It is not an understatement to affirm that the internet has affected every aspect of human life. If someone wants to know something or visit a website presently, Google is a place to go. How does this affect SMBs and eCommerce businesses? It is simple! You need to prioritize content promotion so they can appear on the first page of search engines for their respected keywords – with the help of SEO of course.
Here’s how digital marketing can help you grow your business.
How can digital marketing help you grow your business online?
1. Expand to new locations
It is a painstaking task to expand your business to a new location with a traditional form of marketing. With the help of digital marketing, you can expand to new frontiers without being limited by any geographical restrictions. You can set up your campaigns to target any city or country in the world.
2. Save on marketing cost
Any small and medium business shouldn’t feel constrained with a smaller marketing budget. The goal is to reach as many people as possible at the lowest cost. For instance, a 5 seconds TV ad can cost an SMB over $1000. If you factor in the cost of running billboard advertisements and print ads, that’s a lot of money. Meanwhile, with digital marketing, you can save a huge amount of cash while reaching an immense – and targeted – audience.
Digital Marketing enables you to control your campaigns as you can spend what you want, and as much as you want. You can also achieve an optimized Cost Per lead(CPL) when compared to traditional marketing channels.
3. Measure Analytics
You cannot accurately track the number of people who viewed your TV Ad despite the huge amount of money spent on running it. With digital marketing, you can monitor which of the channels gives you the best returns in terms of sales. Traditional marketing is like wasting money when you can’t track which channel is generating the highest ROI.
Be proactive and start creating marketing campaign reports – if you haven’t already done so. These reports are a great way to gauge what campaigns are performing well along with what digital marketing channels are bringing in leads.
4. Generate Higher Revenue
Digital Marketing can help your both small and medium business generate more revenue compared to when you use the traditional form of marketing. You have 3.3 times a better opportunity of expanding your business and workforce.
5. Target streamlined audience
With digital marketing, you can target a man between the age of 18-25 who is interested in mobile games and lives in New Jersey, and still in school. You can be precise – incredibly precise – about your target. This is what makes digital marketing more exciting and compelling.
Digital marketing enables real-time targeting. You can align your offerings with the marketing content based on the behaviors and actions people take online. You can also streamline your offer to cater to specific people in line with their requirements. This will not only boost customer acquisition and retention, but it will also positively impact your bottom line.
If you are running an eCommerce business or a small or medium scale business, here are the more reasons you cannot do without digital marketing.
Why Your eCommerce Business Cannot Do Without Digital Marketing
1. You need to reach people where they spend money and time.
As of 2019, an average internet user has about 7 social media accounts. That was an increase from 3 about 5 years ago according to emarketer.
97 percent of adults in the United States below age 65 browse social media platforms at least once a month. Many of those adults cannot do without social media. Social media has been classified as the most effective means of managing customer relationships.
While businesses ignore close to 89 percent of client messages, about 22 percent of the global population is on Facebook, with about 62 percent of Americans there as well. 30 percent of individuals on social media platforms mention a particular brand when referencing milestones. It has also been found out that Gen X will likely interact with a specific brand on social media when compared to millennials.
At least, an average individual spends about 2 hours daily on social media. For teenagers, that’s about an average of 9 hours.
Social media is a lifestyle for them- from school to entertainment, to work, and to communicate with their peers.
People are not in their houses; they are on social media. But do they purchase things there?
One of the top reasons people give for staying on social media is to purchase advertised products. They spend roughly 37 percent of their social media duration interacting with branded items.
57 percent of Millennials affirm that social media has improved the relevance of the ads they see. 48 percent say they purchase the last item online consequent to a targeted Facebook ad.
Yet only 45 percent of advertisers think they are generating results with their efforts on social media. While there are winners among them, some are losing money significantly. It is not enough to have a social media account where you share content; you must possess a formidable social media strategy. Once you understand how to increase your ROI in digital advertising, you will generate unprecedented results.
Advertising on Instagram, Facebook, or any other Social channel is just some of the components of digital marketing. Yet, they are very crucial.
2. Digital Advertising offers your business a level playing ground.
Do you remember that time when Walmart came and wiped out local specialty shops in their hundreds? Same for Starbucks which caused bagel shops and mom& pop coffee to shut down the business.
A similar equivalent online is the example of Amazon. These big corporations invest a huge amount of money in managing reputation and online marketing.
You shouldn’t fear as a small business owner; digital advertising can serve as a beacon of hope for your business. It can position you to outperform and outrank market leaders if you work with the right Adword solution provider.
Digital marketing helps you to compete with a smaller budget. If managed properly, you can control where and what you spend your advertising budget on. With the right data and metrics, you can make informed and smarter moves.
3. You have the ability to manage your ads and budget.
If you are running an ad in a magazine, you will perform some targeting. At least, you are aware your audience buys and reads that magazine. You possess some level of control over the size and ad placement. You can also manage the message within the guidelines of the publication.
The ad may reach over a million readers. But you cannot determine what percentage of that population is your target. A specific fashion and lifestyle magazine may possess a demographic of 58 percent with the age of 35 to 55 years. They may possess a college education. You are conversant with the fact that they like the form of fashions shown in the publication. Well, that’s a huge population to target.
One of the beauties of digital marketing is that you can disintegrate a huge demographic. Reduce them into targeted groups so you can become super-focused on each individual.
Who is this person? Is He or She likely going to buy our products or services?
Targeting at this level can make your ad to be relevant to the target market instead of becoming a nuisance. Because of this relevance, your ad can connect the prospects on a dimension that traditional or conventional marketing cannot. This capability helps you to influence their buying decisions. You achieve this without downplaying the techniques of conventional advertising. You don’t show an ad until it bores the viewer over and over. You don’t have to interrupt an important program being viewed repeatedly.
So, what forms of targeting can you achieve with digital marketing? This information will amaze you.
Taking search advertising as an instance, you can target individuals searching on Google in this type of digital marketing. Search results presently account for close to 64 percent of site traffic on the internet. For SMBs who have invested heavily in Search Engine Optimization, they generate close to 80 percent of traffic from search results.
Search advertising is also known as PPC or Pay per click, enables you to be positioned close to the top searches. It is even possible your website will show up organically.
Search advertising can help you target individuals with unique
- Goal
- Challenge
- Profession
- Buying habits
- Education level
- And many more.
You can achieve this via bidding on search queries representing some specific targets. You can also create ads, as well as landing pages around them, to convert the traffic.
Social media advertising also enables you to trim down your target audience. You can utilize already sourced data or instruct Facebook to only present your ad to individuals who show some specific habits, location, interests, or other identifiers.”
You don’t have to spend so much on a single ad; you can run your ads intermittently. This will help you tweak it to connect different target audiences. This is not possible with a conventional form of marketing.
Conclusion
You can begin to understand what people are searching for by interacting with them digitally. What’s their concern? What’s their burden? What are the solutions you have that can meet their deepest desires? With conventional marketing, you can only guess; but with digital marketing, you can discover what your customers want and build a solid relationship with them to meet their needs.
