Digital Marketing

What are the main benefits of Digital Marketing?

Unlike typical offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate real time results. If you've ever put an advertisement in a newspaper or phone book, you'll know exactly how difficult it is to know how many people have seen that ad. There's no way to know if that ad was effective in increasing sales for your business.

With digital marketing, you can measure your ROI immediately and accurately from pretty much all of your different tactics.

Some examples include:

• Website Traffic
• Content Performance
• Lead Generation

How long until I can see results?

With digital marketing, you can more easily see results and track your ROI than with a typical offline marketing campaign due to the ability to track that return. However, it ultimately depends on the scale and effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy.

If you spend time developing comprehensive buyer personas to identify the needs of your audience, and you focus on creating quality online content to attract and convert them, then you're likely to see strong results within the first six months.

If your strategy includes paid advertising, then the results come even quicker - but it's recommended to focus on building your organic or free reach using content, SEO, and social media for long term sustainable success.

Do I Need a Big Budget for Digital Marketing?

As with anything, it really depends on the specific tactics you plan to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy.

If you already have a website, and you're focusing on inbound techniques like SEO, social media, and content creation then the good news is you don't need very much budget at all. With inbound marketing, the main focus is creating high-quality content that is extremely relatable to your target audience (you should know what they want from your buyer personas). So unless you plan to outsource the work, the only investment you'll need is your time. If you're short on available time, Stoute.co has a team of expert marketing professionals that are ready to tackle your digital marketing project.

With outbound tactics like search engine marketing or pay-per-click, you'll have some expenses and the cost directly relates to what kind of visibility you want to receive as a result of the advertising.

For example, to implement PPC using Google Adwords, you'll be bidding against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google's search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive which is why it's a good idea to focus building your organic reach too.

I'm ready to try digital marketing. Now what?

If you're already doing digital marketing, it's likely that you're at least reaching some segments of your audience online. No doubt you can think of some areas of your strategy that could use a little improvement, though.

That's why we partnered with Hubspot, an inbound marketing, and sales software platform, to bring you Why Digital Marketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing Your Brand Online - a step-by-step guide to help you build a digital marketing strategy that's truly effective, whether you're a complete beginner or have a little more experience.