Digital Marketing is more than “likes” and “followers”
Digital marketing involves actually advertising for a product or service through channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. It covers a wide range of marketing activities. The importance of digital marketing depends on several factors:
- Reach: Social media marketing and advertising are important channels.
- Uniform Online Platform: Small and medium enterprises get the chance to compete and outdo big business houses and attract their customers / online traffic and increase their sales. There is no requirement of physical stores even for global customers.
- Interaction with targeted audiences: Digital Marketing has better ability to interact with targeted audiences due to the internet marketing tools. This leads to engagement with customers, providing an insight of customer’s choices and subsequent conversion.
- Hyper-Personalized: Targeting can be brought down to almost to the individual level. This is called personalization.
- Advanced Analytics: With digital marketing, one can understand whether users have actually seen it, interacted with it, liked it, shared it with a friend or bought it.
- Digital Marketing Provides better Return On Investments (ROI): Digital Marketing is easy to track and monitor, and information is received as soon as targeted audiences provide contact information, subscribe to a newsletter or make a purchase.
However, mere likes on a Facebook page or sharing it online may be misleading. There can be several reasons behind this conclusion:
Content and social experts have invested a lot of money into Facebook but without results. Data has revealed that Facebook marketing is at the bottom when it comes to business value. Facebook fan page or business page has a low impact than ever before. So, it is not advisable not to use a Facebook fan page as the primary audience. The reasons can be summarized as:
- Users who like the page may never engage with the content.
- Facebook likes are not linked to more business
- Vanity metrics are defined as registered users, downloads, and raw page views.
- Vanity metrics are all those data points that may make the advertiser feel good if they go up, but don’t help in making decisions. They can be easily manipulated and do not necessarily correlate to certain things that may be of more value like active users, engagement, cost of getting new customers, and revenues and profits. These are called actionable metrics.
But it does not imply that there should not be any Facebook page at all, because that may lead to deletion of a database of visitors and reduce the organization’s digital presence. There should be other strategies like app downloads in smart phones, which may increase business prospects. Again the money/resource spent on developing a Facebook page may be a wastage, which can be used for several other projects like developing the product or service itself.