Small businesses face several challenges when launching a new venture. Not only do you need to differentiate yourself from competing brands, but you also need to effectively generate brand awareness, increase your reach, and acquire as many customers as possible on a limited budget.
Marketing is essential to ensuring your target prospects can see the benefits of buying from your brand. More importantly, the right promotion is a crucial way of building customer relationships, which helps increase long-term sales and revenue.
While there are many ways to approach marketing, from offline print ads to coupon and outdoor advertising, digital marketing is by far the most lucrative strategy for most brands.
In fact, the market for digital advertising is expected to reach a value of around $671.86 billion by 2028.
Using online marketing techniques, such as SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, and PPC, companies of all sizes can connect with consumers where they spend most of their time – on the web.
The right digital marketing strategies convert customers, increase opportunities, and give you the scope to grow your small business.
In this post, we’ll examine the top digital marketing benefits for small businesses.
10 Top Digital Marketing Benefits
- Reach a wider online audience and increase visibility
- Targeted advertising
- Cost-effective compared to traditional marketing
- Measurable results
- Increase customer engagement and loyalty
- Improved customer insights
- Greater flexibility
- Access to global markets
- Improved conversion rates
- Gives small businesses a competitive edge
1. Reach a wider online audience and increase visibility
Over 50% of today’s small businesses rank lead generation as one of the top challenges they face with marketing. To generate leads (potential customers) for your business, you first need to be able to connect with your audience through brand awareness and reach.
Compared to traditional marketing strategies, which generally only allow you to connect with a fraction of your audience through local methods, digital marketing offers much greater reach.
More than 5.16 billion internet users are active online today to interact with the right marketing campaigns. Moreover, around 86% of companies say they have effectively increased brand awareness using one or multiple digital marketing channels.
Through digital marketing, companies can connect with their customers through every stage of the modern sales funnel.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures you can connect with customers looking for solutions to specific problems or answers to questions.
PPC (Pay per click) advertising can position you at the top of the search results for consumers in your target audience or demographic, helping you to generate warm and hot leads.
Social media also allows you to boost your visibility to a highly targeted audience, creating campaigns you can show consumers at specific times during their purchasing journey. Perhaps above all else, digital marketing helps customers to find you wherever they are online.
2. Targeted advertising
Crucially, the world of digital marketing doesn’t just help small businesses to connect with more potential leads and prospects. It also ensures you can reach the right people – your target audience.
Every business has a specific “ideal customer” they want to appeal to – the people most likely to benefit from your services and interact with your brand.
As the digital landscape has grown more competitive, new tools have emerged to ensure businesses can easily focus their attention on the right consumers.
Through Google Ads and Facebook Ads, companies can leverage tools that allow them to show their campaigns to customers with the right demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Tailoring your campaigns to your customers means you’re more likely to generate positive results. At the same time, it reduces the amount of marketing budget you might waste on connecting with less interested consumers.
Companies can even leverage email marketing and automation tools to send highly personalized messages to consumers. With an email platform, you can segment your customers into different groups based on their interests, location, or previous purchases.
This is crucial in a world where around 80% of customers say they’re more likely to buy from a company that offers a tailored experience. In fact, around 72% of customers will only engage with personalized ads.
3. Cost-effective compared to traditional marketing
All companies, big or small, want to keep their costs low and profits high. However, smaller businesses are often under more pressure to accomplish their goals with limited budgets.
Traditional forms of advertising, such as TV, radio, and print promotion, can be extremely expensive for beginners and don’t always generate the right ROI.
Alternatively, digital marketing methods can be extremely cost-effective. If you have some basic writing skills, you can leverage content marketing with little initial investment and generate leads from SEO.
Even B2B brands benefit, with 89% of the most successful business-to-business companies reporting they use a content strategy.
Social media can be equally cost-effective. You don’t necessarily need a huge digital marketing team to get started, provided you create valuable, engaging content for your audience.
You can create basic videos through Reels and Facebook to increase conversions and even experiment with micro-influencer marketing to boost your company’s credibility.
Email marketing is easily one of the most cost-effective tools for small businesses. It requires very little initial investment and returns an average of $36 for every $1 spent!
With just a little time and practice, you can create amazing marketing campaigns with minimal cost.
4. Measurable results
Most marketers know that if they want to increase their marketing ROI and reduce costs, they must also monitor and consistently optimize their campaigns. It can be difficult to get a full view of the “ROI” of your campaigns when you’re using traditional marketing strategies.
Facebook and many other social media tools have their own built-in analytical systems where you can track click-through rates, engagement levels, and cost per click.
Google and other PPC marketing platforms offer insights into the most valuable campaigns in your roster, so you can make better decisions about how to invest in promotion going forward.
There are even free tools like Google Analytics, which can help you to dive deeper into crucial information about the impact of each digital marketing strategy.
5. Increase customer engagement and loyalty
One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is it gives smaller businesses an easier way to interact with and engage their audience consistently.
Thanks to social media, content marketing, and email, you can connect with your customers regularly, keeping your brand top-of-mind with potential leads.
The more channels you’re actively engaged on, the more professional and authentic you’ll appear in the eyes of your target audience. In fact, many customers say they wouldn’t trust a company without a solid online presence.
Building your digital marketing campaigns means you can conveniently share useful information with your audience en masse. You can post news stories on social media or your website and keep customers up-to-date on new products and services through email.
Digital marketing helps companies in any industry form the foundations for greater trust and better brand relationships. In one study, 75% of marketers said investing in digital marketing strategies helped increase their company’s credibility.
6. Improved customer insights
Customer expectations are constantly evolving. Today’s consumers expect brands to understand their preferences and requirements before purchasing. One study even found 80% of customers are more likely to shop with brands that show evidence they understand them.
With the right tools, you can map out your customer’s journey from start to finish, gaining a behind-the-scenes knowledge of exactly what each customer needs to make a purchase.
Depending on your digital marketing strategies, you can invest in things like customer surveys and polls on social media to learn more about audience preferences.
Gathering this information about your target audience ensures you can create campaigns that resonate directly with your chosen audience. This way, you can reduce your ad spend, optimize your campaigns, and increase your ROI, while presenting a better image to your target market.
7. Greater flexibility
While traditional marketing methods may benefit some brands, they’re often relatively rigid and restrictive. If you create a television advertisement and discover in a couple of days, it’s not performing as well as you’d hoped, you can’t easily change out the messaging or visuals the next day. The same isn’t true for digital marketing.
For instance, 71% of marketing experts who say using strategic keywords is crucial to their marketing campaigns can adjust their target terms for SEO and PPC in seconds, using the right online tools.
The report you generate during your marketing campaigns will allow you to determine almost instantly whether you need to update or optimize a certain part of your strategy.
Many PPC, social media, and email marketing tools even provide access to convenient A/B or split testing solutions, allowing you to instantly compare one campaign’s performance to another.
With digital marketing, you can instantly update your strategy, based on your target audience’s expectations, changing trends, and requirements, without spending a fortune.
8. Access to global markets
Not every small business that embraces digital marketing will require a global advertising strategy. That’s why most of today’s tools allow companies to focus on more specific, local audiences when necessary.
However, if your business does start to expand, digital strategies give you more freedom to increase the scale of your online marketing campaigns whenever you choose.
You can leverage tools for international SEO to ensure your content marketing and campaigns resonate with audiences worldwide.
With social media marketing, you can specifically focus on specific countries based on your needs. With email marketing, you can send different customer messages based on location.
This means you can reach a much wider market overall, potentially drastically increasing your revenue.
9. Improved conversion rates
Conversions are everything for a small business. The more sales you can generate, the more your company can grow. Fortunately, digital marketing gives you everything you need as an evolving business to increase sales and boost revenue.
Digital marketing campaigns allow you to experiment with various strategies to strengthen your brand presence.
You can create targeted landing pages with lead magnets to enhance your chances of collecting leads that will generate more conversions. You can even improve your results by investing in specific strategies, like targeted messaging via PPC and personalized content created to address the needs of specific customer segments.
10. Gives small businesses a competitive edge
Even in difficult economic environments, companies from all industries continue to invest in digital marketing. Around 40% of companies said they expected to increase their marketing budgets in the next couple of years. Less than 16% said they would consider dropping their marketing budgets any lower.
This means small businesses can improve their chances of competing against bigger brands. They can leverage the exact same tools and strategies as larger companies to boost their growth potential.
Additionally, using the latest tools and techniques, you may find you can develop a stronger relationship with your target audience than other major brands. Thought leadership content can increase your credibility, while micro-influencer strategies allow you to connect with customers more deeply.
Conclusion
Digital marketing offers many benefits to businesses of all types and sizes. Small businesses benefit most since digital marketing can drive prosperity and growth. To get started with digital marketing, use the following guides:
- Digital Marketing Courses – online courses to help you master all aspects of digital marketing.
- Digital Marketing Certifications – a list of the most popular digital marketing certificates to become a certified digital marketer.
- Learn Digital Marketing – a step-by-step guide on how to teach yourself digital marketing.
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