Ashish Kumar is the CEO and conceptualizer of Red Dash Media – A Full-Service Global Digital Marketing Agency helping brands shape their digital conversation and bringing ideas to life. He has worked strategically with several businesses in the past as a Hospitality Advisor. He compliments his busy lifestyle by being a fitness enthusiast and nutrition expert.
Digital marketing has significantly changed the way businesses function and has become the core of all kinds of businesses. In today’s digitized world, connecting with your prospects online is the best way to expand your business. The goal of digital marketing is to help your business reach prospective audiences online.
The Internet has become an inevitable part of everyday business and it is the first place people go to when they are looking for a service and if we talk in numbers, approximately 87% of the buyers search for products online before purchasing. That is massive market size and definitely a big reason why as a small business you should invest in digital marketing.
When it comes to small businesses, a common question that we get to hear often is, ‘Is digital marketing suitable or relevant for small businesses?’ It is seen that there is an idea formed that digital marketing is only suitable for big brands and businesses who can work with an exorbitant budget. Of course, this is not true.
Even if you are a startup or small business you can profit from digital marketing. We live in a digital world with more than half the world population using the internet and this is why businesses of all sizes need to meet their audience where they are, and that is online! Digital marketing offers various resources where you can connect with your prospective customers at every touchpoint of the sales funnel.
Let us take a look at the many benefits of digital marketing.
Reach More Targeted Customers
Digital Marketing focuses on accomplishing your marketing goals and objectives by reaching out to your targeted audience base. With so many digital developments, people use at least one online platform to find information about different products and services and as a small business, you can reach your targeted customers easily through online marketing.
An efficient digital marketing plan can help you connect with the right prospects at the right time. For example, you can use Google ads to know about the people who are interested in your services. With their reporting metrics, you’ll know exactly who is interacting more with your ad campaigns and you may also find out audience groups that outperform others. This will help you focus your marketing strategies more towards these highly targeted audiences.
Get High Conversion Rates
The conversion rate defines the percentage of visitors that take action after visiting the website. Digital marketing strategies include conversion rate optimization that allows your business to reach a higher number of users that take the desired action.
For any business, the primary business goal is to generate more sales leads and digital marketing helps derive those leads through online advertising and other promotional campaigns. For example, Pay-per-click advertising, where you pay for every user that clicks on the ads is a potent digital marketing tactic that contributes to improving the conversion rate.
Improve Brand Awareness
Including social media marketing in your digital marketing plan, you can increase the number of audiences who know about your business and recognize it by name. Social media platforms are the biggest resources when it comes to building awareness about your brand.
On average, 3.2 billion people use social media across the globe and so your customers are already on one social media platform or another and by promoting your brand on social media, you can increase awareness even faster. You can connect with your audience more closely and make your brand more relevant to them directly impacting your business’s credibility.
Helps Build Long-lasting Customer Relationships
One challenge faced by most small businesses is retaining customers or re-engaging with them. Hundreds of new businesses crop up every month in the country so losing customers is a lot easier in this time and age of digital domination. If you know your target audience well and have a great understanding of your product, you can use digital marketing to keep your customers coming back for more.
Some effective digital strategies to build a good rapport with your customers are sending out personalized thank you notes and follow-up emails. Unlike traditional marketing, you can reach a larger audience at much less cost. You can ask your customers to engage with your social media after they purchase a product so that your brand remains in their mind and they come back for more, or you can use retargeting to point out products that may compliment the product that they bought. Digital marketing gives you different ways to engage and re-engage your customers so that you can build a long-lasting relationship with them.
You Get To Measure The ROI
The best thing about digital marketing is that you can measure the progress. Digital marketing strategies are not just targeted but they also provide you with different credible ways to measure your progress and check what’s working for your business and what’s not. So, as a small business, you can start by investing small and see the results before going all in and investing more.
You can start out by creating a dedicated landing page for a specific inbound campaign and with the help of the ROI metrics of Google Analytics, you can monitor how many visitors land on the page. Along with this, you can check the bounce rates, how many visitors interacted with the entire landing page as well as the number of visitors that converted to buyers. You can further use A/B testing to determine the marketing techniques that give the most conversions. All these results can help you create a more targeted marketing plan and help boost conversions.
Move Ahead Of Your Competitors
Many small businesses are already using digital marketing to extend their reach among their prospective consumers. Utilizing digital marketing for your small business, you not only get to reach a wider audience but you can also keep an eye out on what your competition is doing and based on that formulate your strategies to get ahead of them in the competitive market.
From the number of their social media followers to the keywords your competition is targeting, digital marketing tools can help you find all the data that will be useful for any kind of digital marketing campaign that you plan to start. Digital marketing through SEO, social media marketing, email outreach, content creation, and other strategies can help spur your business ahead of the curve.
Conclusion
The benefits of digital marketing for small businesses are immense. Digital Marketing can help bring big surges of growth for your startup or small business. It lets you track your performance along the way with the help of analytics and make necessary adjustments along the way to improve your campaign.