5 Industries Getting the Most ROI From Digital Marketing

Every company needs a digital plan, but some sectors are more suited than others for this type of marketing.

In our com­put­er-dri­ven and mobile world, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is how rela­tion­ships get built. Gone are the days of old-fash­ioned mar­ket­ing plans con­sist­ing sole­ly of in-per­son events and tra­di­tion­al media. Instead, out­reach through email and social net­works are now cru­cial to every company’s mar­ket­ing efforts. It’s a real adapt or die sit­u­a­tion, and so far, the over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of com­pa­nies have adapt­ed and shaped up for these new mar­ket­ing chan­nels. Accord­ing to a recent study by Smart Insights, 82 per­cent of busi­ness­es have a defined strat­e­gy for dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, either in their mar­ket­ing plan or in a sep­a­rate dig­i­tal plan.

As con­sumers, we’ve all been the tar­get of these dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts. Our inbox­es are filled dai­ly with emails from busi­ness­es, and our social media feeds are pep­pered with pho­tos and videos encour­ag­ing us to try the prod­ucts and ser­vices of com­pa­nies we either fol­low or are, accord­ing to the adver­tis­ing algo­rithms, com­pa­nies we’d prob­a­bly want to fol­low. Clear­ly, the mes­sage is out.

But in the midst of all this dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing bom­bard­ment, a big ques­tion looms — is it worth it? Are com­pa­nies get­ting a sol­id ROI, or return on invest­ment, on their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts? Are the fol­low­ers click­ing, are the cus­tomers buy­ing, and are their indi­vid­ual brands ris­ing in the glob­al mar­ket­place? The num­bers say yes as most com­pa­nies are see­ing at least $5 in rev­enue for every $1 spent on dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Clear­ly, though, the ROI on dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is more for some sec­tors than for oth­ers. Here are five indus­tries that are get­ting high ROI from their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts.

1. Law.
It may come as a bit of a sur­prise, but make no mis­take, the legal indus­try is killing it when it comes to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. While it may not be an entire­ly strate­gic move, accord­ing to Greentarget’s 2014 State of Dig­i­tal & Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Sur­vey, just one in four law firms had a spe­cif­ic con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. Where law firms are stand­ing out is in blogging.

Attor­neys are intel­li­gent indi­vid­u­als who spe­cial­ize in com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Specif­i­cal­ly, they’re good at explain­ing how the law works and how to finesse your way through an argu­ment. On their indi­vid­ual firms’ blogs, on LinkedIn, and on promi­nent web­sites like Medi­um and Huff­in­g­ton Post, these attor­neys are writ­ing help­ful blog posts on spe­cif­ic legal top­ics. Peo­ple find them and read them, and those firms gain clients as a result. It’s a strat­e­gy that pro­vides a robust ROI because, for these law firms, they’re not invest­ing too much finan­cial­ly, yet they’re get­ting a whole lot in return, as fur­ther explained in this Huff­in­g­ton Post article.

2. Health.
When you’ve got a ques­tion about your health, what’s the first thing you do? If you’re like more than three-quar­ters of inter­net users — 77 per­cent, accord­ing to the Pew Research Center’s Health Online 2013 study — you check online to find out more infor­ma­tion. While doc­tors are clear­ly still a sig­nif­i­cant part of the pic­ture, the plain truth is that they’re not the first place peo­ple go to access health infor­ma­tion. That’s why a good dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing approach for health­care orga­ni­za­tions and indi­vid­ual doc­tors is so cru­cial. A good web­site, a sol­id social media pres­ence, easy to read info­graph­ics and health infor­ma­tion that’s been opti­mized for search engines all make a good impres­sion and bring in patients.

3. Auto.
Mar­ket­ing has always been a huge part of the auto indus­try. Flashy tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials, slick mag­a­zine adver­tise­ments and news­pa­per ads promis­ing the best deals on the newest mod­els have been stan­dard for a long time. Late­ly, how­ev­er, dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing has become one of the auto industry’s most impor­tant chan­nels for reach­ing poten­tial cus­tomers. Accord­ing to eMar­keter, spend­ing on adver­tis­ing in tra­di­tion­al media by all major auto com­pa­nies is fol­low­ing a down­ward trend, while spend­ing on dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing is increas­ing every year. In fact, from 2014 to 2015, it rose almost 22 percent.

A pri­ma­ry rea­son for this growth is that dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing allows automak­ers to cus­tomize the mar­ket­ing expe­ri­ence for dif­fer­ent demo­graph­ics — thanks to per­son­al infor­ma­tion avail­able through social media, a baby boomer, for exam­ple, will be engaged with dif­fer­ent­ly than, say, a mil­len­ni­al. Rather than wait­ing for view­ers or read­ers to come to the adver­tis­ing, automak­ers are bring­ing the adver­tis­ing direct­ly to the customers.

4. Enter­tain­ment.
Social media has become the place for enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies to share all sorts of infor­ma­tion — pho­tos, trail­ers, behind the scenes looks, even live videos. More than that, though, it’s a place where these com­pa­nies plant ideas in fol­low­ers’ heads — go see this movie, don’t for­get to DVR this show, tell your friends about how much you loved this live experience.

With the per­son­al infor­ma­tion obtain­able on social media, cou­pled with in-depth ana­lyt­ics to pro­mote spe­cif­ic enter­tain­ment prod­ucts to cer­tain demo­graph­ics, the ROI for enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies’ dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing efforts is high­er than with tra­di­tion­al media, which was con­sid­er­ably less tar­get­ed. Accord­ing to a recent expla­na­tion on Track­Maven, this is all thanks to improved engage­ment with fans, bet­ter seg­men­ta­tion of the mar­ket and improved mar­ket­ing met­rics for retar­get­ing spe­cif­ic demographics.

5. Food.
Peo­ple have a real emo­tion­al con­nec­tion to the food they love, and they’re fierce­ly loy­al to favorite prod­ucts. Well aware of this, food com­pa­nies have respond­ed in force with image-laden social media cam­paigns con­tain­ing tons of sen­so­ry appeal and a high degree of direct cus­tomer engagement.

“The food indus­try is no longer depen­dent on bor­ing recipe cards, or words in a book,” said Mat Sil­ta­la, Pres­i­dent of Avalaunch Media. “Con­sumers now go online, they check out social feeds and watch amaz­ing videos that share in just a few sec­onds how to pre­pare almost any­thing you can imagine.”

These efforts allow users to be drawn in. They’re made to feel that the com­pa­nies actu­al­ly care about their eat­ing pref­er­ences, and the results are impres­sive. This 2014 case study from Dig­i­tal Train­ing Acad­e­my looks at five dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and shows how both traf­fic and sales got a boost from each one.

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