In recent years, the internet has become an essential tool for business—not only for shopping but also for interacting with customers and maintaining relationships. Having a website is no longer sufficient; you need to digitally engage with your audience and encourage them to engage with you.
And what is a digital engagement if not marketing to some degree? It’s utilizing various social media platforms to connect with your audience, engage with them, and grow your business. While SEO (search engine optimization) and social media are crucial to grow your business, you also need to consider how to market your financial services business online.
The Importance Of Digital Marketing
Let’s be honest, no one wants to spend their time doing marketing, interacting with customers, and handling sales. You’re much more likely to enjoy doing what you do and be successful at it. But without marketing, you won’t get very far.
According to HubSpot Blogs, “Marketing is the process of communicating with consumers about your product or service in order to drive action.” Essentially, marketing is what gets you customer loyalty and ultimately, leads to recurring business.
So it follows that if you’re serious about growing your business, you should consider investing in digital marketing.
The Evolution Of Digital Marketing
Traditional marketing with newspaper ads, radio commercials, and billboards has been around for quite some time. With the evolution of digital marketing, you can find almost any type of marketing content you could want or need online. And what’s more is that you can do all of this from the convenience of your laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
Additionally, with digital marketing, you can test and measure the results of your marketing efforts with greater precision. How? Interactive marketing lets you track the progress of a specific campaign or ad in real-time, through clicks, site traffic, and other metrics. This level of precision is invaluable and, in many cases, makes or breaks a business’ ability to thrive in today’s digital world.
Learn The Basics Of Marketing
If you’re new to marketing or feel like you need a refresher, consider watching or reading one of these recommended introductory guides to marketing:
- How to Market a Financial Services Business
- Marketing Essie Au Natural Businesses
- Starting a Business in Direct Sales
- How to Market a Spa Business
- Marketing to Latinos
- Marketing to Baby Boomers
- Marketing to African Americans
- Marketing to Chinese Consumers
- How to Market an Entertainment Business
The Many Forms Of Digital Marketing
There are numerous ways to engage with customers online, and you need to consider which one is the most effective and relevant for your business. Below we outline a few of the more popular forms of digital marketing so you can get an idea of what is out there and which would be the best fit for your business.
Advertising
Advertising is the practice of paying to have your product or service advertised to the public. In some cases, you might want to advertise online and earn revenue from advertisers. You can use platforms like Google AdWords to find advertisers who are seeking to reach consumers who are interested in your product or service. You should consider Google AdWords when you are looking for potential advertisers because it is the biggest and arguably the most popular among its competitors.
There are also several specialized platforms designed for advertisers, such as HubSpot Marketing, which can help you design, run, and analyze Google AdWords and other paid advertising campaigns. Once you’re set up, you can simply check your ads’ performance from month to month, alerting you to any changes or improvements you need to make. If you run an eCommerce store, you can integrate Google AdWords into your shopping cart to earn revenue when a customer makes a purchase. The advantage of this strategy is that you can target your audience based on a number of criteria, including geographical location, device, and even the language they are searching in. This form of marketing is quite flexible and, depending on your product or service, might be the best choice for you.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is more focused on creating and distributing content, typically articles or blogs, that are both useful and relevant to your target audience. This type of marketing often relies on a combination of inbound and outbound strategies – attracting and engaging with prospective customers via online content, as well as proving to current customers that you are trustworthy and a source of valuable information.
The advantage of content marketing is that you are not required to have a large advertising budget to engage with potential and existing customers; however, you still need a way to measure the success of your efforts. To do this, you can look to metrics like article views, link clicks, social media engagement, and customer engagement via email.
Brand Development
Brand development is the process of creating and strengthening a brand’s identity or image in the minds of customers, partners, and other stakeholders. It usually entails creating a brand strategy, which sets the brand’s purpose and direction, along with a comprehensive brand identity, which details how the brand will present itself across all marketing channels.
The advantage of brand development is that it is an activity that can be measured and improved upon. You can integrate customer feedback into your brand experience and strengthen your identity through frequent brand audits, where you assess the performance of your entire brand across all channels.
Sales
Sales is the practice of getting someone to agree to buy your product or service. In digital marketing, you can use a platform like Shopify to build your eCommerce store and take advantage of all that the platform has to offer, including online sales.
However, if you’re looking for more of a traditional approach to sales, you can find several standalone applications that you can use to find customers and generate sales leads. For example, LeadSquid is a tool that can help you capture and convert the contact details of potential customers into leads.
Once you have leads, you can use various tools like HubSpot Marketing to connect with and engage with prospects, as well as track the progress of a particular campaign or ad in real-time, through clicks, site traffic, and other metrics. This level of precision is invaluable and, in many cases, makes or breaks a business’ ability to thrive in today’s digital world.
At this point, you might be wondering which form of digital marketing is the right fit for your business. Well, that depends on you and what you want to achieve. If you’re looking for flexibility, you might want to consider content marketing. If you’re looking for a more traditional approach, you might want to look into sales or advertising. And if you’re looking for a combination of the two, you might want to consider adopting a hybrid strategy.