Often small business owners underestimate the power of using digital marketing for their business. They focus on traditional marketing like print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, and outdoor advertising like billboards. They may believe that customers would eventually find their way to them because they provide an excellent product or service. These tactics are great for the local level, but what about beyond that?
So, if you are not using digital marketing for your business, you are more than likely losing out on a significant market share of potential customers.
There are many benefits to implementing digital marketing for your small business, including giving you the ability to compete against multimillion-dollar enterprises successfully!
What is Digital Marketing?
"Digital marketing" refers to a company's marketing efforts conducted via electronic devices or the internet. Businesses utilize several digital tactics to engage with their clients in this form of marketing. Digital marketing, to put it simply, is marketing via the internet. The methods used in digital marketing include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing (SMM), Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing, and more.
Benefits of Digital Marketing:
Social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2021, 82% of the population in the United States had a social networking profile.
Search engines drive around 94% of all website traffic.
Before purchasing in a store, 82% of individuals use their phones to do an internet search.
If a brand's name shows more than once during a search, 50% of customers are more likely to choose it.
In 2020, over two billion people purchased goods or services online, and during the same year, e-retail sales surpassed 4.2 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide.
Note: More marketing channels are not necessarily better. You will be able to choose from various digital channels to build brand recognition and generate leads for your business. It is the best practice to tailor your digital marketing strategy to your current needs and goals.
Why Digital Marketing is Important for YOUR Small Business
1. Non-exclusivity
Small businesses can compete with global corporations due to the increase in accessibility created via cutting-edge digital marketing tech. Digital marketing can also help companies reach and engage with diverse clients on many different channels.
Ann Smarty, former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal, said this in her article for Digital Marketer:
“The great thing about digital marketing is that ingenuity and creativity can always win over big marketing budgets.”
According to Marketo Blog, sometimes being a small business investing in low-budget UGC with a laser-focused target market can do more for your campaigns than investing millions of dollars into video production.
For example, a small hardware store owner in Wales filmed a heartwarming Christmas ad gathering over 2 million views on YouTube. Many of the comments stated, “I want to buy from this small business after seeing this ad."
2. Higher ROI
Digital marketing does not demand enormous spending. Small businesses can identify online platforms that work for small budgets and generate more clients than word-of-mouth. As a result, digital marketing has become a beacon of hope for small firms.
3. Increases Conversion Rate
It is often difficult for small firms to attract and convert leads into consumers. To do so successfully, a small business must first understand its target customer needs to fulfill them.
Understanding the traffic that converts into subscribers, leads, and sales allows you to measure conversions. Digital tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush, and SurveyMonkey help you conduct consumer research so that you can learn about your potential customers.
Don't forget to utilize social media and your existing audience to learn about what they enjoy, what types of posts they interact with the most, and their other interests. Digital marketing converts better than conventional kinds of marketing. For that reason, small businesses should make an effort to develop a robust digital strategy aimed at increasing conversions.
4. Offers Focused Audience Targeting
One of the reasons digital marketing outperforms conventional marketing is that it can target a specific demographic. Interactions with the target audience are goal-oriented.
They aid in the achievement of pre-set objectives. E-mail marketing and search marketing enable you to target and speak directly to people that will actually be interested in your product or service.
Due to all the data-driven features, digital marketing is regarded as the most customized kind of marketing. To best take advantage of this technology, it's recommended to construct one or more consumer personas and conduct market research to ensure you are making educated decisions about who your customer actually is. This will enable you to build custom and highly targeted marketing campaigns for specific categories of consumers, ultimately converting them into purchasing and returning customers.
5. Increases Revenue
More conversions result from robust digital marketing approaches. Revenue rises as a result of increased conversion rates, in fact, companies that use social media create 78% more business than those that do not. Email marketing generates a lot of interest as well. A combination of content marketing and other marketing methods stimulates engagement and ranking on Google, leading to a better return on your business investment.
6. Increases Mobile Marketing
As more people use smartphones and tablets than ever before, mobile marketing has emerged as the most effective method of reaching your target audience. While digital marketing has grown in popularity, mobile marketing is preferred for professional marketers and developing businesses.
People take their cell phones with them everywhere they go, so when you design with mobile in mind, your company can reach them faster and easier. Location-based searches are becoming more popular as data accuracy becomes more dependable than ever before.
Currently, 46% of all Google searches are for local information, and 72% of local searches result in in-store visits within a 5-mile radius. When individuals are out and about, they use their mobile devices to search for local spots. As a result, marketing via mobile devices is the most effective approach to reach new customers and beat out the competition by ranking in the top 5 keywords for your local business services.
7. Improves Influencer Marketing
Social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram can affect the broader population. Influencers have emerged as a result of the incorporation of social media techniques. This specific breed of influencers has a remarkable capacity to sway public opinion. The beauty of influential marketing is that even regular people with no special qualifications may become influencers and generate interest for millions of people.
Micro-influencers allow businesses to no longer need to rely on celebrity endorsements to increase product or service sales. This lowers cost and allows for local businesses to tap into the power of regional micro-influencers to promote on behalf of their business.
8. Increases Brand Reputation
Every business begins with the intention of acquiring more clients. The same is true for digital marketing. You might start by aiming to get as many clicks as possible to your websites and marketing platforms. Gradually, more people begin to identify your brand, and when you provide them with precisely what they are looking for, your brand's reputation grows.
Clicks, also known as Total Clicks or Click-Through Rate, are the first step in achieving a conversion. As a result, understanding the value of this statistic is critical in PPC campaigns since it, together with other KPIs (key performance indicators), helps determine if campaigns are effective soon after they begin.
Conversion rates are crucial for many marketers and entrepreneurs to track regularly since they directly influence their company's total sales and income.
9. Influences Buyers
Digital marketing is a collection of digital tactics that influence the decisions of potential consumers: Call-to-Actions, or CTAs, direct users to the next step. By providing clear instructions and appropriate CTAs, you can improve your conversion rate exponentially.
A call to action is a critical component of a webpage, serving as a guidepost instructing the user on what to do next. Without a clear CTA, the user may be unsure of the next steps to take to purchase a product or sign up for a subscription, and they are more likely to abandon the site without completing their goal.
There are thousands of ways to write a call-to-action. But amongst them all, personalized CTAs convert 202% better than default versions. CTAs like these may customize to the visitor in various ways, including their location, browser language, if they are currently a customer or a lead, and much more.
10. Gives Measurable Results
In digital marketing, you can measure outcomes for each platform by using specific digital tools. This will allow you to assess results before going all-in and increasing your investment.
Digital tools allow businesses to conduct faster and more efficient operations that would otherwise take forever to complete without them. Examples include SEMrush, Geckoboard, Raventools, Cyfe, and Finteza.
With seemingly limitless possibilities, digital marketing might be scary if you've never used it before. Several platforms and digital marketing jargon might make it appear to be a more significant effort than it is. The industry is competitive, and while word of mouth and client referrals can help drive traffic, people will struggle to locate your business unless you appear in locations where they spend the most time.
Now more than 4.72 billion people utilize the internet for their everyday. According to the Digital 2021: Worldwide Overview Report, this equates to 60% global internet penetration. So if a potential consumer can't locate you online, they may assume that your company isn't real, is no longer in business, and will move on to another business.
Don’t know where to start with small business digital marketing?
At 6° Media, we offer tailored and comprehensive digital marketing solutions for any business size.
But, just between us, small businesses are our favorite! ;)
Talk with someone on our experienced team to find the right fit for you! We specialize in bringing personality into a field that can be weighed down by technical clickbait. Here at 6° Media, we don't just make sales, we make lifelong connections.
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