Digital Marketing can no longer be over-looked in favour of traditional channels and methods that feel more comfortable. The digital (or online) channel continues to develop, both in terms of consumer adoption and channel sophistication that allows for improved experience and accountability – that not only brings advantage to businesses who embrace it, but will increasingly make irrelevant, those who don’t.
1. Audiences are increasingly online
As of 2017, there were an estimated 3.9 billion Internet users worldwide*. This accounts for more than half of the global population. And not only are more people having access to the internet, but they are also spending more time on it – for information, navigation, entertainment, and shopping. They are online at home, at work, in transit, at the shops, and when traveling. This means brands can increasingly use digital media to stay visible, even as traditional offline media consumption declines.
*Statista: Internet usage worldwide – Statistics & Facts, July 2019.
2. Effective for both large and small marketing budgets
To build your awareness through digital you don’t need a flashy ad or a fancy director, and you don’t even need to activate paid media to see an increase in your sales results. Making smaller investments in your owned and earned channels such as Website UX, SEO, and Social Media, will help to increase your organic reach and will have a huge pay-off, though more towards the longer-term horizon. What you do need in every case is a sound strategy, and understanding of which target audience will be your source of growth and establishing audience personas that will inform how best to reach and engage them.
3. Can be wide reaching or highly targeted
If you are unsure who your strongest audience is, perhaps because you are launching a new brand or product, or entering a new market, the digital channel allows you to very easily move from a broad target audience definition to a narrower one, focused on your highest performing segment. The digital channel is able to capture data and track audience behavior, which signals their interests and preferences, allowing marketers to have a strong understanding of who their most receptive audience is likely to be and how best to engage them.
4. Can be focused on each or all stages of the purchase funnel
Where E-Commerce platforms exist, the digital channel uniquely allows you to target and track consumers through each stage of the purchase funnel, from awareness to consideration to purchase – a marketer’s dream. In regards to where to focus, perhaps you are a new brand or launching into a new market, and awareness building activity is still key to generating traffic to your website, where consumers can consider and ultimately purchasing your product. Or perhaps you are a more established brand, already obtaining high traffic to your website, but are experiencing low conversion to purchase, which may lead you to evaluate the relevance or strength of your product offer and how it is presented through the Website UX.
5. Measurable through each stage of the purchase funnel
Digital activity has the advantage of real-time, absolute data at your fingertips – unlike offline channels reliant on surveys and dependent on small samples from which to draw conclusions. Measures of performance for each digital channel or platform can be matched to your goals, from advertising impressions to clicks, to website visits and duration, social followings and engagements, and ultimately purchase transactions and value. This measurement also allows marketers to better identify bottlenecks in the funnel to help establish what perhaps is and isn’t working in the marketing mix, and also to focus activity to certain stages of the purchase funnel as required (refer Point 5 above for further details on this).
6. An ability to test, learn and optimise – fast
The digital channel’s high accessibility and short lead times make it a fantastic channel to test and learn, and optimise towards higher performing creative, audiences, media platforms or markets. Unsure if Creative A or B will perform best with Audience 1 or 2? Or if Product X or Y will sell better to your audience? Or if China, Japan or S. Korea has the greatest opportunity for your product? The digital channel allows you to test and learn more quickly and cheaply in comparison to executing a similar test market in offline media and retail channels.
About Kindred
Kindred is a digital marketing agency based in Hong Kong, with a multi-lingual team servicing the broader Asia Pacific region. We build human-centric brands for a digital world. Backed by data-science, we place the user at the centre of our digital strategies and build a compelling user-centric narrative to connect your brand with new customers around the world. To grow your brand, contact us today.
