“It is not about the destination that you reach, it is about how you reach the destination.” This is the life mantra of Mr. Rakesh R, Business Head, and Director, Deepsense. His present scope of work includes managing finances and overlooking operations and business development of his firm. Through his consistent and focused efforts, Mr. Rakesh seeks to leverage his knowledge in the fields of sales and management to lead his company to become a pioneer in the field of digital solutions.
The pandemic outbreak forced people to turn down all their social activities and stay cooped up within the four walls of their homes as much as possible. This change, particularly, drove the end-users to opt for different buying behaviours. Thus, they started taking the digital route, be it for ordering food, apparel, or other essential products and services. Consequently, with the everchanging times, even the businesses had to shift their approach of targeting customers. They cut-down traditional marketing strategies, such as television, newspapers, billboards, and embraced the digital space which is far more favoured than the earlier strategies.
Why are brands allocating more budget for digital marketing?
The rise of technology and internet penetration amid Covid-19 brought a whole new market. Digital marketing became the norm of doing business in a new way. It brought a lot of opportunities for the brands as it led to exposure and an authoritative online presence, thereby driving more sales. Here are a few reasons why organizations, regardless of their size, are spending less and less on their offline activities, and more on digital marketing for advertising and promoting their goods and services.
Consumers are online: According to Statista, as of January 2021, there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide, with 749 million in India alone. This figure is poised to grow to over 1.5 billion in India by 2040, indicating a big market potential in internet services. Certainly, owing to the surge on the internet, especially amid the outbreak of the pandemic, people are spending their maximum time online for everything, right from social interactions, office work, accessing entertainment, to purchasing groceries. Hence, the brands understand that there are more people to reach out to if they adopt digital marketing. At the end of the day, businesses need exposure if they wish to attract and retain customers, and in today’s day and age, online seems to be the only viable go-to solution for all. It seems less likely that the brand will lose customers if they have an online presence.
Easy to adapt, faster, and cost-effective: Undoubtedly, initial investments are usually required for a brand’s advertising and promotional activities. Currently, when customers are online, spending money to do it traditionally is not enough. Moreover, if the business has limited resources, printing flyers and seeking other advertising options are expensive as well as time-consuming. However, digital marketing is one of the most cost-effective solutions than any other strategy of traditional marketing. Its process can start immediately. The companies only need to analyze what kind of digital marketing they require for their types of business, such as SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media, and e-mail marketing. Hence, the significance of it, especially for small to mid-size businesses, turns out to be exceptionally clear as brands have realized that it aids to scale and adapt as their businesses grow in the future. For instance, firms can easily pick their day-to-day budget for social media campaigns, display ads, and much more. The companies precisely know exactly how much that campaign is costing them. The brands don’t even require renegotiating an ad spot to keep the advertisement going or stop in case something goes wrong. The ad can continue uninterruptedly till the time brands don’t wish to stop, pause, or relaunch it anytime.
Monitor campaigns and optimize better results: When brands invest time and money into their advertising and promotion, they wish to know whether they are working. When using traditional strategies, it becomes quite an arduous task to know the results of the campaign. For instance, if the brands run a TV ad or opt for billboards, they may need to ask every individual who visits the outlet about what brought them there to measure the ROI. This would be a very time-consuming effort that could pester people. Digital marketing will allow firms to easily track and monitor their advertising campaigns, thereby allowing them to adapt and drive better results. The brands can easily track their campaign’s ROI as well as other indicators to check whether it is driving significant outcomes for the business. They can see metrics such as views, clicks, likes, comments, shares, conversions, and more. The type of metrics will rely on the medium and what the firms want to measure. They can even set up their tracking system to monitor specific metrics for their campaigns. They can easily monitor if campaigns are run successfully or if any further assistance is required. If yes, the brands have the power to make prompt improvements and execute them anytime during the campaign, thereby saving a lot of money. It simply allows the firms to plan their financials even more wisely.
The bottom line
Evidently, during such unprecedented times, digital marketing is critical for businesses to survive as well as thrive. The brands need to expose themselves to a large audience if they wish to grow their business further and reach new heights. Digital marketing is a great opportunity that has a lot of potential to drive valuable results for businesses. Hence, not surprisingly, various brands are allocating more budget for it.