The ways businesses communicated with its customers have changed a lot over the time.The simple TV and Radio ads has been replaced by the social media advertisements. The letters has been transformed into emails and so on. It is not that the traditional marketing and communication methods have completely lost their value, but they gradually become less effective and are being replaced by the modern communication channels and marketing practices. By definition the digital marketing is a method or strategy to get in touch with your customers, prospects, and audience through internet and other digital mediums. There are several digital marketing channels however, usually it is referred to the communication done through online channels that are accessible from a computer or smartphone. With the rise of technology, specifically the internet, computers and the smartphones, the marketing have also adopted to the new norms. Now a days, a social media or search engine ad can produce better results than an ad published in a magazine or newspaper.
Why Digital Marketing Is Important in 2022?
The consumers of the internet and social media have rapidly increased in past decade, according to an article published in smartinsights.com the world population is 7.98 Billion out of that 5.49 Billion people owns mobile phones (unique mobile users) and almost 5 Billion people have internet access all around the world. Out of 5 Billion people with internet access 4.7 Billion are social media users. That figures are staggering, this means how popular social media and internet is, and how businesses can leverage it for their benefits. According to Statista research the number of active social media users in UAE is 10.6 Million, which is almost 99% of the population. Social media channels such as YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn and several others are very popular in UAE. The Google is the most popular search engine in the world and also in the UAE with 96% of UAE search market share. Along with that the other Google services and products are also very popular such as Google Chrome is said to be the most popular web browser in UAE with almost 66% or the market share.
These stats clearly shows how important social media and Google search engine is. If you are a business operating in Dubai or anywhere else in UAE then your customer must be using any of the above mentioned platform. Usually people tend to use multiple social media platforms. For example, I prefer searching the web via Google Search Engine. My top communication platform is WhatsApp for both private and business communication, it is quick, instant and everyone respond to your texts very quickly. I use YouTube on daily bases, I get in touch with my old friends via Facebook and Instagram and for official networking my preferred platform is LinkedIn. I am also an active user of twitter. With all that said, I would also like to mention that I am just like any other ordinary consumer in UAE. That means majority of an average consumer also follow the same pattern, they might be using a different platform but people tend to spend a lot of time on these channels and platforms. This is what makes digital marketing so important for the businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE in 2022 and this trend will continue to grow in coming years.
Here are some key advantages of the digital marketing that will help you understand the importance of the digital marketing for your business in 2022 and beyond.
Advantages of Digital Marketing: Communicate with People through their Preferred Channel
Here in Dubai and all around the UAE people use to spend a lot of time on the internet. According to several researches an average person living in anywhere in UAE spends almost 8.5 hours a day on the internet and out of that time 3.5 hours are purely on social media platforms. This means that your customers and prospects are online, and searching for products and services that you are offering via so many different online digital platforms. If you are not present on these platforms you will definitely lose all those prospects and customers who are more likely to find a competitor with a better online presence. In this modern age almost every customer expects from their favorite brand to be present at their preferred social media platform. Or at least have a website which can help them to acquire information or to get in touch with the business. It is not that businesses are very reluctant to utilize online channels, the problem is that most of the businesses despite having social media profiles and pages and a website still failed to produce the desired results. That is because of the lack of knowledge and strategy that is needed to establish a strong online presence. People tend to appreciate when you contact or communicate to them through their preferred communication channel.
Advantages of Digital Marketing: Very Cost-Effective and Offers Excellent ROI
One of the biggest advantage of the digital marketing is that it can cater to everyone. No matter if you are a startup a small local business or a large enterprise, the digital marketing can benefit all types and size of businesses. Especially here in Dubai and all around the UAE even the government departments, ministries, and official utilize social media to communicate with the population. You can easily start your digital marketing campaigns and start building an online presence with very little to no investments. These days, almost every business has a website, even if you don’t have a website, creating one is not as that expensive. Creating social media profiles and pages is absolutely free, there are a tons of digital marketing tools which are absolutely free. Businesses can utilize these free channels and tools to maximize their online presence. For the businesses who can invest more in the digital marketing such as paid advertisements and paid campaigns, they can even generate more value with these campaigns. The digital marketing campaigns always have better ROI, one of the best example of a digital marketing tool that offers excellent ROI is the email, against each dollar spend over emails, businesses can get up to $44 USD as return. The other digital marketing methods also offer excellent ROI comparing to traditional methods.
Advantages of Digital Marketing: Offers Great Agility and Speed
Another great advantage of digital marketing is that it is agile and offers quick communication with easy reach to everyone and anyone. For example, a simple post on Instagram or a tweet will be immediately available on your followers’ timelines. Comparing to a traditional communication channel like publishing something in the newspaper or magazine, publishing something over your corporate website or social media is much simpler, easy and take just a few clicks on the mouse. The email newsletter is also another great example, businesses can create a newsletter and send it to every customer and targeted audience within minutes. The digital marketing make your business agile and speed up the communication process. On top of that the businesses can have access to the digital marketing tools and platforms all the time, 24/7. So does the customers, which means businesses can communicate with its customers and audience anytime they want. There is no need to design an advert or create a flyer, then publish it and distribute it, which could take up to weeks at best. The customers can also visit your website, blog, social media profiles and pages any time they want to acquire information or to interact with your business.
Advantages of Digital Marketing: Offers Better Targeting
Better targeting always means better result in the marketing industry. Think you are selling a product that is only for females, let say a fancy scarf or something like that. What would be your first idea to market it? Let say if you want to run a commercial on TV channels, that would be expensive, if you will go with radio ads, that might not be effective at all. You left with very few options, such as lending bill boards, posting adverts in magazines, etc. or putting stalls and kiosks in public places and malls. What do you think how much it will cost you? I can’t come up with a figure, but I can tell, that will going to cost a fortune. Now think of running ads in YouTube, or at Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Google, now what do you think what this will cost you? It will cost you just a fraction of the traditional marketing campaign. No let us discuss another and most important factor, let say you go with a traditional marketing campaign, what do you think how many women you will be able to attract?
Let’s talk about the kiosk in a shopping mall, there could be thousands of people who will pass by, let say half of them would be female, then that means your 50% of the targeted audience is already not interested in buying your pink fancy scarf. But what if you somehow can have control over who will visit your kiosk or even the shopping mall? Let say your potential buyers are all female from the age ranging from 20 to 35, what if only that age group visits the mall then, you can have more potential buyers. With traditional marketing methods, this is farfetched, in fact impossible. However with the digital marketing you can easily reach out to your ideal audience. The social media platforms and other digital channels provide you facility to choose the demographics and location as you want. Let say if you want to run your adverts only in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, then you don’t have to bear the cost of running ads in other areas. That is how precise it is and that is how it can help you reduce the cost and maximize the outcome of your marketing campaign.
Advantages of Digital Marketing: Offers Campaign Monitoring and Analytics
One of the biggest advantage of the digital marketing campaign is that the digital marketing platforms and tools offers great analytical data and campaign monitoring tools. The campaign monitoring and analytics help businesses in tracking their campaigns and getting insight, which enables them to drive better strategies for future and keep improving their campaigns. For example, if you are advertising for a pink scarf, you must be uploading a video or an image or you might be publishing an ad in Google search with a link to your online store or webpage. The campaign monitor will let you know how many people clicked on it, when clicked on it and from where clicked on it. Furthermore the digital platform can also provide more user data such as their gender, age group, their social media likings, and a wealth of customer insight which is very helpful in improving your campaigns and maximizing the outcome. However, with a TV ad you will never know how many people have watched it, and who were they, or what were their persona, liking/disliking, etc.
Another big problem with the traditional marketing campaigns is that once you have launched a campaign you can’t changes to it until it is finished and you will have to incorporate the changes in the next campaign. However, with the digital marketing campaigns, you know everything, your customer persona, how many impressions, clicks, likes, shares, or follows you got and you can also related that data to your actual sales to quantify the results and to calculate the ROI. This will help you understand if the campaign is driving valuable results or not. When you can get this level of tracking and monitoring in real-time you can easily tweak your campaigns to improve the outcome. The ability to immediately track the performance of the campaign enables you to control the budget and keep the expense under control. The changes to the campaign can be done easily by just logging in to the administrative dashboards of the platform you can make changes instantly and deploy them without wasting time and money. This also help you reducing the cost, as the budget of the campaign is also in your hand, there is almost no minimum budget limit, you can easily check with a specific budget what you can get and plan the campaign to keep you expense under control too which is not possible with traditional marketing campaigns.
Advantages of Digital Marketing: Compete with Larger Competitors
Competing a larger competitor in traditional marketing is extremely hard, as larger competitors have more budget and resources to invest in the traditional marketing campaigns. However, with the digital marketing competing a larger competitor is not difficult. The online world is very different from the offline world. In online world it is relatively easier to build a good brand identity. Large businesses automatically gets more attention, however, with a smart campaign management strategy you can easily beat them in the digital marketing sphere. The digital platforms and channels doesn’t distinguishes between a smaller or larger business, hence you both have equal chance to reach out to the targeted audience. The search engine optimization or SEO and PPC/CPC are a great way to compete with larger competitors. The SEO will rank your website at top if you are producing better content, if your customers are happy with you and if your website if offering them more value than the others. Similarly the other advertisement campaigns also level the playing ground for everyone regardless of the brand name or business size. This provide a great competitive advantage which is not possible with traditional marketing methods.
Conclusion
The traditional marketing practices are losing their charm, now a days people used to spend more time on their computers, smartphones and tablets rather than watching TV or reading newspaper. The smartphones particularly have put everything at your hand. The news outlets offer smartphone apps, even the TV and radio channels, the magazines and other media channels are offering mobile apps and websites. Printing pamphlets and distributing brochures is a thing of past now. The social media is taking over. Here in UAE where the internet penetration have reached to 99% of the population, the digital media and digital marketing have become extremely important for businesses. Furthermore the digital marketing industry have already surpassed the traditional marketing. The digital marketing offer better targeting, it is extremely cost-efficient and it can produce remarkable ROI. This is what makes it more important than the traditional marketing campaigns.
RSI Concepts is a leading digital marketing agency in Dubai, UAE. If you want to learn more about the subject of if you want us to help you setup your marketing campaigns or to lift up you online brand image, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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