Digital Marketing Services: A Cost of Doing Business or an Investment?

If it wants to grow, every business needs marketing. Whether you provide a product or service, the bottom line is to make money by giving customers what they want and need. Digital marketing is an important channel to reach that goal.

Many small to medium businesses (or SMBs) put off digital marketing because it’s an expense they believe they can’t justify. But here’s the thing: marketing isn’t an expense! It’s an investment in the company and your business’s future. Once you understand that distinction, you’ll appreciate the significant benefits an internet marketing company brings to the table. To learn more about making the most of your digital marketing investment, talk to Smart WSI Marketing today.

Great Digital Marketing Makes Your Business Money

From website design to social media and email campaigns, investing in online marketing tactics ensures:

• A strong online presence
• You attract a wider audience
• Win more customers

When you engage with the right digital marketing agency to handle your overall marketing strategy, internet marketing doesn’t cost you a thing in the long run because you see such a big return on your investment.

Even better, venturing into digital marketing doesn’t need to be expensive. If you’ve been hesitant to dive in, a good digital marketing agency can help you start small with proven low risk, high reward strategies like pay-per-click campaigns. Once you see the results, you can confidently invest in current must-haves in the internet marketing realm, including video and live streams, content marketing, and SEO.

What Will You Get in Return?

Increased conversion rates, often at more than 10% higher than traditional marketing approaches.

Improved brand credibility with your target audiences.

High-quality website traffic due to focused targeting.

Real-time data that confirms whether your marketing strategies are performing optimally.

Continuous business promotion so people can find you on their schedule.

Personalized content that targets customers at each stage of the sales funnel.

Increased brand awareness that organically leads to increased profits.

Measuring Your Investment

Just like investing in a gym membership can safeguard your lifelong health and a savings account can protect your financial future, digital marketing is an investment in your brand and your business’s long-term growth. But how do you measure your investment?

Every digital marketing campaign has the same underlying goal: to deliver a positive return on investment. Yet, while digital marketing’s endgame is increasing profits, not every campaign brings in dollars and cents. Some are intended to raise awareness of your brand. Others attract visitors to your website. While both help boost your bottom line in the long run, you can’t quantify their near-term results with monetary values.

It’s true PPC clicks give you the most meaningful data for measuring digital marketing success. Other “success metrics,” though, ensure you get a more complete picture of your campaign’s impact.

Here’s everything to look at for a more in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of your digital campaigns.

Pay-Per-Click Metrics You Need to Track

The massive amount of data you get from your PPC campaigns helps you determine how well they generate leads, boost traffic, enhance brand awareness, and increase conversions. These six PPC metrics are critical to digital marketing success:

• Clicks – the number of times users click a paid ad.
• Cost-per-click – The average amount you spend per click.
• Click-through rate – How often an ad’s clicked on after being seen.
• Impression share – How often an ad is displayed for a given keyword.
• Conversion rate – How frequently a click results in a sale.
• Cost per conversion – How much you pay to drive each paid conversion.

These six crucial PPC metrics give you a clear picture of a campaign’s performance and the information you need to make current and future campaigns better.

SEO Metrics: The Long Game

It’s important to build your brand, not just your business. Branding is creating a distinct feeling and experience for your customers that keeps them coming back time and again. Search engine optimization metrics are more difficult to measure than PPC ones, but they’re invaluable in letting you know if you’re communicating the right message to your audience.

When you track the right SEO metrics, you get the most accurate picture of a campaign’s performance. You can then use collected data to improve your online marketing strategies, boost rankings, and increase profits.

• Organic traffic. Traffic to your website comes from multiple sources like search engines, social networks, other websites, and direct searches. These unpaid results reveal your website’s visibility to people who search for specific keywords related to your niche and business. If your marketing campaigns are working, you should see these numbers go up.
• Keyword rankings. Optimizing your website to rank for target keywords is central to successful digital campaigns. Rankings for keywords frequently change, so it’s essential to monitor them to see how your overall search visibility is performing.
• Core Web Vitals. Google constantly shifts its focus when deciding how to reward websites based on user experience (UX), including how quickly your site loads. To avoid businesses focusing solely on loading speed, the search engine giant introduced three “Core Web Vitals” in 2020: first input delay, cumulative layout shift, and largest contentful paint. These more user-centric metrics give Google a more UX-based way of measuring page load time.

The Importance of Social Media Metrics

According to humourist and best-selling author William Bruce Cameron, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.”

Though social media metrics are considered “vanity metrics” that don’t correlate to ROI, they’re still vital to digital marketing success. They’re often described as the currency of social media, and here’s why: without followers, you have no audience! And without ongoing engagement from your audience, many social networks can begin to work against you, making it more difficult for your social content to potential customers.

Metrics like followers, shares, likes, and comments keep social media running and represent a crucial piece of performance data for any business: whether or not people care about what you’re saying. They signal your brand’s connecting with people one-on-one within a public forum—an opportunity only social media offers.

Invest with Us!

Investing in digital marketing brings substantial returns, including improved brand awareness and credibility, high-quality website traffic, and the real-time data you need to know your marketing strategies are performing the best they can.

Smart WSI Marketing is an Edmonton digital marketing agency that ardently believes every business idea has merit. As we see it, our job is to take your idea and help you realize its full potential by harnessing the power of digital technology. When you’re ready to make the investment in your company’s future, we’re here to ensure you achieve that return with a sound internet marketing strategy. To learn more about how we do it, contact us today. 

Lynne Motkoski, Digital Marketing Strategist

Specialty: Digital Marketing Strategies
Education: MA Communications & Technology, BComm [U Alberta]
Author: The Online Marketing Handbook for Busy Entrepreneurs (coming soon)

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Lynne is known for her strategic approach to marketing communications, technologies, and lead generation. She has a passion for education, keeping up with current marketing trends and practices, and helping clients keep ahead of their competition.

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