Top 9 Benefits of Digital Marketing: Reasons to Increase Your Budget

The internet is giving businesses and marketing teams not only more ways to reach prospective customers, but it’s also widening the audience that they can reach. Nowadays, getting your brand in front of an international audience is completely feasible. 

That said, it’s not just about the numbers that you can attract. To reach your marketing goals, you need to go beyond reach. You need to engage. 

Thanks to the various types of engaging content that you can create, digital marketing methods tick this box too. Like its reach, the reasons why you need to invest more in digital marketing go beyond simply a couple of key benefits. Aside from engagement and global reach, here’s what you can achieve with digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing Versus Digital Marketing

Before you can truly understand the biggest benefits of digital marketing, you need to understand how it’s different from traditional marketing. These are two distinct approaches that businesses can use to market their products or services. 

Put simply, traditional marketing refers to offline marketing strategies that use traditional channels. Examples of traditional marketing include TV commercials, radio ads, billboards, and print ads in magazines, newspapers, etc. 

Digital marketing, on the other hand, uses digital channels. Examples include mobile devices, email, social media platforms, and search engines. 

9 Digital Marketing Benefits:

1. Strategies are cost-effective

Let’s face it, cost is most likely the first question you have. 

Traditional marketing methods like a full-page ad in a glossy magazine, radio spot, or TV ad make it virtually impossible for smaller businesses to compete. Without digital marketing, small business owners are pretty much restricted to sliding pamphlets under car windshield wipers. 

However, thanks to digital marketing’s lower costs, advertising your business has become a lot more affordable. In fact, with some strategies you can get started for free. For example, to get started with social media marketing, all you really need are a profile and time to create and publish posts. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) and email marketing in particular are praised for their cost-effectiveness. Our Digital Marketing Benchmark 2024 Report reveals that SEO is rated as the most cost-effective channel because of its ability to align with user intent. 

What’s more, many agencies offer digital marketing packages to bundle relevant services together for a lower rate. Aside from offering more value for money, the pricing is transparent. You know exactly what you’ll get and how much it will cost. 

You don’t need to sign up for a digital marketing package to cap your spending, though. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another way that you can limit your spending. You get to set your budget.

At the end of the day, cost is also one of the factors on which marketing agencies get rated. For agencies, digital marketing allows you to stretch clients’ budgets. This way, the results as well as the lower cost will be selling features. 

2. The results are easy to measure

Unlike traditional marketing strategies that are often a shot in the dark, digital marketing is measurable. With digital marketing, practically every click, view, like, and comment can be tracked and analyzed. 

You also have insight into who engages with your content and the ability to highlight the main traffic sources. This means marketers can gain an in-depth understanding of their audiences’ behaviors and preferences and adjust the digital marketing funnel accordingly. For example, if you find that video content attracts more views and shares than a blog post, you can make video marketing a primary marketing tactic across each stage. 

This granular level of insight is made possible by a wealth of analytics tools that allow for the scrutiny of campaigns. The extensive knowledge gained from these insights allows for continual optimization of marketing efforts, creating a loop of improvement and success. 

What’s more, as the data is typically available in real time, it empowers marketers to adjust and optimize strategies quickly. This way, their digital marketing efforts are aligned with consumer behavior and marketing trends most of the time.  

Plus, you get to decide which metrics to track. You can go beyond vanity metrics like follower count and post likes to more substantial, meaningful metrics such as engagement rate, audience growth rate, and click-through rate (CTR) that offer more insight. 

3. Refined targeting is possible

One of the key rules of marketing is that you should target a specific audience. Marketing to everyone sets you up for failure from the start. 

With traditional marketing, targeting is tricky. However, with digital marketing you can target much more precisely. 

Let’s take email marketing as an example. You can segment your subscriber list with impressive accuracy to create a series of groups based on shared characteristics like age, gender, profession, etc. 

This way, you can share personalized content, ensuring that your message stays relevant and interesting. For example, if you’re advertising baby products this week, you can set up your email campaign so that it reaches only parents.  

The same level of targeting can be applied to paid campaigns. For example, if you’re creating ads for Pinterest, you can filter your target audience according to demographics, interest, and keywords. It also offers unique options like targeting users who’ve had some prior interaction with your brand already. 

Not only can you refine your targeting, but you can also retarget. Put simply, it’s when a visitor browses a website and a cookie gets stored on their computer allowing you to display ads that are linked to the pages they browsed. This enables you to target specific visitors with specific personalized ads. 

4. Campaigns are easy to adjust

Touched upon earlier, digital marketing campaigns can be adjusted on the fly. As you’ll be working with digital assets, elements like messaging, layout, color, visuals, etc. can be changed mid campaign. 

Spotted a typo? It’s an easy fix. 

Now, if it were a printed ad, you had to hope that the grammar mistake wasn’t the thing your ad is remembered for. 

This benefit reaches further than superficial fixes. Your Facebook post might be error-free, but for some reason it just doesn’t hit the mark. In this case, you can change it quickly with the goal to optimize. 

Alternatively, you can run two versions from the start to see which version finds better traction among your target audience. A/B testing is frequently adopted for website optimization, email marketing, and social media ads.

5. You have a wider reach

With digital marketing, you aren’t limited to your local audience. Unlike a billboard that reaches a very limited geography, digital assets can reach a global audience. 

Combine this with its targeting capabilities and you can reach almost exactly who you want across the world. 

That said, even if you choose to focus on your local audience, you still have the ability to reach a bigger, local audience. 

Let’s take the example of the billboard again. If you were to place a billboard advertising your restaurant next to the main route, your ad will reach only those who traveled via this route. Those who take a different path would be none the wiser. 

However, with local SEO, you can basically target everyone who searches for a restaurant in a specific town.

6. Better engagement

Digital marketing essentially opens a two-way communication channel. Advertisers can engage with their target audience directly, adding to a more personalized experience. 

Social media marketing is a good example. Potential customers can respond to your post in comments or show interest by liking it. They can also tag friends so that their network gets looped in too. 

There’s also the added benefit of real-time engagements. If you assign a dedicated social media community manager, you might even be able to reply to some of these conversations immediately. If not, your community manager will at least encourage engagement. 

The same applies to many other online marketing channels. Blogs and emails can also encourage engagement. While subscribers can’t typically reply to promotional emails directly, they can forward these emails to their network or click on calls to action and engage further with the brand via landing pages and its website. 

Whichever digital channel you use as your primary line for engagement, it builds customer loyalty. Plus, even if you’re not that active when it comes to participating in online conversations, the content in itself is more engaging. 

Highly visual content like online video and infographics capture and hold attention very effectively. Semrush’s Social Media Trends Report 2024 reveals that TikTok user-generated content remains the most engaging format to tell stories and the platform has the highest user engagement figure. In fact, across all social media platforms, this report lists video as the star format. 

7. There’s a variety to choose from

Digital marketing is all about variety and flexibility. There’s a wide selection of not only channels, but also strategies and content types. 

From more traditional channels like email to newer ones like TikTok, you have various ways to reach target audiences. Then, marketers can also pick and choose which strategies and content types to use and mix and match these with relevant channels. For example, you can use influencer marketing to reach potential customers via social media or podcasting. 

Influencer marketing also doesn’t necessarily need to take the form of audio or video content. A static social media post with a branded hashtag campaign can be equally effective. 

Plus, repurposing a piece of content for another digital marketing platform is relatively straightforward. This way, you can essentially use one piece of content on multiple digital platforms.

8. Better ROI

According to our Digital Marketing Benchmark Report 2024, social media takes the lead and delivers a return on investment (ROI) of 38.5%. 

Other marketing reports back this up and highlight that short-form videos shared via social media specifically generate a remarkable return. HubSpot’s The State of Marketing 2024 Report lists short-form videos as the marketing trend that generates the strongest results. As for channels, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are the top social channels for marketing when measured based on ROI.  

Here’s what the picture looks like for other online marketing channels:

• Affiliate marketing 15.4%
• Email marketing 14.1%
• Content marketing 12.8%
• SEO 10.3%
• PPC advertising 6.4%

The higher ROI is linked to the fact that it’s easier to link conversions to specific digital marketing campaigns. Combine this with digital marketing’s cost-effectiveness and it’s no wonder why marketing teams embrace online marketing strategies.

9. Chance to improve the customer experience

Because of the nature of digital marketing, businesses can also use their marketing efforts to improve the customer experience and delight customers. As mentioned earlier, digital marketing creates the perfect platform for target audience members to engage with the brand. 

Followers can comment on social media posts not only to share their excitement about an upcoming event but also their pain points. You can use their responses to improve your service and products accordingly. For example, is the checkout process too complex or your website too slow? Use this data and make the necessary changes. 

Aside from becoming a valuable channel for gathering customer feedback informally, you can also include features like a chatbot into your website design. When a visitor lands on your blog, a chatbot can answer FAQs. 

TLDR: You Get More for Less

Digital marketing strategies enable you to target the audiences that matter most to your product or service. This precision reduces advertising costs and ensures that your marketing efforts aren't just mere random guesses.

Thanks to this cost-effectiveness, businesses can also leverage multiple strategies and online channels. An integrated approach ensures consistency in messaging, which strengthens brand recall and promotes user trust. Synchronizing your online presence from social media to email marketing creates multiple touchpoints, enriching the customer experience and enhancing the customer's journey toward conversion. 

While digital marketing has the upper hand over traditional methods in more areas than one, it’s less trustworthy. This is merely because it’s not as old as newspaper ads. 

With the right content and channel, your messaging can instill the same level of trust. Hence, the reason to go multichannel. Then, ensure that you strategically incorporate social proof and user-generated content into your content marketing strategy and you’re set to become a trustworthy brand online and offline.

About the Author

Koba Molenaar

Writer

Koba Molenaar brings nearly a decade of rich experience in content writing, specializing in digital marketing, branding, SaaS, and eCommerce. Her passion for helping brands, from solopreneurs to established companies, connect with their audiences shines through her work. As a member of the Golden Key International Honor Society, Koba’s commitment to excellence is evident in her work, showcasing her as a relatable and knowledgeable voice in the industry.