Importance of Digital Marketing: 8 Reasons Why Digital Marketing Is Important

What is the importance of digital marketing?

Digital marketing is important because it enables your business to create cost-effective and measurable campaigns that reach targeted audiences who are already searching and shopping online.

Key reasons digital marketing matters:

• Reaches people where they already spend their time online
• Helps you target your most valuable audiences
• Levels the playing field with bigger competitors
• Gives you clear data to improve performance
• Drives reliable, cost-effective growth

Digital marketing is important because it enables you to target your exact audience online, drive more sales, increase traffic to your website, and boost your revenue year over year.

Today, 90% of users will switch to a competitor’s site after a poor website experience, making your online presence a critical factor in customer retention. If you aren’t actively engaging customers online, you risk losing them to businesses that are.

Of course, these are just a few of the reasons why digital marketing is important. If you’re looking for more info about the importance of digital marketing, you’ve come to the right place. Below, we’ll talk about eight reasons why Internet marketing is important to any business!

Why is digital marketing important?

The importance of digital marketing lies in its ability to reach target audiences, drive sales, and increase revenue. By using a variety of digital marketing strategies, businesses can harness digital marketing to engage, convert, and retain their target audience.

8 reasons why digital marketing is important

As you look for ways to market your business, you may hear some digital marketing myths, including the myth that digital marketing isn’t important. But if you hear that, don’t believe it. Digital marketing is a valuable asset to your business’s growth and helps you establish an authoritative online presence.

In fact, around half of all marketers say that search engine optimization (SEO), a particularly helpful digital marketing strategy, has a better return on investment (ROI) than any other marketing strategy. Additionally, methods like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising increase brand awareness by as much as 80%.

So, why exactly is digital marketing important? By investing in digital, you will help your business grow. You can find out more about that in this video:

In this post, we’ll cover eight reasons digital marketing is important to your business:

1. You reach people where they spend their time
2. Your competitors are already doing it
3. You can compete with larger corporations
4. You can target your ideal audience
5. You can choose from a variety of strategies
6. You can spread brand awareness
7. You can monitor and optimize your campaigns for better results
8. You get an impressive return on investment (ROI)

Keep reading to learn more about the importance of Internet marketing and why it’s time for your business to adopt an online marketing strategy!

1. You reach people where they spend their time

With the continuous growth of the Internet, more people than ever are spending time online. Over 6 billion people use the Internet across the globe. It’s become an integral part of everyday life to conduct searches, check social media, and purchase products online.

Your customers are online, which highlights the importance of digital marketing. They’re browsing the web looking for your products or services. If they can’t find them because you don’t have an online presence, you risk losing those leads to your competitors.

To drive the best results for your business, you need to build your online presence. You’ll then reach more leads that want your products or services. This is one of the main reasons why Internet marketing is important.

2. Your competitors are already doing it

Another reason why digital marketing is important is that your competitors are already using it. Many of your competitors have already taken advantage of all digital marketing has to offer.

They’ve created social profiles, adapted their website for SEO, and run paid advertisements to reach new leads.

In fact, 52% of online brand discovery now happens through social media, 65% of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) run PPC campaigns, and 90% of users will switch to a competitor’s site after having a poor website experience. When you put those numbers together, it’s easy to see how much ground you give up when you don’t invest in your online presence.

If you want your business to compete with those competitors, you have to do everything that they’re doing and more.

Your competitors are gaining traffic that could be yours because you’re not investing in digital marketing. Customers won’t know that your business is an option, so they’ll automatically choose a competitor. You need to invest in digital marketing to put your hat in the ring and get leads to consider your business as an option.

3. You can compete with larger corporations

Competition is the hardest part of running a business. When you’re in a market with bigger corporations like Walmart or Amazon, it’s hard to compete with them. Those companies are all well-established brands, which automatically leads people to trust them.

With digital marketing, though, you have a fighting chance against those bigger corporations. Your business can reach interested leads with the same methods as those larger companies do. Methods like SEO and PPC level the playing field.

With SEO, your site ranks in the search results based on relevancy. A corporation can’t buy their way to the top of the ranks. They have to optimize their pages just the same as a small mom-and-pop shop.

You can see that in action in the search results for informational queries. For example, in the search results for “best Christmas romance books,” a smaller bookseller called Pouring Over Books outranks well-known brands like Barnes & Noble and Penguin Random House. That happens because the page answers the searcher’s question well, not because the brand has the biggest name.

When you use PPC, Google ranks ads based on relevancy, too. Even if a corporation bids twice as much as you for the same keyword, it doesn’t guarantee them the top spot. They can’t buy a top-ranking ad spot because, again, the rank is based on the relevancy of your ad.

The sponsored results for a query like “best running shoes” show how this works in real time. Brands like On, New Balance, and HOKA can all appear alongside a major name like Nike in the paid results when their ads and landing pages match what searchers want to see.

This creates the opportunity for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to compete with bigger corporations. If you can create content that is more relevant to the selected keywords than your corporate competitors, no amount of money will enable them to outrank you.

In short, digital marketing is a great opportunity for your business to compete with bigger companies to obtain more relevant leads.

4. You can target your ideal audience

The ability to target your audience better is one of the most obvious reasons why digital marketing is important. Imagine being able to market directly to people who have an interest in your products or services.

With digital marketing, you have the capability to directly reach leads interested in your business.

You don’t have to hope that people will see your traditional marketing efforts and contact your business. With digital marketing, you can target your audience more precisely than you can with traditional methods. You can input important information about your audience and use that information to shape your digital marketing campaigns.

Let’s say your ideal customers are single men between 23 and 35 years old who make at least $35,000 a year. You’re trying to reach this type of ideal customer on social media to get them to follow your business.

If you wanted to precisely target those characteristics, you could easily set those parameters for your social media ad campaign. This would ensure that only the people specified would see your ad.

You can segment your audience, too. Let’s say you also wanted to target women with the same characteristics. You could segment these two groups and market to each of them separately to deliver a customized ad experience that’s relevant to them.

A platform like Meta Ads makes this even easier to visualize. In the image below, you can see ad delivery data in Meta Ads broken down by amount spent, impressions, and key demographics like age, gender, and location. That kind of report helps you understand who actually sees and engages with your ads so you can adjust your targeting and messaging over time.

Social media also gives you more chances to turn that targeting into revenue. In fact, 58% of U.S. shoppers have bought a product after seeing it promoted on a social media platform. When you reach the right people with the right message, you make it much easier for them to take the next step.

When you can better target people in your audience, you drive better results with your campaign. It’s critical for your business to recognize the importance of Internet marketing so you’ll reach more leads that are interested in your products or services.

5. You can choose from a variety of strategies

Another great thing about digital marketing is how many options it gives you. There are a lot of different ways to market to people online, each with its own advantages. You might focus on creating website content to rank in search results, or you might send out emails. You might even market to people on social media.

Some of the top digital marketing strategies you can use include:

• Search engine optimization (SEO): This involves optimizing your website and content to improve your visibility in search results, allowing you to reach people looking for your products or services.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: PPC advertising involves running paid ads in search results or on social media, where you only pay each time someone clicks, helping you drive quick, targeted traffic.
• AI search optimization: This strategy adapts your content and site to appear in AI-powered search experiences and answer engines, ensuring you stay visible as search evolves.
• Social media marketing: This marketing strategy involves building brand awareness and engagement with your audience on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok through organic posts and paid ads.
• Email marketing: These campaigns involve sending targeted emails to help you stay connected with subscribers and encourage repeat purchases through targeted messages.
• Content marketing: Content marketing focuses on creating helpful content, such as blog posts, videos, and guides, that answer your audience’s questions and move them closer to a purchase.

Of course, there’s no reason you should limit yourself to one strategy. You can use multiple strategies together to help you reach a wider audience and drive more conversions.

And if you need help with implementing multiple strategies for your business, you can contact a full-service digital marketing agency like WebFX to help! We offer a full suite of services that include all the strategies listed above.

6. You can spread brand awareness

Not all of your marketing will lead directly to a sale. But that’s okay. Digital marketing is also a great tool for spreading brand awareness — that is, helping a wider range of people become familiar with your business and what you sell.

The more people become aware of your business, the easier it will be to drive revenue. For example, let’s say you offer pest control services. Someone might see one of your online ads, but maybe they don’t need your services, so they don’t convert. However, now they’re aware of your brand.

Months later, that same individual finds themselves struggling with pests in their home. Suddenly, they remember your brand because of that ad they saw months ago, and they give you a call.

That’s one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing for businesses like yours, no matter your industry.

7. You can monitor and optimize your campaigns for better results

Another contributor to the importance of digital marketing is that you can easily track and monitor your campaigns.

When you invest time and money into your campaigns, you want to know that they’re working. Digital marketing makes it easy for you to track your campaigns, which allows you to adapt and drive better results.

When you use traditional methods, it’s challenging to know the results of your campaign. If you run a TV ad, you may have to ask every person that comes into the store about what brought them to your business. It would be a very time-consuming effort, and it could annoy your customers.

With digital marketing, though, you don’t need to worry about bothering your audience and every campaign you run becomes trackable.

Analytics platforms like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) show you exactly where your traffic comes from and which channels help you acquire the most customers. 

In GA4’s acquisition section, you can see how direct, organic search, and paid search traffic all stack up, which makes it much easier to decide where to focus your time and budget.

Tools like RevenueCloudFX take this a step further by pulling your marketing and sales data into one place. That way, you can:

• See which campaigns drive the most leads, calls, and revenue
• Track your cost per lead and cost per sale
• Understand which marketing touchpoints help close deals
• Identify campaigns that need attention right away

When you can track your campaign’s performance, it’s easier to fix issues, improve your results, and spend your budget wisely. You don’t get that kind of clarity with most traditional marketing methods.

8. You get an impressive return on investment (ROI)

If you really want to know the importance of digital media, look at the results it drives for businesses.

Online marketing strategies have an awesome ROI. When you invest in these methods, you’ll get more out of them. Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs out of all methods. For every $1 spent, you have the potential to earn up to $45 in return, with the average ROI being 36% across various industries!

This is a great opportunity for you to grow and earn a profit from your marketing efforts. So, why is there so much room for a great ROI with these methods? The answer is that it’s very cost-effective to use online marketing methods.

That leaves room for a great ROI, because you don’t have to spend much money to run a campaign. It doesn’t cost much to run a PPC campaign or social media ad campaign (at least, compared to some traditional methods). That allows your business to have an opportunity to grow.

Want to know more about the importance of digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a great opportunity for your business to grow and reach new heights. You’ll be able to run different digital marketing campaigns to drive valuable results for your business.

WebFX is one of the best digital marketing agencies in the USA, and we’re proud to provide our clients with top-of-the-line services. When you partner with us, you’ll maintain full control over your marketing campaigns, but we’ll handle all the work for you.

If you want to learn more about the importance of digital marketing, or if you’re interested in our digital marketing services, give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online or to speak with a strategist about why now is the right time to invest in digital marketing!