Once considered a passing trend, digital marketing has now become an important tool of success for small businesses. Why?
Digital marketing enables you to reach more targeted customers than you could with traditional marketing. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In this blog post, you’re going to learn the benefits of digital marketing for small businesses.
Think about it:
As of 2021, there were close to 5 billion global internet users.
Out of these 55% prefer to shop online.
In fact, over 75% of consumers shop online at least once per month.
What do these statistics mean?
Digital marketing is no doubt the most powerful form of marketing in today’s post-pandemic times. And this is especially true given that people are spending more time on online channels than ever.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, otherwise known as online marketing or internet marketing comprises all marketing efforts done via digital channels like social media, email, search engines, and more.
Essentially, digital marketing involves identifying, engaging, and converting internet users into paying customers for your products or services.
This form of marketing enables you to reach a larger audience and target people who are more likely to purchase your products and services.
Generally, there are 9 different types of digital marketing:
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing/Pay-per-Click
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email Marketing
- Affiliate Marketing and Influencer Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Audio Marketing
Note: You can also pursue a career in digital marketing and start helping small businesses leverage this great marketing strategy.
You can find professional resume writers from college-paper.org to revamp your resume and start applying for those gigs in digital marketing. Now that you understand what digital marketing is let’s see why so many businesses are using it.
1. Makes Your Small Business More Accessible
According to a Think with Google survey, 63% of shopping occasions begin online. Besides, when looking to buy something, customers use Google as their main source of information.
If your business isn’t appearing on Google, then you’re missing out on a lot of great opportunities.
Digital marketing enables you to establish a strong web presence thus making your small business visible when people are looking for information related to your products.
When you set up a Google My Business account and optimize it effectively, you make your business open to customers 24/7. This way customers can contact you and do business with you at all times.
What’s more, customers can easily find your small business when searching for products or services locally.
Here are practical tactics to make your small business more accessible online:
- Create and optimize your website for SEO.
- Get your business listed on Google.
- Create business profiles on the top social media channels- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
- Publish helpful and informative content across all your digital channels regularly.
- Engage and respond to prospects online.
2. Enables You to Know Your Target Audience Better
If you think you know your target audience enough, think again.
66% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs and expectations.
However, this can be challenging in today’s world where customers’ needs and expectations keep changing every time.
The best thing about digital marketing is that it makes your small business visible online thus prospects can interact and engage with you at any time.
During these interactions, you can get to understand their pain points which can help you find explicit solutions.
For instance, you can start a conversion on social media or run a survey on your website to gain valuable insights about your customers.
To better understand your customers’ pain points, pay attention to what they are saying in the comments or scrutinize survey responses.
Use the information you gather through surveys on your website or online conversions to provide solutions with your products or services.
3. Can Help to Improve Reputation
Today’s consumers are increasingly savvy, skeptical, and selective about their purchase decision.
According to HubSpot, 55% of customers now trust companies less than they used to.
The beauty of digital marketing is that it enables you to know your target audience better, be contactable, and build social proof which ultimately helps to build a reputation for your small business.
To build trust and respect for your small business, engage with your audience by responding promptly to their questions on social media.
You can also share testimonials or personal stories of your business on social media.
Soliciting Google reviews and LinkedIn recommendations is also a great way to demonstrate how other customers trust your business.
4. Enables You to Acquire More Targeted Customers
Another incredible thing about digital marketing is its accuracy in reaching your target customers.
With traditional marketing, you print flyers or advertise in the local newspapers but you cannot be sure whether your target customers will even read the newspaper or get the flyers you distribute.
This can make your marketing efforts appear like shooting in the dark.
On the other hand, digital marketing enables you to find, interact and engage with people who are actually looking for your products or services.
You can use influencer marketing, targeted advertising, or use SEO to target customers with keywords and phrases they are actually entering on search engines when looking for information about products they intend to purchase.
5. Improves Conversion Rates
Digital marketing enables you to know your target audience better and improve your reputation.
It also makes your small business more accessible and enables you to target customers who are looking for your products or services.
This ultimately improves conversion rates.
Using search engine marketing, for instance, can help you to accurately target customers who have already shown interest in purchasing your products.
6. Digital Marketing is Cost-Effective
As a small business owner, you don’t have too much money to spend on TV adverts or billboards.
With digital marketing, you can promote your small business for free through social media marketing.
Besides, digital marketing enables you to target customers who are interested in buying your products. This helps you to avoid spending money advertising your business to people who won’t buy what you offer.
The most important thing when promoting your small business on social media is to select the platform that your prospective customers spend most of their time.
LinkedIn, for instance, would be a great choice to generate B2B interest.
As a rule, you should conduct thorough research on social media usage and demographics to know what kind of people use what type of social media channels so that you can determine how to target them with what products.
7. Higher ROI at Lower Cost
There is no denying that the cost of traditional marketing is way higher than that of digital marketing.
Every small business owner’s dream is to market your product or service without making a dent in your pocket and generate higher revenue.
Luckily, for every dollar you invest in email marketing, you can generate an ROI of $42.
The best thing is that everyone can learn digital marketing. After all, there are plenty of digital marketing courses on the internet both free and paid. All you need to do is to set aside some time every day to learn the skill.
8. Digital Marketing Offers Multiple Strategies
Unlike other forms of marketing, digital marketing offers different strategies for any type of business.
This means that you have the freedom to choose an affordable strategy to use for your kind of business. You can also use a combination of different strategies to achieve great results.
For instance, you can use email marketing alongside social media marketing or combine SEO with content marketing, etc.
9. You Get Multiple Content Types to Use
Another reason digital marketing is important for small businesses is that offers you different types of content to promote your business.
Besides, you can repurpose the content types to fit as many platforms as you want. For instance, you can create blog posts and convert them into short videos that you can engage your audience on TikTok with.
You can also convert long blog posts into videos and publish them on YouTube. Some of the best content types to use in your digital marketing campaigns include:
- Videos.
- Blog posts.
- Images.
- eBooks.
- Social media posts.
- Etc.
10. Provides Equal Opportunities for Everyone
With traditional marketing, larger businesses can dominate marketing avenues like print advertisements and others. This is thanks to their huge marketing budgets and resources.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, offers equal opportunities for everyone regardless of the size of your business.
Besides, small businesses can compete with large companies by taking advantage of cost-effective strategies such as social media marketing, email marketing, and more.
Of importance is to choose marketing strategies suitable for the type and size of your business.
11. Enables You to Offer Real-Time Customer Service
According to a recent Salesforce State of The Connected Customer report, better customer service is among the top reasons 48% of consumers switched brands in the past year:
Image via Salesforce
What’s more? A positive customer experience makes 91% of customers more likely to make repeat purchases:
In the same report, 83% of customers say they expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company.
What do these statistics mean for your small business? Customer service is not optional anymore.
But achieving better customer service is easier said than done. Luckily, digital marketing enables you to offer real-time customer service to your customers.
For instance, you can respond to customer complaints via a Messenger app or reply to their comments on social media.
Conclusion
No doubt digital marketing is the future of marketing.
Having, read the benefits of digital marketing for small businesses, it’s clear that you cannot ignore it when developing your business strategies.
Are you already using digital marketing for your small business?
Leave a comment below and let us know the digital marketing strategies you’re using.
You can also let us understand which strategy is generating great results for your small business.
