Digital Marketing – Why are you using it?

• 47% cite ‘building brand awareness’ as their biggest digital marketing challenge.
• 91% of charities are using social media to help them achieve their objectives
• Only 40% are using paid search engine marketing
• 75% of charities cite raising awareness of their cause as the top reason to use digital marketing
• 96% of European charities say they are not utilising digital marketing to its full potential

But why are you using it?

Don’t worry, it’s not a direct challenge, but more of an overview of your business. Do you, for example, think you’re using digital marketing to the best of its potential? Are you using the right types of marketing to better communicate the message of the business?

That question may seem irrelevant after reading that opening paragraph, but it’s a question that we at Distract ask ourselves; why would there be a need to use digital marketing for a specific business?

It needs to apply to the strong attributes of the business in question. Simply showing an ad with some copy as a YouTube ad-banner may make some engagement, but may not ultimately be relevant to the aims of the business.

47% in a study cited that ‘building brand awareness’ is their biggest challenge when using digital marketing. This comes back to the question of relevance; it needs to matter, and it needs to have meaning. But keep in mind; the figure of 47% only state that it’s a challenge, their success or failure is totally separate to this. 100% of the responses will have found a way to use digital marketing to their advantage.

The landscape for digital marketing is huge, and so there’s plenty of opportunities that could benefit your marketing campaign. Here are just a few examples of what digital marketing can entail:

• Video Ads
• Google Ads
• Press Releases
• Newsletters
• Social Media

Perhaps even just reading through those five, you may have the remnants of a plan forming of just how one of these examples could be used for your business; perhaps a newsletter to keep people informed of where your product is currently in stock at?

Also, once you do realise why you are using digital marketing, and how it could be used even more for your business, let it work for you.

There are social media management applications that can schedule Instagram posts, Tweets and Facebook posts so they can have the most engagement with little work from you, so you can focus on the other avenues of marketing. Even newsletters and press releases, everything can be released in a timely fashion so that they can appear on a potential customers’ feed at a time when they’re scrolling through most.

It’s been found from another study that 75% of charities cite raising awareness of their cause, as the top reason to use digital marketing, We’ve spoken before of Google Grants and of how charities are working with businesses such as ourselves to better increase engagement and awareness for them, but there are plenty of other examples as stated above that can be used in the campaign, or even as multiple projects.

There’s always opportunity somewhere, there simply needs to be research undertaken to see if certain aspects of digital marketing can fit your business.

So the question should really be: 

“Why aren’t you using digital marketing in other ways yet?”