits all approach.
This allows you to test which channel works best for your business.
15. Flexible Marketing
Online advertising is also extremely flexible.
There are virtually no limits to how you wish to advertise, whether it’s a lot of money on one single marketing channel or a little bit of money on multiple marketing channels.
There’s different website platforms, marketing platforms, plug-ins, applications – the digital world is your oyster, and you have the flexibility to choose the marketing combination that best works for you.
16. More Consumers Are Using The Internet To Make Purchase Decisions
Before purchasing any product or service, the majority of consumers use the internet to do their research first.
This means that if you do not have an online presence, you will have a severe disadvantage compared to your competitors who do have one.
In business, you must adapt or die.
Bringing your business online is therefore where you must be in order to increase your sales and conversion rates.
17. Laser Target Your Ideal Customer
Large conglomerates like Facebook and Google have billions of data points on all of their different users.
They sell this data to advertisers in the form of allowing you to target users with ads based on their gender, age, demographics, household income, interests, and much, much more.
Businesses are able to use this to their advantage by selecting the criteria that narrowly identifies their target customer, thus allowing them to only show their ads to these types of people.
This is much more beneficial than traditional advertising, where these types of targeting features are largely unavailable.
18. Retargeting Made Simple
Another great online marketing benefit is the ability to retarget consumers that have already interacted with your business online.
Whether they viewed an ad, visited your website, or engaged with a photo, you have the ability to retarget this exact same user with followup ad.
This is one of the greatest advantages of digital marketing.
In the marketing world, it is well-known that retargeting interested customers is 10 times more effective than targetting cold traffic.
Internet marketing’s ability to give you the power to retarget any consumer with laser-like precision is a deadly benefit of the digital medium.
19. Convenient And Portable Access
Not only can you create a campaign within mere minutes, but you can also do it anywhere in the world provided you have an internet connection.
There is no need to be in the company office or even in the comfort of your own home.
The real experts can even optimize their campaigns on the go from their phones.
All it takes is a steady internet connection and the knowledge to do so.
20. Relatively Simple And User-Friendly
Now, we always recommend that, if you have the money, to always hire a professional digital marketing agency to get your marketing done.
However, if you’re on a tight budget, you can take a few days to learn how to use a specific marketing platform and run tests on it with a small budget.
It doesn’t take a genius to run a campaign, but if you’re competing against businesses who have hired the experts, you may have a tough time outperforming them.
That said, most marketing platforms are user-friendly and easy enough to at least get started with a simple campaign.
21. Ease Of Personalization
With the advanced targeting and retargeting capabilities of internet advertising, you have the ability to create extreme personalization with your ads.
The type of ads in which your audience will feel like is speaking directly to them.
We know that the more an ad resonates with your ideal customer and the more that they can identify with it, the more likely they are to take action.
By being able to bucket and your audience into very specified segments, you can create extremely personal ads that will ultimately lead to high conversion rates.
22. Instant Transactions
Online marketing allows you to accept instant transactions right on your website.
The internet has been around long enough that consumers now feel comfortable paying for their purchases online.
This can take you out of the entire sales process entirely…
24. Sales Automation
Which leads to sales automation.
You have the ability to both generate leads on autopilot and accept instant online transactions – this means your entire sales process can be automated, too!
And this is exactly how e-commerce works.
If you have your funnels set up correctly and your marketing and messaging targeted properly, you can essentially take yourself out of the entire equation and allow the sales machine to do the work for you.
This is the ultimate benefit of digital marketing.
23. Seamless And Immediate
By creating an automated sales machine, your process can be both seamless and immediate.
Seamless to the point where you very rarely have to get involved and immediate to the point where you will get notified the moment you make a sale.
These are advantages that are exclusive to internet advertising.
25. Increased Conversion Rates
Digital marketing will also help you to increase both your offline and online conversion rates.
It will increase your conversion rates offline because you will be able to drive consumers to your physical store.
I will also provide your business with the online presence needed for when they research and look up your business online.
And by giving you the ability to laser target your customers online, you will have more targeted traffic to your website that will resonate better with your products and services.
26. Get In Front Of High Intent And Qualified Buyers
There are many different digital marketing channels you may choose to utilize.
Some of these channels – like Google Adwords and SEO – allow you to position your business directly in front of consumers that are actively searching for your products and services online.
They do this through Google positioning.
These consumers are in the market and ready to buy now.
By being one of the businesses that show up when they search their query, you have a high chance of converting this immediate customer.
27. Ability To Compete With Large Brands
Online advertising provides you with the tools to communicate your business in the digital world.
By positioning and differentiating your business appropriately, you can compete with large corporations for a cheap price.
Large brands no longer have the advantage of market dominance due to the high barrier to entry costs.
Because they’ve been lowered, even the local mom-and-pop shops have the ability to compete using a variety of digital local area marketing ideas.
28. Competitive Research
The 28th benefit of digital marketing we’d like to touch on is the ability to perform thorough competitive research.
There are dozens of tools out there to help you dissect and understand exactly what your competitors are doing to achieve their online results.
This allows you to reverse engineer their successful strategies as well as develop a strategy of your own that builds on their strengths and improves on their weaknesses to ultimately provide you with better results.
Online Marketing Advantages: A Conclusion
There are many, many digital marketing benefits which help prove that online advertising has become far superior and more efficient than traditional advertising.
With the low barriers to entry, cost-effectiveness, laser targeting, scalability, measurability, and more, there clearly are many advantages to internet marketing.
If you’d like to learn more about digital marketing and different methods of marketing your small business online, please visit our Knowledge Centre to learn more.
Thank you for reading and feel free to leave a comment down below!
