10 Must-know Benefits of Digital Marketing for Your Business

What is digital marketing? And what are the benefits of digital marketing for your business? These questions haven’t been more relevant than they are right now, and understanding the impact digital marketing can have on your business is key if you want to take your marketing strategy to the next level in 2024.

In this post, we will explore what digital marketing is, popular digital marketing strategies, and the top ten benefits of a digital marketing strategy for businesses.

Digital marketing is an umbrella term, encompassing all marketing activities done through digital means, such as social media, emails, websites, mobile apps, paid advertising, videos, and influencer marketing, to name but a few!! In 2023, digital advertising dominated the UK marketing industry with a 12.76% growth as compared to the full year prior, overshadowing new product introductions, customer experience spending, and traditional marketing activities.

Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC) – This is a model of paid digital advertising that can encompass a combination of text, images and videos, and is used across search engines, social media platforms, websites, and more.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – The process of optimising a website’s technical functionality, creating high-performing content, and quality links to increase its visibility and, in turn, achieve higher rankings on search engines.

Content Marketing – The creation of content through blogs, on-page website copy, articles, white papers, videos, podcasts, and more. Content marketing is a key inbound marketing strategy used to attract, engage and delight audiences, bringing them in as opposed to advertising directly at them.

Social Media Marketing – Social media goes hand in hand with content marketing, employing similar techniques by creating engaging content, whether that is text, video, or images, to draw in your audience, interact with them, and build a community. Social media strategies can utilise both organic and paid content.

Email Marketing – This involves directly communicating with customers (new, past, and present) via email. You can use email marketing to promote products or services, offer something of value through content, coupons or discounts, as well as keeping your contacts informed of any changes to the business, such as new opening times, new stores etc.

The needs of the business will influence which strategies are best to invest in, - your objectives and goals should be aligned to capitalise on the benefits of each digital marketing strategy.

Here are ten of our top benefits of digital marketing.

1. Reaching New Audiences

One of the leading benefits of digital marketing, particularly for small businesses, is the ability to reach audiences on a global scale. Unlike traditional marketing, there is no geographical limit on who you can target and where you can target them. According to Statista, between 2023 and 2027, social media users are expected to grow by 26.5% with an estimated 5.85 billion users worldwide by 2027. There is no denying that integrating social media into your digital marketing strategy should be a no-brainer. Digital marketing even allows businesses promoting highly niche products or services to discover a wider pool of audiences, which is essential to business growth and success.

2. Build Better Relationships

Digital marketing channels like forums, blogs, social media, live streaming, and webinars allow you to directly interact with your audience. This two-way communication helps to cultivate sincere relationships with an audience which often leads to great brand loyalty.

It can also be instrumental in helping you better understand your audience's needs, wants, and desires, influencing service or product developments.

3. Greater Brand Interaction

Not only can digital marketing help you build relationships with an audience, it can also help to promote greater brand interaction. Audiences are spending more and more of their time online and brands that capitalise on this by implementing an engaging digital marketing strategy are more likely to increase their brand interaction.

When you put your audience at the forefront by being present on their preferred channels – whether that’s a specific social media platform, websites, email or apps – and creating relevant, enticing content, you are more likely to see better engagement.

4. Staying Up-to-date & Relevant

It has never been more important for businesses to stay on top of the latest changes and trends. With that in mind, businesses that leverage digital marketing are more able to respond to these changes in real time.

In comparison to traditional marketing, digital marketing has the added advantage of allowing you to roll out campaigns quickly, meaning you can promptly respond to the latest industry trends and customer needs. Not only does this make you more relevant to your audience, but it can instil an added sense of trust in your brand.

5. Data-informed Decision Making

While it is difficult to accurately measure offline marketing efforts, digital marketing enables you to track almost every aspect of your online marketing activities. Using a suite of reporting tools, you can accurately measure where your website traffic is coming from, what pages people are visiting on your site, which days and times achieve the highest number of conversions, how many clicks your ads are getting, and so on.

Using this data, businesses can make informed decisions around adjustments to their marketing initiatives, better understand product lifecycles, target their audiences more accurately, and much more.

Some of our favourite reporting tools that our team at Zelst use on a daily basis include GA4, SEMrush, Google Search Console, Moz, and Ahrefs. We love seeing how our client's digital marketing campaigns are performing, and utilise the data available to ensure we’re staying ahead of the curve.

Talk to us if you’re not sure if you’re making the most out of your marketing data.

6. Versatile and Efficient

One of our favourite benefits of digital marketing is the ability to create a piece of versatile content that can be repurposed and shared through a range of channels to ensure you’re engaging effectively with a wide audience.

Say you create a blog in the form of a list (like this one!), you can take each point and transform them into individual social media posts to share across your social platforms. You could then turn each of the blog points into a series of short videos for YouTube. And hey presto, you’ve utilised one idea to create a variety of engaging pieces of content across many platforms for your audiences to enjoy.

7. Increased Trust

Content marketing is one of the most critical ways a brand can increase trust in their services or products. In HubSpot’s 2023 Marketing Trends Report, they found 56% of people go on to make a purchase after reading a brand's blog post. Displaying your business’ expertise and authority within a market by providing quality content increases the audience's positive perception and trust of the brand. In turn, this increases the likelihood of them converting.

A brand’s E-E-A-T (expertise, experience, authority, and trust) also directly influences a website's online visibility as Google ranks domains with strong E-E-A-T signals higher within the search results page.

8. Grow Sales

Digital marketing strategies like PPC and paid social advertisements allow you to target audiences that are actively seeking your products or services and those who are ready to convert. Seeing your brand’s advertisement may be the last nudge to get them across the finish line and convert.

A well-run paid advertisement strategy is especially important for e-commerce businesses as it is estimated 51% of people spend more online, compared to 39% who spend more in-store!

9. Cost Effective

One of the key benefits of digital marketing, especially for small businesses, is how cost-effective it can be. Unlike traditional marketing such as print advertisement, TV and radio, digital marketing is significantly more affordable and allows you to precisely target your audiences, resulting it a much higher Return On Investment (ROI).

10. Personalised Experience

With traditional marketing, you are limited as to how effectively you can target and personalise your marketing activities. On the other hand, digital marketing strategies provide a world of data at your fingertips. There are boundless, data-rich resources to understand your audiences’:

• Interests
• Demographics
• Location
• Buying behaviours
• And more

You can use this information to ensure you are optimising your targeting, and resonating with your audience for a personalised customer experience. Audiences are much more like to be engaged when they feel brands have taken the time to understand them and their needs.

These benefits of digital marketing for businesses are only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many ways in which leveraging a digital marketing strategy for your business will help you grow your audience and improve their experience. 

Why not sign up to our email today and get some actionable tips and insights from our experts straight in to your inbox, and take your digital marketing to the next level in 2024.

Not sure which digital marketing strategy is best for your business? Talk to our team of experts who are always on hand to discuss your options, and find the best strategy for you. Take a look at our case studies to see the results we have achieved for our clients so far, or head to our blog for more digital marketing insights.