Internet Marketing

9 Benefits of Internet Marketing to Grow Your Business

Since the introduction of the internet, the marketing world has changed massively. Many businesses have shifted from traditional marketing to online marketing in order to reach new audiences and gain more sales. As a business owner, reaping the benefits of internet marketing is possible if you take your efforts up a notch by starting and maintaining vibrant digital marketing campaigns.

Also called digital marketing or online marketing, internet marketing refers to all marketing efforts done across the internet via mobile-based channels. It is a modern approach to marketing that complements traditional or mass marketing.

The most common internet marketing strategies include:

A business’s internet marketing strategy depends on its marketing goals, target audience, and marketing budget, among other factors. The good thing is that businesses aren’t limited to only one strategy. You can use as many as you find suitable.

9 Benefits of Internet Marketing for Growing Your Business

Here are nine benefits you can enjoy when you use online marketing to grow your business.

1. Convenience for Customers and the Business

Internet marketing is highly convenient for both customers and the business. As the business owner, you don’t need to worry about maintaining strict opening hours. Once you put up your online business, it can run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Having no specific opening and closing hours also means you don’t have to worry about overtime payments for your staff. In the online work system, you can have employees working from various locations at their own convenience, provided they always deliver.

For customers, internet marketing saves them the hassle of moving around trying to locate local retail shops. Each potential customer can find your business online any time and order from your online store at their convenience.

2. Unlimited Geographical Reach

Large and small business owners can enjoy unlimited geographical reach for their businesses because internet marketing doesn’t confine them to a particular locality.

With digital marketing, your business can overcome time and distance limitations to reach consumers even outside your country of operation.

You don’t necessarily need local shops in your country or export outlets in other countries. You can ship your products or offer your services directly to your consumers.

However, you’ll need an elaborate marketing strategy if you target a particular local market, either in your country or outside of it. You must find out what the local customers are looking for to solve their problems, then you can tailor or personalize this for them.

3. Reduced Costs

Compared to traditional marketing methods, online marketing tactics are cheaper. In an online marketing system, you do not need many physical retail shops, if any. The lack of physical shops means no rent or property maintenance costs.

With internet marketing, no display stock is required since no physical outlet is used. All you need to market the products are a few images that you can post online on your website or on different social media platforms.

The inventory cost for digital marketing is also low. Each prospective customer can order a product at their convenience, and you source it on-demand to deliver to the customer.

In some situations, such as affiliate marketing, you don’t even need to handle the products in any way. Instead, the parent company or producer directly ships the product to the customer, saving you delivery costs and time.

The lower costs of internet marketing are also connected to lower travel expenses and advertising costs. Since you don’t need to buy stock in anticipation of buyers, you save on distribution charges.

Also, some online marketing strategies are low-cost, such as search engine optimization (SEO) because they bring new leads from organic traffic. Even when you rely on online advertising like Google Adwords or Facebook Ads, the cost is lower.

This situation is very different from offline marketing, which forces marketers to rely on traditional advertising to reach their target market through more costly and inconvenient methods.

4. Better Relationships with Customers

The modern customer prefers businesses that make them feel valued. A good starting point for building quality relationships is using a subtle online marketing campaign or method, such as content marketing.

Your customer wants their privacy respected, which makes using subtle advertising or marketing tactics necessary. Unlike traditional marketing, which uses intrusive adverts and other marketing methods, online marketing uses methods the client prefers.

For example, online ads are less intrusive, so the customer can live with them as they don’t excessively interrupt their activities. In most cases, the client can even choose to hide or skip the ad, like with in-video YouTube ads.

Reducing the intrusiveness of ads and marketing strategies endears your business to your customers more than one that uses intrusive mass marketing tactics like unavoidable billboards and repetitive TV adverts.

Furthermore, internet marketing allows for two-way communication between a business and its customers. Feedback is easy to receive, and your marketing team can respond to it quickly.

Today’s customers want to deal with businesses that take them seriously, including timely and effective responses to their complaints, compliments, and reviews.

Fortunately, online marketing entails different communication channels like chatbots, email, and social media. Your customers can use these channels at any time at their convenience.

Another way to build quality relationships with customers is to use follow-up emails to thank them for interacting or doing business with you. In this way, you make them feel valued.

Email marketing is also an excellent retargeting method. This way, customers who showed interest in your products or services but haven’t bought them yet can be reached and encouraged to reconsider.

You could also closely study your customers and their purchasing behaviour to give them a tailored experience with personalized or customized offers. A regular email to customers with special customized offers is a great tactic.

A healthy relationship can further be nurtured between you and your customers when you invite customers to leave genuine product reviews detailing their experience with your products and the entire purchase process.

You’ll want to professionally respond to both negative and positive reviews that will endear your business even more to new and existing customers.

If your services or products gain an immense following online, you can nurture a sense of community by bringing your customers together in a forum, for example, to share their unique experiences using your offerings or interacting with you.

Such communities and forums are excellent sources of user-generated content, which boosts your overall digital marketing strategy.

5. Banking on the Effectiveness of Social Media

Social media has become a crucial aspect of how most businesses run their marketing efforts. A marketing campaign launched on various digital platforms and complemented or duplicated on social media can go viral if it resonates well with the target audience.

A digital marketing consulting agency like Canopy Media can help you determine which social media platform is ideal for each marketing effort since not all use the same methods. For instance, YouTube and Facebook are ideal for video marketing.

If your marketing content goes viral on social media, you can expect more business from current and new customers, leading to an upsurge in sales and revenue.

6. Gaining More Qualified Leads

Internet marketing relies greatly on inbound leads realized through social media, SEO, and blogging. These inbound marketing tactics subtly reach out to your target audience, unlike intrusive mass marketing tactics.

With traditional marketing, a business puts up advertisements to a broad audience, including those who aren’t your target consumers. For instance, a billboard advertising gasoline will be seen even by motorcyclists who do not need gas to run their bikes.

Online marketing brings in more qualified leads because the business already has definitive buyer personas and a predetermined target audience to reach out to with paid or free media. Furthermore, prospective customers are already looking for such products and services online.

If a lead is more qualified, it takes much less effort to turn them into a buyer. A lot of time and resources are saved as your marketing team doesn’t have to do a lot of back and forth convincing them to buy.

7. Enhanced Brand Credibility

While most businesses equate brand awareness to credibility, brand credibility actually goes a lot further. Massive brand awareness may not always result in high sales conversions, but high credibility can because customers trust you more.

A credible brand is one that customers can trust or count on at any time to cater to their needs with impartiality. It is a brand that has gained authority in its industry.

For example, a business that appears on top of search engine results pages can be classified as credible since it has gained enough authority for search engines to trust it.

You can also measure brand credibility by the number of repeat clients and referrals you receive from past and current customers. Referrals are a great way to keep you in business without running new marketing campaigns all the time.

8. Higher Returns on Investment

The main goal of many businesses is to make a profit from each qualified sale. Sales and marketing teams work together with hired internet marketing consultants to maximize sales conversions and rake in more profits.

Higher returns on investment (ROI) are possible with online marketing. One reason for this is the aforementioned reduced costs. Keeping your marketing and distribution costs low means higher ROI, especially if your production costs are also low.

Compared to online marketing, traditional marketing can be pretty expensive and often leads to a lower ROI. For instance, TV ads can cost an arm and a leg, yet it’s hard to determine how many people buy from you because of them.

9. Measurable Results

Unlike offline marketing, internet marketing makes it easy to measure the results of your marketing efforts. The main key performance indices (KPIs) include:

  • Cost per click (CPC)
  • Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
  • Return on investment
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV/CLTV)

Measuring the results of your marketing campaigns helps you see what is working and what isn’t. From here, you can choose which tactics to keep using and which ones need improvements or doing away with altogether.

The advantage here is that you’re not marketing blindly like with traditional marketing tactics.

Different marketing analytics tools come in handy for measuring the results of each marketing campaign. Such tools include:

If you’re a small business, you may not be able to buy all the required marketing tools. To leverage their benefits, your business can hire an internet marketing consultant since they have most of these resources already at their disposal.

Conclusion

It’s easy to enjoy the vast benefits of internet marketing if you get your online marketing strategy right in its development and execution.

From reduced costs and unlimited market reach to leveraging social media and building brand credibility, there is no limit to how beneficial online marketing can be for your business’s growth.

The tricks include having the best internet marketing strategy and an able in-house marketing team.

If your team cannot develop a great digital marketing proposal or strategy because of time limitations, you can always hire an internet marketing consultant like Canopy Media to help develop and execute the strategy.

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