In this day and age, digital marketing is the norm for operating a successful business. But most small business owners ignore this aspect of marketing, because they don’t understand it.
They usually opt for traditional forms of advertising, completely missing out on the benefits of online marketing.
In this article, we’ll discuss the benefits of digital marketing for small business and share the most effective digital marketing strategies you can use to grow your company.
Four Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
1. Cost-Effective
Thanks to the ongoing advancements in email, text, and social media, digital marketing solutions are now more affordable than ever.
Furthermore, because of the nature of the world wide web, your customer reach is wider, yet more specific, as these solutions target only your prospective customer base.
Additionally, the control you have when placing your ads, sending emails or group texts, makes digital campaigns cheaper and more effective than their traditional counterparts.
As an example, social media advertising costs less than renting a billboard, because you specify your audience, budget and when it’s shown, thus bringing you greater returns in the long run.
2. Greater Reach
Another benefit of digital marketing efforts is the fact that their reach is unmatched. Play your cards right and your ads should get through to your most potential customers online.
The average American spends around 6 hours on their phone, so it’s safe to assume your message will not go unnoticed. And thanks to advanced algorithms, your campaigns will gain traction over time, reaching the most interested parties for a modest investment.
3. Increased Brand Awareness
Expanding your online presence through digital marketing will also lead to increased brand awareness. In fact, simply setting up a social media account opens you up to potentially reaching 4 billion people around the world.
Experiment with various marketing strategies, because you never know which idea will suddenly become an internet sensation. Even if your goal is to keep your business local, digital marketing can help you become the name everyone knows in town.
4. Excellent Way to Deal With Competitors
Make no mistake, the majority of your competitors already have a developed digital marketing strategy. Therefore, if you want to get ahead, you need to promote your business online.
Failure to adopt a digital marketing strategy and you’ll eventually find yourself unable to attract new customers, while losing traction with existing ones.
Developing your online marketing campaigns are a must if you hope to compete for the long term.
The Five Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most commonly used digital marketing tools. This comes as no surprise considering how effective it can be.
But many small business owners mistakenly think this type of marketing takes no time and effort, so their results may be less than they’d hoped.
Managing multiple social media accounts on your own can be quite demanding, which is why it’s usually delegated to marketing agencies. So, start with just one or two platforms and see which is most effective at reaching the people you’re after.
Growing your audience organically at first costs very little and gives you a chance to become familiar with the platform before investing in paid media.
Paid social media ads can be a great way to establish your online presence at the beginning of your campaign. The key is to utilize platforms that are both relevant for your products and services and are where your market spends most of its time.
For example, if you want to highlight the visual aspect of your product, Instagram may be a good place to start. These platforms are constantly evolving, so you may see opportunities to incorporate text, audio or video to your images as well.
In this context, using a tool like VEED can be extremely helpful as it offers a video trimmer and video converter that can help you create engaging and high-quality content for your social media campaigns.
By using VEED’s video trimmer, you can easily cut and edit your videos to showcase the most important aspects of your product or service. Additionally, the video converter allows you to convert your videos into various formats, ensuring compatibility with different social media platforms.
As you create and share visually appealing content, you’ll be able to attract more followers and potential customers. Make sure to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and features on each platform to maximize your social media marketing efforts.
2. Email Marketing
Although it might seem somewhat archaic, email marketing strategies can still be part of an effective marketing solution if you have a solid contact list.
This type of marketing involves promoting your products and services through newsletters offering updates, limited time offers, contests, etc.
The most important part of this strategy is gathering the email addresses of current and potential customers with their consent, because otherwise, they might consider your messages spam.
3. Mobile Marketing
In recent years, mobile marketing has become as widespread as desktop marketing. Some statistics are even suggesting that mobile ad spending will surpass that of desktop by 2022. So, if you want your small business to grow rapidly, developing a good mobile marketing strategy might be the best course of action.
Start by making your website mobile-friendly, because the majority of your customers will access your webpage through their smartphones.
Fail to optimize it for mobile, and chances are visitors will quickly switch to your competitor’s page.
Automated Text messages, apps, and paid mobile ads can also be integrated into your mobile marketing solution.
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing is as old as marketing itself. Namely, it involves presenting information about your products or services to your prospective customers with the aim of educating them and providing value. In the digital age, it’s an essential part of the digital marketing arsenal.
Digital content marketing can take the form of brochures, helpful guides, case studies, and videos. The goal of digital content is to convince potential customers that your brand is the best choice for them by teaching them how your offer helps solve their problem or serves a need.
Therefore, you should avoid generic solutions, as they would only weaken your brand image.
Only creative and well-informed content will draw people’s attention and make your business the one they consider when they’re ready to buy.
5. SEO and Local Search Marketing
SEO (search engine optimization) is a marketing tool that improves the visibility of your website through several different methods.
Keyword research is the most important part of search engine optimization. Namely, incorporating relevant commonly searched terms in your content to place your website among the top results.
Link building also improves your SEO efforts by making your content more visible on other websites and blogs. This practice revolves around setting up hyperlinks to your website from external sites. The more external links leading back to your website, the higher your site ranks among search results.
If your business operates locally, you might want to consider local search marketing. This strategy is part of the SEO that integrates the search engine map function. In this case, the geographical location of your potential customer becomes a relevant ranking factor. Using this strategy your brand will become the household name in your town or region in no time.
Five Hot Digital Marketing Trends
The field of online marketing is constantly evolving. So, if you want your business to grow, you must go with the tide. Here are a few of the most popular trends you should hop on this year.
1. E-Commerce
E-commerce has gained a lot of traction over the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic, back in 2020, forced most people to take their shopping online. This trend will likely not end anytime soon, as people have come to enjoy the convenience of online shopping and new delivery services are sprouting up all the time.
Additionally, when people discover new consumer habits, they tend to stick with them until a new one comes along. Therefore, a well-developed e-commerce solution could bring you huge profits.
2. Voice Search
Due to the emergence of smart voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri, voice search has become more common than ever. From desktop to mobile, voice search will continue to evolve.
Keep an eye on voice search optimization as it’s an entirely different process and could offer you opportunities to grow your brand awareness.
3. Chatbots
AI-based customer support is slowly replacing human client services. This comes as no surprise considering the benefits of chatbots. First of all, they are available 24/7, while most regular customer support has a limited working time.
Secondly, they are much cheaper, because once you set them up, they work on their own with very little maintenance cost.
Chatbots eliminate all of the discomforts of talking to a call center operator too. So, it might be a good idea to incorporate one into your web or social media page. You may not want to get rid of human customer support altogether though, as there is no substitute for personal service when it comes to handling more complex issues.
4. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels
Seeing the success of short-video platform TikTok, both YouTube and Instagram decided to include a similar format to their platforms.
But, Shorts and Reels aren’t there just for dancing videos and memes.
They’re also an excellent opportunity to increase your brand awareness and reach new customers. A single 15-second video on one of those platforms could help you grow your business overnight.
You may take the help of an online video editor tool to create short videos easily by using pre-made video templates.
5. Quora Marketing
For those of you familiar with the concept of Quora, this next trend may come as a shock.
Quora is a Q&A platform that lets people ask and answer questions.
But, marketing experts saw an opportunity in the platform to promote brands through the answer section of this site. It has since become common and even widely accepted for companies to answer random Quora questions.
Note that you shouldn’t just blast your message on any question you come across. Good Quora marketing strategy starts by finding questions related to your products or services. Follow that up with well-researched and meaningful answers that briefly mention your brand. This way, your prospective customers will see you as helpful rather than self serving.
Final Thoughts
Developing effective small business marketing strategies in the digital era can be tough. But hopefully this article helped you decide on some digital marketing solutions for your company. Still find this concept overwhelming? Consider hiring a professional digital marketing agency, or better yet, request a free demo of DYL’s all-in-one platform to see how our digital marketing tools can be used for growing your business.
What are some techniques you’ve used to grow your brand awareness and attract new customers? Let us know in the comments. And if you have any ideas for future articles, write us at feedback@dyl.com. We’re always looking for new ideas!
