The Power of Digital Marketing

Everyday I get to see how beneficial online advertising is for Hive Digital’s clients. I don’t mean beneficial in a vague, esoteric sense. I get to see exactly to the penny how Hive Digital’s advertising team has profited for its clients, and today was no exception.

One of our specialties is marketing for financial firms. One of our new financial clients, a provider of commercial lending, reported to us today that a they are closing a $500,000 deal that came to them from an Hive Digital paid search ad. The ad campaign responsible for the deal had a total click cost of a little under $700 during the month when the user (now our client’s customer) clicked on the ad.

Digital vs. Traditional Media

As much as this example shows our ability to properly run online ad campaigns, it shows the true power of digital marketing. Offline ad media like billboards and mailers, aside from distracting drivers and cluttering up mailboxes1, cannot compete with digital when it comes to targeting, ROI, and reach.

  • We can target digital advertisements only to people who have demonstrated a commercial intent for a specific product or service. On the other hand, traditional advertising strategies cast a wide net: anyone driving down a certain highway, anyone listening to a certain radio station, anyone reading a certain magazine. Why spread out your ad budget to reach all those people when you can focus it on your target audience?
  • In online advertising, everything can be measured. We have the ability to know exactly what the ROI is, which allows us to scale in a way that makes sense. Again, traditional advertising cannot do that. With print, radio, and TV ad campaigns, you pay for the placements and, hopefully, by the next quarter you see a bump in sales. There is no way to know exactly what the ROI is, and you have to have massive ad coverage (and a big budget) in order to see any bump. With digital, you can start small and scale confidently because you can easily assess ROI.
  • While we’re talking about scale, in the online world we can scale bigger and faster than traditional media, going from 100 to 100,000+ daily ad views at a moment’s notice.

Even though digital has grown massively over traditional ad media over the past 10 years, it doesn’t show signs of slowing down. This year 80% of companies will increase their budgets for digital advertising according to the most recent Mondo poll (link to article). Given the proven success of digital ad buys, perhaps the other 20% will come around soon.

 

Notes:

1 Aside from being an inefficient way to advertise, direct mail marketing (i.e. junk mail) is terrible for the environment.  Check out the EPA’s guide stop getting junk mail.

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