Digital Marketing has been an absolute godsend for all businesses. It has allowed the world to shrink and businesses to grow above and beyond the traditional borders of geography and target audiences across the world.
While large businesses have always had the means to make sure they had the kind of reach they wanted, digital marketing has democratized how the marketing arena works for small businesses. Today, if you are a small business owner, you can market your products anywhere around the world, even if you do not have a huge marketing budget at your disposal. Using digital marketing strategies and using them well can potentially put your brand on course to becoming a force to be reckoned with sooner rather than later.
These are exciting times, isn’t it? So let us take a deeper look into what digital marketing is and how it can help small businesses.
What is Digital Marketing for Business?
Any type of marketing that uses the internet to maximize the reach of a brand, company, or organization falls under digital marketing. From online pop-up ads to social media posts, everything is a part of digital marketing. Some of the most used digital marketing methods are as follows:
- SEO – Search Engine Optimization
- Affiliate Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
The Practical Importance of a Digital Marketing Strategy
To understand how important digital marketing is, just think of the amount of time you spend on your phone or your computer. Now compare this to the time you spend reading a newspaper or looking at print ads, or watching good ol’ television (not OTT, mind you!). There is simply no comparison. The internet has taken over the world and everything we do. And it is not going anywhere.
A quick Google search will show you how in most studies in various countries, people averaged well over 5 hours of daily phone use. This statistic alone is enough to tell us how the most efficient way to target customers for any business is by using a cutting-edge digital marketing strategy.
Why is digital marketing essential for small businesses?
Digital marketing can help local business change their entire outlook of being a “small” business. In today’s day and age, no business is “small” if it uses the many marketing tools out there to expand its reach.
Digital marketing strategies also allow businesses to course-correct their campaigns along the way and target the intended audience very efficiently. Initially, a small business can also take the help of any digital marketing agency to help them learn and understand different digital marketing strategies better suited for them.
Reach
When compared to traditional marketing strategies such as print ads, digital marketing is far more cost-effective. It allows small businesses to reach a much wider audience at a fraction of the cost. From email marketing to social media marketing, businesses can make sure they have a wide reach among the right kind of audience. For example, if you own a small jewelry store and are capable of shipping worldwide, you can use a number of digital marketing strategies to your advantage.
Strategies such as content marketing can ensure people, even in far-off countries, visit your website and interact with your social media content. This is far more efficient and is more likely to attract customers than, say, having print ads run in the local newspapers.
Measurability
One of the most unique and useful features of digital marketing is that everything can be measured. If you are running a Facebook campaign, analytics can show your campaign’s exact reach, how your target audience interacted with it, the time spent by a user, how much traffic was directed to your website via the campaign, and much more. This gives you the ability to course-correct as you go. You can see what works and understand what digital marketing trends are best suited for you.
For a small business with a limited marketing budget, this can result in efficient spending of resources. For example, if the Facebook campaign for your jewelry store isn’t getting you the kind of traction you need in, say, South Africa. You could take the time to look into the latest trends in the South African jewelry market and modify your campaign thumbnails to increase clickability. This ability to measure what’s working and how much is something that traditional marketing lacks.
Targeting
Small businesses almost never have the luxury of a big marketing budget, especially new ones. The option that digital marketing provides to really focus on a predefined audience works wonders for small businesses. It is also great in terms of the ROI. This is because these businesses have a well-defined demographic that works for them.
If your business caters to women between 20 to 50 years of age, then targeting and analytics ensures they are the ones who see your ad most prominently. You can also keep track of which digital marketing trends work best for your target demographic.
Dialogue
Traditional marketing is one-sided. You are telling people opening the newspapers about your jewelry brand and how you have an amazing sale with discounts of up to 20% on some items. You have gotten a beautiful layout designed, and the ad is displayed in a prominent portion of the newspaper. Great! But what do the readers have to say? Do they have any feedback?
This one-sided marketing strategy is turned on its head when you push an ad into the digital world. You can have a healthy dialogue with your customers. And the dialogue is what a small business thrives on. It helps you understand your audience and also helps cultivate brand loyalty as customers feel seen and heard.
So, if you run the same jewelry ad on Instagram, you may have potential customers tell you about how maybe a rival brand is running a 30% discount. Or you could come across a helpful comment about making your designs more appealing.
As you can see, digital marketing can be the difference between a small business and a successful small business. When used well, digital marketing strategies can allow your business to prosper by attracting the right kind of customer base at very reasonable costs.
Conclusion
It is interesting to know that Facebook has over 2.8 billion active monthly users, and Instagram has over 1 billion. Those are staggering numbers! But that, or any fraction of that, is also the potential customer base you are looking at when it comes to digital marketing.
