Traditional marketing of a product or service involved doing expensive, often time-consuming research to find out your target audience. It also required you to predict upcoming market trends and was reactive to changes in the marketing environment. Digital marketing takes away some of the guesswork and makes market research faster and more cost effective. It also has one other key differentiating factor, while traditional marketing is reactive, digital marketing allows you to be proactive. The ability to get immediate feedback from your target audience and to affordably make changes to your marketing strategy at the click of a mouse means digital marketing teams have to stay on top of what their target audience expects. Doing this can be challenging but the rewards include a greater reach for your product or service, increased sales and greater market share.

To ensure your audience remains connected, you need to proactively anticipate what they want to see from you. This doesn’t mean your marketing strategy should focus exclusively on what will entertain your audience but it means you need to create content that captures your audiences’ attention while meeting your sales and marketing goals.

A great way to do this involves staying on top of what’s trending locally and internationally. Whether it’s reversing cars or Game of Thrones, finding what your audience is organically interested in and harnessing this interest for your business’ goals in a timely manner is a major advantage that digital marketing has over traditional marketing channels. Not only does this help your brand remain relevant but as digital marketing can be more affordable than traditional marketing, making changes to these ad campaigns are often very cost effective.

The ability to address issues in real time is a major boon to marketing strategies but can sometimes lead to businesses providing potentially controversial opinions on topics without considering the effects of taking a position on these issues without running it by all the relevant teams can have on the overall bottom line. It’s often easy to work with the assumption that because it’s easy to put content out digitally, it’s easy to take it back but once something goes out online it is there forever, so any views shared can be used to define the business. Not only that but as the goals of the company changes and the views of society changes, some comments may not age well and can often come back to haunt the company’s image. As damage control is expensive and not always 100% effective, it’s better to stay away from controversial issues unless they are relevant to your business’ field of interest.

Digital marketing has been a game changer for how we interact with consumers and greatly allows us to make changes both in what we sell and how we market it based upon their immediate feedback. It lets us know what we’re doing right and what we’ve done wrong and gives us opportunities to make real-time fixes. How has digital marketing changed how you and your business operates? Let us know on the comments.