Four reasons why your brand should invest in digital marketing

The world of marketing has seen an ever increasing investment in digital over the last decade. 2020 made that especially necessary as it became increasingly difficult to reach consumers outside of their homes and marketers learned just how important it was to be able to make adjustments on a whim. In looking at the US digital ad spending forecast from eMarketer, the world of digital marketing is only going to continue to grow over the next five years.

So why is that? While traditional marketing is certainly not going anywhere, here are four key reasons why many brands are choosing to invest more heavily in digital.

You move quicker.

The days of having “set it and forget it” campaigns are long behind us. Brands need to continually optimize their campaigns to improve performance as there is a growing demand to show concrete return on investment. As a result, it is critical to be able to be agile, whether that means reallocating funds from low performing channels to top performing channels, conducting creative testing to understand which messages are enlisting the greatest impact, or making adjustments to audience targeting based on changing consumer trends and demands. Digital marketing enables that whereas more traditional channels that require upfront commitments and more static placements cannot. That doesn’t mean that traditional marketing does not offer value, but it does cause limitations in what enhancements are possible.

You are more efficient.

With budget decisions often made at the senior leadership level, there is a need to show the impact of your spend. . All marketing should level up to a true business goal, but should also be optimized heavily based on cost metrics rather than rate metrics. By optimizing toward cost metrics in digital, marketers are able to get more for less. Most traditional marketing is priced out on a flat cost fee structure whereas programmatic digital campaigns have dynamic cost metrics that can be lowered through machine learning, bid adjustments, data and inventory management, and more. Overall, there are a lot of levers that can be pulled to ultimately get brands closer to their ROI goals.

You gain more data-driven learnings.

To some, this benefit may be both a blessing and a curse. The abundance of data available from digital marketing campaigns that can often be initially daunting to weed out what’s important from what isn’t. However, once the “true signals” of what success looks like are determined, there is a lot of power that can be held from those data learnings. Brands will be able to understand more clearly who their strongest potential and current customers are, which channels are getting them closer to their goals, how they can adjust planning to build off of those data learnings and more. Overall, this data has the ability to inform on broader business decisions beyond just marketing objectives when applied strategically.

You evaluate success.

With digital marketing, teams can build a robust measurement framework and KPIs by which to measure success in terms of action and consumer response. Digital can take analysis beyond expected impressions based on traffic patterns and subscribers, and distill it down to what’s actually important to your brand. That means it should be easier to answer the question of “is it working” to those who are not involved in the day-to-day marketing function.

If you are interested in further exploring the world of digital marketing, reach out to our team at Coegi.

By: Elise Stieferman

Elise Stieferman is the director of client strategy and development at Coegi, an all-in-one premium marketing partner for media professionals seeking a streamlined way to leverage programmatic and social solutions. Coegi enables marketers to become digital heroes among co-workers and clients by empowering them with best-in-class strategies, technologies, and expertise through simplified partnerships. Elise holds an MBA and a master’s in communication and journalism from the University of Missouri.