Digital marketing has acted as a lifeline for small businesses in recent years and especially in 2021. Companies with digital marketing solutions have found themselves in a state of high growth and demand. Many budding entrepreneurs have started using digital marketing early to take the top spot, since they realise its value in business. It has opened the door to prosperity and growth for them, and the impact of digital marketing on small businesses is extremely significant. We will understand this in detail in this article.
Digital marketing, in simple terms, refers to marketing that takes place on digital platforms. It consists of various tools and methods used across numerous channels such as social media marketing, Search Engine Optimization, reputation marketing and pay-per-click ads strategies to name a few. Thanks to digital marketing, the company's customer base expands uniquely through lead generation on the internet. This strategy is essential to the growth plan of a small business.
When it comes to marketing costs, you want to know how much it would cost the business to essentially buy a new client. From this, you can understand whether marketing is relatively cheap and how many new clients you can expect when you increase your marketing budget.
Smaller businesses and new start-ups generally have a smaller budget than long-established businesses and therefore cannot allocated as much to marketing. Their marketing needs to be low cost, efficient and have a great return on investment. This is where digital marketing comes in, because a small business can pinpoint their target audience using SEO and Pay-Per-Click ads which cuts out needless marketing to people outside of their target audience.
Return on investment is also easier to quantify when going digital for your marketing, since the business is able to track metrics such customer engagement and apply tags to their interests.
When you're a smaller business, its easy for your brand to get lost amongst others, however with digital marketing - you're given the chance to stand out and show off your company's unique personality and brand. When businesses do this, they make an impression in the customers mind that sticks. Think about when a company has posted something really funny on social media; people will repost it and talk about it for months. One example of great social media is Greggs - check out this post below.
Digital marketing makes it easier to measure your return on investment. Unlike traditional marketing, customer engagement can't be tracked so it is difficult to know whether your marketing is working or not - with the only possible metric being a visible increase in sales. However, you still can't tell what is working and where to focus your marketing efforts.
With digital marketing, you can track exactly how long a potential customer has viewed some content, what links they have clicked and what they're engaging with the most. Almost everything can be tracked and measured in the digital world, meaning you can adjust your budgets accordingly and not waste resources on marketing that isn't working - making it ideal for smaller businesses.
Unlike a physical presence, having a digital presence means a business is selling constantly since the internet is always open! Your shop doesn't close and an impression can be made on your customers at any time, which sweeps up far more opportunities that those without a website are missing out on.
For small businesses that need to scale faster, this is important because they'll want to grab every opportunity they can to gain exposure. This means they can be less reliant on a physical sales team and therefore allocate their budget to more effective digital marketing.
Its easy for a small business to get lost in the sea of small businesses or fall back into the shadows, but digital marketing can prevent that with the use of SEO which will be sure to get you seen at the top of the Search Engine Results Page and not get lost in the dreaded second page of the Google search.
In conclusion, the framework of smaller businesses requires them to be more efficient and require a solid return on investment when it comes to their marketing budget, which digital marketing caters for. Digital marketing provides smaller businesses with an identity and reputation that rivals long-standing businesses and allows them to compete.
If you're a small business, don't miss out by not doing digital marketing
