Why Digital Marketing Is Important for Small Business
Customers have become overly reliant on the internet when making purchase decisions.
Statistics show:
- 82% of people use mobile devices to do online searches before purchasing an item from a store
- 50% of consumers are more likely to buy from a particular brand if it appears more than once during a search
As such, small businesses can no longer rely on traditional forms of advertising; they must leverage digital marketing techniques to reach their target audience and make actual sales. We explain what digital marketing for a small business entails and its benefits.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the use of digital channels like email, social media, search engines, and others to connect with prospective customers. It can be done online or offline. Online digital marketing has to do with channels like content marketing, search engine optimization, and social media marketing, to mention a few.
On the other hand, offline marketing is a form of electronic device marketing. It could be phone marketing, e.g., sending push notifications, radio and television marketing, billboards, and QR codes.
In fact, a well-rounded digital marketing strategy leverages both online and offline marketing channels. Digital marketing is often used interchangeably with inbound marketing, but the two are different. The latter is a strategy that uses digital marketing techniques like
search engine optimization and blogging to address a company's long-term goals, like lead generation and increase conversion. It follows precise steps and practices.
By contrast, digital marketing is a more holistic strategy focusing on solving a company's short-term goals, like growing a brand's awareness, increasing a site's traffic, and boosting organic searches. This discussion will focus on online marketing strategies a small business can leverage.
10 Benefits of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has become an invaluable tool for small businesses because it helps them communicate better with their customers and deliver value. Here are other reasons a small business must integrate digital marketing into its operations:
#1 Customers Are Online
It's a no-brainer; customers spend absurd amounts of time online. Research shows a typical global internet user spends seven hours daily on the internet across all devices. This means digital marketing is the fastest way for small businesses to interact with potential customers where they are—online. They may be on social media sites and search engines waiting to discover a new product or service.
#2 Digital Marketing Is Cost-effective
Most small businesses operate on tight budgets, and finding ways to cut costs while realizing great value is critical. Digital marketing is one way of reducing costs as it doesn't require much monetary input.
Marketing strategies like SEO, blogging, or social media marketing reach as many people as possible with little budgetary allocation. Moreover, the business realizes a higher ROI than it would if it used traditional forms of advertising.
The cost of setting up a billboard, for example, is fixed regardless of the number of people you reach or conversions made. Digital marketing gives you some control because you can choose the most effective strategy based on your budget.
#3 Ease of Finding a Business
Customers rely on search engines to find businesses. Studies show 93% of consumers search Google Maps to find local businesses. An excellent digital marketing strategy that includes listing your business on Google's listing is critical. It increases your chances of being found when customers look for products or services near them.
#4 Easy To Change and Adapt
Developing a marketing strategy takes time because you must follow the process until completion. Sometimes the strategy doesn't yield the desired results and may compel you to change or adjust a few metrics to achieve your objectives.
Digital marketing makes it easy to adjust the strategy without starting the whole process again. Metrics like conversion statistics, bounce rate, demographic information, and more provide insights that can help you change or adjust the strategy.
For example, you may notice that potential customers visit specific pages without purchasing your products or services from your website. Including detailed descriptions of your products or services could help them transition from the consideration phase to the decision phase and buy the product.
#5 Enhance Reach to Target Customers
With digital marketing, you know where your customers are and how best to reach them. This is an advantage marketers don't enjoy with traditional advertising like billboards, magazines, and TV.
They provided a limited reach to target customers, which wasn't effective. Digital marketing allows you to identify and target a specific audience by sending personalized and highly-converting messages.
For example, email marketing enables marketers to interact directly with their target audience. The customer is already aware of your products and services; thus, they won't find your email intrusive. Using social media marketing, you can send an ad to a specific audience and narrow its reach by location, age, networks, gender, and other metrics.
#6 Give You an Online Presence
Once customers learn about a business, they look it up online to get more information. A report by Visual Objects found that 76% of consumers check a company's online presence before visiting its physical location.
Most customers expect to see a Google Business Listing, along with the store's opening and closing hours, photos, contacts, and location. They also hope to find the company's website, where they can find more information about the business before visiting its physical location. If the business doesn't have an online presence, the customer may purchase from a competitor altogether.
Digital marketing compels a business to have an online presence because it has to develop a website and create social media pages and other platforms can interact with prospective customers. It's also an opportunity to create a narrative that sets you apart from your competitors.
#7 Levels the Playing Field
Previously marketing strategies like print advertisements and signage were restricted to large corporations because they required large capital investments. However, digital marketing levels the playing field for small and larger businesses.
Most digital marketing strategies are readily available for all players allowing small businesses to leverage strategies they deem fit. And with the right strategy and audience targeting, a small business will look just as impressive to customers as a large company.
#8 Ability To Quantify Results
Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console make it easy to quantify the results of a digital marketing strategy. Views, impressions, clicks, web traffic, and other metrics can help a small business determine if a particular digital marketing strategy is effective. Moreover, marketers view the results in real-time.
With web traffic, for example, you can determine the number of people who viewed a web page, the amount of time spent, the device used, and where they came from. Such insights help a small business determine the marketing channels to spend more or less time based on the number of people visiting the website.
By comparison, it's challenging to quantify the effectiveness of traditional marketing methods like billboards, print ads, and TV ads. And if the sales increase, there's no clear way to determine the ads were responsible for the results.
#9 Improves Conversion
The ability to quantify digital marketing efforts makes it easy for a small business to improve conversion rates. You can identify the most effective tactic and refine it to improve the conversion. Digital marketing also helps a business target an audience more likely to produce high-quality leads and become customers.
#10 Competitors Are Online
Your competitors already know the benefits of digital marketing and have created social profiles and adapted their websites for SEO. As such, a small business can't neglect digital marketing. If it does, it will probably lag as it won't reach its target customers adequately.
Forms of Digital Marketing
As highlighted earlier, digital marketing involves various marketing techniques used to establish the brand's identity and reach customers online. Here's an overview of each:
Content Marketing
This is the process of using content to create brand awareness to convert the reader to a customer. The content can be a blog post, ebook, podcast, white paper, infographic, and more.
Content marketing is most effective when combined with other digital marketing strategies like SEO, social media, and email marketing. When you write content, you need to optimize it for search (SEO) and publish it on social media and email marketing publications.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the process used to help a website increase ranking organically. To do this, marketers look for words and phrases customers may use to find information online. They include them in their websites, e.g., by writing blog posts that increase the likelihood of ranking higher on SERPs every time a user searches the terms.
Marketers optimize websites using different strategies:
- On-page SEO: It involves focusing SEO efforts on the site's content by incorporating keywords on the pages and content, creating metatags and titles, and curating high-quality SEO copywriting content, among other factors.
- Off-page SEO: This is optimization outside the website, e.g., earning backlinks. Remember the number of sites linking to yours and their authority affects ranking. Therefore, you must network with sites publishing high-quality content.
- Technical SEO: Here, the marketer focuses on a website's backend and how individual pages are coded. Individual ranking factors like a website's loading speed are analyzed and improved.
Social Media Marketing
This is the use of social media platforms to promote your brand, products, and services. Social media marketing is most effective for small businesses looking to increase brand awareness,
generate leads, and increase traffic.
As such, the business must be consistent in its marketing efforts, and if using automation tools, it must keep the posts organic. Customers can figure out brands that solely use automation tools to respond without much human input.
Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Pinterest are the most common social media marketing channels businesses use to create viral campaigns. The company can join a trend related to its target audience to increase reach.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest digital marketing strategies, but it is still the most effective. Research shows businesses realize an ROI of 36 dollars for every dollar spent on email marketing.
This marketing strategy is somewhat old-fashioned, but four out of five marketers prefer it to social media. Email marketing provides direct access to your target audience, eliminating much guesswork.
Also, you have more control because you own the relationships you've forged with your target audience. As such, changes like Facebook or Google algorithms hardly affect your marketing efforts.
Moreover, it's easy to scale your reach as your audience grows without spending lots of money. Other digital marketing strategies like pay-per-click require significant monetary investment, which isn't always possible with small businesses.
Search Engine Marketing
This advertising model allows advertisers to place ads on social media platforms, search engines, and third-party websites for a fee. The business pays the publisher every time a user clicks on an ad.
SEM can be a costly form of marketing, sometimes requiring significant budget allocations. Some companies realize results from investing a few hundred dollars, while others spend thousands.
The cost varies depending on the keywords you're bidding on. High competition keywords attract more bidders hence more expensive than those with a low search volume. The primary benefit of this form of marketing is that you can choose your target audience by location.
For example, if you want to reach people within your town, you don't have to show the ads to people who don't live near your business. Also, advertisers can place ads in front of motivated customers who are more likely to buy.
Affiliate Marketing
This performance-based marketing model involves promoting other people's products in exchange for a commission. It starts by finding an affiliate program or network that interests you and checking the program overview, including the products or services offered, payment channels, and commissions paid.
Affiliate marketing leverages the ever-growing popularity of social media influencers and industry experts. A business can work with them by registering and choosing programs that interest them.
After approval, the influencers engage with their audience through videos, posts, or blogs to attract more customers to the business. Affiliate marketing has become a popular form of digital marketing, but a company must find the right content creators to take their digital campaigns to the next level.
Native Advertising
With this form of marketing, a business uses content-led advertisements featured on platforms alongside other non-paid content to market its products. Facebook and Instagram advertising and BuzzFeed-sponsored posts are excellent examples of native advertising.
How To Go About Digital Marketing
As a small business owner, you want to be as agile as possible by updating your digital marketing skills. Knowing how to implement and manage a digital marketing strategy that can reach your target audience at the right time and place is critical. Here are essential steps to help you execute a digital marketing strategy:
#1. Define Your Objectives
You need to define why you want to do digital marketing. Do you want to increase organic traffic, your brand's awareness, or conversion rates? Defining your goals helps identify the most effective strategy and tailor it to your needs and budget.
#2. Determine Your Target Audience
Who do you want to reach? What's their age, location, behavior, or interests? One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is the ability to identify and target an audience accurately. You can also curate content for different audiences easily.
#3. Identify the Right Marketing Channel
After defining a target market, determine the best way to reach your customers. If young people are your target audience, you may need to channel your marketing efforts on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok instead of blogging or SEO.
#4. Optimize the Content
It would help if you studied your audience to know what they prefer and how they like their content delivered. Do they spend time on mobile devices or laptops? If the former, you must optimize the content for mobile viewing.
#5. Strike a Balance Between Paid and Free Digital Strategies
The most effective digital marketing strategy balances out paid and free digital strategies. You can build organic traffic using SEO content and social media, but paid advertising is more effective if you need immediate results.
#6. Make a Budget
The budget varies based on the digital marketing channels used. Techniques like SEO, content marketing, and social media don't need much investment. However, outbound marketing techniques like purchasing email lists and online advertising are expensive.
#7. Finetune Your Strategy Based on the Results
It would help if you analyzed the results to determine if it's meeting the desired goals. Insights from Google Analytics provide information that helps determine its effectiveness.
It could be your target audience is no longer interested in content on Instagram and prefers what you're creating on TikTok. It's essential to re-examine your strategy and adjust it to match your audience's preference.
So, Why Is Digital Marketing Important for a Small Business?
Having reviewed the reasons digital marketing for a small business is essential, it's clear that it's an invaluable tool when developing a business strategy. Not only do you connect with your target audience, but it's also an opportunity to acquire a customer.
Digital marketing provides many opportunities to reach buyers through a variety of channels. Whether it's websites, social media platforms, or other online mediums, you can promote a business, product, or service.
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