Top 20 Advantages and Disadvantages of Digital Marketing

We are aware that marketing is what fuels a business. Before we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of digital marketing, let’s revisit the basics briefly.

What is digital marketing exactly?

Digital marketing refers to the marketing of goods and services digitally, using the internet or other digital means. It helps not just online businesses but brick-and-mortar ones too. These can be accessed by various types of electronic media, and the new techniques are way more efficient today. Many experts feel that soon, conventional marketing will be replaced completely, though there are limitations of digital marketing.

If we were to take a quick look at the history of digital marketing, it was in the ‘90s that the term digital marketing was first heard. From the first clickable banner in 1993, there was steady progress, with the launch of search engines in the late ‘90s, and social media platforms emerging in the early 2000s.

Once YouTube made its entry, there was no looking back for digital marketing. Businesses started leveraging the potential of social media to advertise their products and services, and have been increasing their budgets steadily.

Digital marketing includes several activities that drive traffic to your website organically and inorganically (paid) like:

• SEO: Optimising your content for search engines with keywords, link building etc. to be found in the top search results
• SEM: Search engine advertisements displayed on the top of search results which encourage visitors to click.
• Email Marketing: Sending promotional and informative emails to potential and current customers to engage and sell.
• SMM: This includes social media management and marketing; one strategy focuses on building the brand by providing value to customers, engaging with them, addressing their pain points, and responding to their feedback, whereas the other strategy is advertising on those platforms.
• Content Marketing: Includes blogs, infographics, videos, etc. which deliver information to the target consumers and is an indirect and soft marketing method. 
• Paid Methods: These include Performance Marketing (PPC) or pay-per-click ads, banners on other sites which users can click to reach the business site, carousel ads, and more.

WAC is a leading digital marketing company with the expertise to help your business engage with your target audience and run successful digital marketing campaigns that help you boost conversions and revenues.

Digital marketing has gained prominence today thanks to the massive proliferation of personal digital devices like desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Over 5 billion people – 65% of the world’s population –  spend close to 7 hours a day online. It is expected that by 2025, there will be 6.5 billion internet users globally. That should tell you how important it is to tap into this market; can you imagine the impact of digital marketing when so many people are online for such long periods?

Traditional marketing methods like running ads in print media and television, billboards or hoardings on roads, flyers, etc. have severe limitations when it comes to reach. Not to mention that print media ads are on their way out almost, as readership is swiftly dwindling.

One of the biggest digital marketing advantages is that it helps you reach millions of people all over the world; this is especially important in a world that’s increasingly becoming more digital by the day.

Let’s now take an in-depth look at this subject; let’s check what are the advantages of digital marketing:

1. Improves Brand Loyalty

Businesses can leverage digital marketing to attract customers, forge a stable, long-term relationship, and retain them, thereby building brand loyalty – one of the best uses of digital marketing. 

Your recurring customers are your brand ambassadors, and they also help you to bring more customers. Nurturing and maintaining relationships with customers is achieved by providing them value, solving their pain points swiftly, and delivering exemplary customer service. Digital marketing methods help you do all of this.

WAC has successfully helped 450+ businesses enhance their brand value in the past 11+ years.

2. Get Instant Feedback

Customers are able to give you instant feedback on your products and services; this motivates you to do better and helps you to improve.

Customers can leave feedback on your website through chat, forms, or email, and on your social media pages as well, without having to wait for anyone to answer the phone. This is a major benefit of digital marketing for businesses as it allows them to make changes and improvements swiftly before the problem becomes unmanageable.

3. Measure and Track Results

Thanks to analytics, you can actually measure your results and track the performance of your campaigns. This allows you to make the necessary changes to your strategies to get better results. This feature is one of the biggest benefits of digital marketing.

4. Increase Engagement with Consumers

Digital marketing channels allow businesses and consumers to interact with each other and engage in meaningful conversations about the company’s products, services, and values. It makes the customer feel valued and helps build trust, and eventually turns them into a loyal customer.

5. Improved Market Analysis

Information from digital media helps businesses to study the market, the competition, customer behaviour, trends, and so on. This facilitates strategy formulation and helps in promoting your products and your brand effectively.

WAC has experienced BI analysts who study volumes of data to make accurate forecasts and formulate effective marketing strategies.

6. Improved ROI

One of the biggest advantages of internet marketing is the higher return on investment that it offers.

Digital marketing can help you accurately target your audience by using data from your social media pages and website to pick out those who are most likely to purchase your products. This helps you focus your marketing efforts on them and boost conversions. It is also more convenient for customers as they can shop wherever they are – no commutes or phone calls are needed.

7. Global Reach

Digital marketing allows you to target your audience regardless of where they are in the world. You are not restricted by geographical boundaries – the world is literally at your fingertips. It also helps make  brands and businesses more accessible to consumers. At the same time, it also allows you to improve your local reach with local SEO techniques.

Talk to our local SEO expert at WAC to know how you can do this!

8. Unintrusive and User Engaging Content

With digital marketing, you can create content that effectively engages users – your target audience – without being intrusive. Nobody goes knocking on anyone’s doorstep to sell products or distribute pamphlets; there’s no hard sell.

Digital marketing is inbound marketing, which means there is less focus on selling, and more on delivering value and engaging the user. For example, making and posting videos demonstrating how to assemble, properly use, or clean a particular appliance or equipment, is helpful for users. Consumers will trust brands that help them without pushing sales.

Similarly, contests conducted online engage customers and encourage participation. We can say that one of the best advantages of online advertising is its unintrusive nature.

9. Can Test Different Strategies

One of the chief benefits of online marketing is that you can have a trial-and-error implementation of various strategies. You can experiment with different methods till you discover the optimal ones that produce the best results.

Digital marketing strategies can be changed quickly and without much expense, unlike traditional marketing methods. For example, it costs a business a substantial amount to make a TV ad and run it; to change it because it’s ineffective would mean incurring huge expenses. However, a carousel ad or online banner can be easily changed if it’s not producing the desired results.

10. Personalised Messaging

Being able to personalise the marketing message is one of the top advantages of online marketing. By analysing data and past behaviours and preferences of customers, businesses can personalise their offerings and messaging to customers. Once you store customer data, you will be able to target them with products and services they like when they visit you next.

Personalised marketing is more effective than generic as it makes the customer feel important, valued, and pampered. It conveys to them that the company considers them important and invests time to remember their preferences.

Let us now discuss the digital marketing disadvantages:

1. High Competition

Competition is very intense in the digital marketing sphere as it is in everything today. You have to put in serious effort to ensure that your digital campaigns are successful and bearing results.

Without the expertise of a digital marketing company like WAC, you may find it difficult to stand out in the crowd.

2. Negative Feedback

Though by itself it’s not necessarily a disadvantage, some customers can be very rude and leave nasty comments. Such feedback can impact other customers’ decisions and damage your reputation; you will have to deal with it carefully.

3. Tech-Dependent

It goes without saying that digital marketing is dependent on technology. There are many different tools that need to be used and this is one of the disadvantages of online marketing. Software can develop chinks, and there can be problems with connectivity, which can lead to broken links and pages that don’t load, which may cause customers to go to another site.

4. Maintenance Cost Can Go High

You may need to invest in many different software tools, or train your staff and ensure they are competent to handle them as well as run the campaigns. This can push up your expenses by a significant amount.

5. Rapid Changes

Search engine algorithms, consumer preferences, regulations, and industry best practices, all are prone to rapid changes. This can create chaos and lead to a lot of re-work frequently. It can be difficult to stay abreast of these changes and adapt in time.

WAC is a digital marketing agency based in India that can assign a dedicated team to handle all of this for you so that you can focus on your core business.

6. Vulnerable to Malicious Activities

Just as you work to build and grow your brand, there could be malicious entities who work to bring down your reputation. Many businesses have been found to indulge in harmful activities like writing false negative reviews to damage their competitors.

7. Short Attention Span

People today have extremely short attention spans; you have a very small window of time to catch the eye of your target audience, and to keep their attention focused on your content. This can happen only if your content is highly value-adding and engaging.

8. Danger of Strategy Theft

Your competition is sure to be watching what you do; they will analyse your strategy and thanks to the tracking tools, they will also get a fair idea of what strategies worked and what didn’t. The possibility of others employing the same strategies as you is quite high, and there’s actually nothing you can do about it.

9. Understanding What Works Can Take Time

It is common for businesses to try out various strategies in an effort to understand what will work. But to do that, you need to go by a trial-and-error method, or elimination, and that can take weeks or even months, depending on circumstances. This can be a stumbling block to success, and is one of the unfortunate disadvantages of internet marketing that you need to be prepared for.

However, by outsourcing your digital marketing activity to experts like WAC, you can reduce this time. Years of experience in the field allow us to quickly grasp what works.

10. Security and Privacy Concerns

As with everything that goes through the internet, digital marketing is also susceptible to security and privacy threats.

Today’s business strategy collects  a great deal of information from customers, and they analyse it to study patterns and customer behaviour in order to craft more effective marketing strategies, to personalise messages, and to deliver outstanding customer service so that they can increase conversions and profitability. But the incidence of cyber-attacks is increasing, and malicious entities are increasing their scale of attacks to steal sensitive information.

We have seen what are the advantages and disadvantages of online marketing in some detail, and we know now that in spite of the drawbacks, it delivers immense benefits to businesses. The biggest digital marketing benefits in my opinion, are undoubtedly, the ability to reach millions in seconds or minutes, irrespective of their location, and the ability to actually measure results and check how good your work has been. It allows for course correction and damage control without incurring too much expense or delays.

WAC is a leading IT services provider and digital transformation company that has provided consistent results to its clients for the past 12 years. We have served hundreds of companies, helping them run successful digital marketing campaigns that boosted their conversions, helped them serve customers better, and increased their profitability. We are not constrained by geographical boundaries and serve clients all across the globe.

Are you ready to craft your success story? Allow WAC to be your partner on this journey, and we ensure you a seamless, hassle-free, and efficient digital transformation.