Why invest in digital marketing for your business? How do you grow your North Carolina small business with digital marketing?
With the rise of the internet as a marketing tool, digital marketing is now the leading trend in the industry.
The digital marketing concept prides itself on the following advantages:
- It incurs little to no investment. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, costs thousands of dollars right from the start.
- More and more people are shopping online. They prefer home delivery services to time-consuming brick-and-mortar shopping.
- Your competitors are doing the same things you do. Thus, it comes down to who reaches customers first - online.
- Digital marketing uses many tools not used in traditional marketing, making it easier for businesses to make decisions. With these tools, you can craft strategies based on your audience and product feedback.
At the core of it all is the fact that everyone is online. With online marketing, you have the power to reach billions of people to spur growth for your small business fast.
Why Digital Marketing Is Important for Small Business
Digital marketing is a vital tool for marketing small businesses because:
It levels the playing field.
Nowadays, small companies understand that digital marketing is not only for large and multinational corporations. It is no longer only for those that have enormous resources needed to mount online marketing campaigns.
Small Businesses (SMBs) have realized that they can compete against big names and get their share of traffic and revenue through the same channels. Even without call centers, small companies in North Carolina can engage with multiple customers worldwide. They can engage customers even in parts of the world where they have no physical presence.
It is cost-effective.
According to a recent study, 28% of business owners plan to shift their marketing budget from traditional to digital channels using online digital marketing tools and techniques.
This trend is encouraging for small businesses like you because many of you have tight budgets. You can use digital marketing services on a low budget but deliver results for your business.
You can even rake in savings while using digital marketing to promote products and services. The respondents in the same study claimed that they get significant savings by promoting their business through digital methods.
It delivers conversion.
Most businesses using digital marketing measure their success by gains achieved in converting traffic into leads, subscribers, and sales. That is a logical approach because, without conversions, your marketing efforts are useless.
It is the reason why marketers are streamlining their digital campaigns towards optimizing conversions. That should be your top priority, too.
It helps open doors for more revenue-generating channels.
According to the bigwigs from Google, companies that market online have almost three times better expectancy for revenue growth than those that do not.
These experts added that SMBs using online marketing are also positioned to expand their business and workforce locally and internationally. One of these Google experts, Kevin O’Kane, described the Internet as a rocket engine fuel to grow SMBs fast.
It promotes quality interaction with target markets.
One reason why digital marketing is important to your business is that it provides tools and techniques for real-time audience engagement. Audience engagement means the opportunity to discover what your potential customers want. With that, you can adjust your products and services accordingly.
Some of the areas you want to ask your audience about are:
- Their experience in browsing your website (loading speed, quality of content, ease of navigation, etc.)
- Timely response to queries and feedback
- Customer support
- Level of social media engagement
- Product quality and helpfulness of offered solutions
The information you gather from these interactions will help you and your team steer towards the best direction to provide a better user experience and develop stronger customer relationships, trust, and loyalty.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
There are many benefits to digital marketing for small businesses. Highly-targeted audience segmentation is one. Another advantage is it’s being a cost-effective way of marketing a business. The availability of tools for measuring effectiveness based on set goals is also an advantage of digital marketing.
Ability to generate organic traffic
Digital marketing allows you to attract traffic passively using SEO, keyword optimization, and social media ads.
First, you need to create high-quality content to post on your landing pages and the other pages of your website. You want to attract organic traffic. But you also want to make sure that when people access your site, they can find relevant and informative content there.
Relevant and informative content serves a lot of purposes for your visitors. It can be that they are looking for ways to lower purchase costs but not compromising on quality. Or they are looking for tips to find the best service available near them.
Thus, you need to make sure that you know your audience well and their pain points and provide the information based on those needs. With that content already available, you proceed to attract search engine and social media users.
- SEO – Quality content and keyword optimization allow you to capture potential leads by ranking high in search results. The trick is to use the search keywords your audience uses and incorporate those words in your content. Also, ensure a good user experience when your potential customers visit your site.
- Social media engagement – Social media is a vast resource for attracting traffic. Engage with a targeted audience on these platforms to show your expertise and authority in your industry.
Ability to target mobile consumers
Now is the best time to target consumers on mobile because of the proliferation of communication and consumer-related technology, such as tablets and smartphones. In America, 90% of adult consumers always have their mobile gadgets within reach, whether at home or in their office.
Digital marketing provides the best techniques to reach this segment of your market. Some tools and services can help you provide an excellent browsing and shopping experience for your target audience.
We provide a free audit of your website that can help you ensure that your web pages load properly and fast on mobile devices. Nine out of ten mobile searches lead to customer action, and half of them lead to sales. So, make your website as mobile accessible as possible.
Ability to optimize branding
Another component to optimize when marketing online is business branding. First, digital marketing tools and services allow marketers to analyze brand and product mentions. With these tools, you will not only understand how your audience feels about your brand. It also allows you to understand what you can do in terms of offering customized services.
Digital marketing also increases the visibility, recognition, and reach of your brand. Because you do your marketing online, a larger audience can see your brand and access it. Consequently, you also build brand awareness by marketing online.
Having increased your brand’s visibility online, you can expect more people to engage with you. When your audience starts engaging with you, then it is time to focus on nurturing, and later on, building brand loyalty.
Ability to measure results
Another advantage of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that it can provide you raw data about how successful your campaign is.
Banners, billboards, TV ads, and fliers cannot give you such vital information. On the other hand, digital marketing tools can provide data on a single dashboard to help guide you in your marketing campaigns.
Those analytics are helpful to your business because of the insights they provide on:
- How to use resources effectively
- Determining the most effective marketing platform to use
Developing a Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Business
Developing and managing a digital marketing strategy can be challenging at first, so you may need some help and hire a digital marketing agency as you start.
Here are the simple steps to build a digital marketing strategy for your business. These steps apply whether you are just starting a new business or taking your business to the next level.
Understand what your objectives are
Clearly outline your objectives why you are getting into digital marketing:
- Is it for brand awareness?
- For generating leads?
- For driving sales?
Understand your audience
Outline market demographics:
- Male or female
- Young or old
- Employees or people heading to retirement
- Income? Interests? Type of industry they are in?
Messaging
From understanding your audience, you want to craft the perfect message for them. Different messages resonate with diverse audiences. Answer the question about benefits. What benefits can your audience get from you?
Channels
Where are these people at? What strategies can you use to engage your audience in these places?
Channels to consider are:
- Social media
- Search platforms
- Paid search
- Organic search (SEO)
- Affiliate marketing
Content
What content does your audience like to consume?
- Is it video?
- Is it photo?
- Do they prefer Infographics?
- Do they like reading a lot of articles?
- Is a podcast more suitable for them because they commute going to work?
- Do they actively participate in forums?
Whatever contents your target audience needs, create it and post it on platforms where they hang out the most.
Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Business
Here are three digital marketing strategies. Pick one at a time, experiment, and master the platform before moving on to the next strategy.
Blogging with SEO in mind
Because you need to get more leads and sales, you need to purposely target solutions that your target audience is looking for. In the area of blogging, this entire process is called keyword research. How does keyword research work?
For instance, if you sell physical products like computers, computer parts, and accessories. What do you think your potential customers are searching for in Google?
Probably things like:
- Why computer is slow
- How to speed up my computer
- How to make internet speed fast
What is great about these questions is that they guide you in building your content while integrating the products you sell in your store within that content.
Invest in YouTube videos
Next to Google, YouTube is the second most used search engine, and the same principle of providing solutions to your target audience works for video strategy, too. People are also looking for solutions when they search for relevant videos.
Social Media Marketing
When targeting social media platforms, you want to focus on one platform at a time. Remember, it is not about numbers. It is all about building a loyal following.
If you target all social media platforms simultaneously, your attention gets divided, and your results get diluted. Go where you can reach your target audience is and then cater to that platform.
How Can Digital Marketing Help Grow My Business?
First, digital marketing allows interaction with your target audience on different platforms. The good thing about that is that you can get timely feedback about the good and bad things that your company is doing.
Next, digital marketing aligns with today’s consumers. People are consuming media, content, and information on the internet. Also, they are using their phones for everything they need. So, the requirement for advertising has changed.
In summary, the advantages of digital marketing for your business include:
- Geographical expansion – With digital marketing, your business can expand globally with ease.
- Reach thousands of customers – You can engage with many people at once without being burdensome on the budget.
- Measurable analytics – Digital marketing allows you to gauge success using the data it gathers. You can analyze the patterns and behaviors of your users and customers.
- Targeted audience – It allows marketing in real-time. So, you can adjust accordingly based on the actions your target audience takes.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is important for small organizations and businesses because, with digital marketing, they can generate leads and sell faster at a low marketing cost. Also, with digital marketing and the data it provides, you can effectively plan your next move without wasting resources on methods that do not generate results.
Keep in mind that you need to pick strategies that work best for your type of business. For determining the best strategies that will work for your small business, feel free to contact us for a free consultation today.
