A small business without a digital marketing strategy is akin to a ship without a captain at sea.
If you think this is an exaggeration, you’re wrong. There is more at stake for small businesses compared to their bigger counterparts. As more and more people turn to online shopping, this means that there is a big market small businesses can tap into. The right digital marketing strategy can help increase sales and leads.
However, small businesses have another goal: to grow. To do this they need to make more people aware about their brand, products and services.
If you’re still not sold on having a digital strategy for your small business, here are reasons for you to reconsider.
Cost-Effective
One of the most common excuses small businesses have when it comes to not having a budget for digital marketing is that it is expensive. No matter how big or small your business is you just need to be careful on how money is spent since budget is limited.
Small businesses need to decide how to spend their advertising budget early. Do they want a TV commercial, print ads or billboards? Small businesses need to choose an advertising strategy with good ROI to make their efforts cost-effective.
TV ads and radio spots can be expensive. The cost of this type of advertising can also skyrocket depending on the region or spot you choose to air your advertisement. This is why digital marketing is a better alternative for small businesses. It is targeted towards specific audiences so it has a much higher ROI compared to TV and radio.
Take PPC or pay-per-click for example. Your advertisement can be targeted towards people in a certain location who choose specific keywords when searching for something. This means that people who click on your ads are the ones who are interested in your product or service.
Fast & Easy To Plan
Because digital marketing is targeted towards a specific audience, it is faster and easier to plan and execute. If we follow the example of PPC above, Google Adwords has a learning curve and it might take a while before you get the hang of it, but mastering it is doable.
Once you have identified your target audience you can now set up a budget that works for you and then A/B test your ads so that you can find out which ones have better reception than the others. After you have all of this information, targeting your audience will become easier to plan.
Easy To Track
Google Adwords, Facebook advertising and other similar digital advertising platforms have a dashboard that makes ads easier to track. Aside from clicks, you can also access other important metrics like CTRs, impressions and cost per conversion.
Going digital means accessing the right analytics so that you can see what’s working for you and what’s not. For example, you will want to know how many people are opening your email newsletters on a regular basis. Knowing this type of info will make it easier for you to make adjustments to your campaign.
The same cannot be said for a billboard for example, since it would be hard to know how many people saw the ad.
Easy Update
As soon as you get the metrics, adjusting your strategy should be easy. Since you know what’s working and what’s not, you can easily terminate campaigns or readjust them so that you’re only using strategies that have good ROI. This means you are more efficient in using your advertising budget.
Updating ads for traditional marketing is harder to do. It’s not only expensive to rent a billboard, it’s also expensive to print something that big.
Targeted
As we have stated earlier, digital marketing is targeted specifically for your audience. This means you have control over who sees your ad. More importantly, you can make sure that your ad only gets seen by the people who are interested in it.
There are many platforms that makes targeting possible. For example, you can use Google to target specific keywords that are relevant to your campaign or product. This will enable you to reach a global audience but can only be seen by people who use certain keywords for searching a product. These people will then become your audience or your potential customers.
Wrap-Up
Even though digital marketing is easier than traditional marketing, it still takes patience and dedication to find out which types of internet marketing works well with your product or service. Having vision and foresight helps and jumping on the digital marketing bandwagon will pay off sooner rather than later.
A digital strategy can help your company compete in today’s fast paced world. Marketing is not only crucial to a business’ success but also to touch base with your targeted audience.
