Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Businesses?

Are you a small business owner? Or planning to start a business.

As a business owner you know generating sales is one of the most important pillars for growing a business.

Small business owners who just started, focus on generating sales via different marketing channels whether traditional or door-to-door marketing or any other conventional method to market their products and services.

After doing all this they didn’t find much value as they are investing their time and money, if we compare with digital marketing.

At first, small businesses didn’t understand the importance of digital marketing and how they can leverage online marketing to grow their businesses. Also, it takes time to build a brand through online marketing. It’s not an overnight game to get success.

The data also says that every new person first checks the online presence of the brand and then goes to the shops, to check the researched data –

• 73% of Gen Z and 75% of Millennials say they would shop more at small businesses if they offered similar conveniences as chain stores (GoDaddy, 2023)
• The average American shops at a small business 213 times per year (AT&T, 2022)
• 9. 64% of Americans occasionally feel guilty after shopping at big chain stores (AT&T, 2022)
• 10. 73% of consumers say small businesses offer better and more personalised customer service than corporations (Zendesk, 2019)
• According to a study by Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalised experiences.
• 94% of consumers admit that a bad review made them avoid a business. However, 45% said they are likelier to visit a company if it responds to negative reviews.
• Nearly half of consumers (45%) are likely to visit a company’s physical location after finding a strong online presence on a local search page.

In this blog, we will explore how digital marketing can help small business owners grow and scale their brands.

Let’s understand what Digital Marketing is.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is a process of marketing your business’s products and services in the form of online marketing channels. It can be any online marketing platform like social media, search engines, display ads, web advertising, email marketing etc.

Fun fact: More than 3 quarters of Americans go online daily. Not only that, but 43% go on more than once a day and 26% are online “almost constantly”.

These figures are even higher among mobile internet users. 89% of Americans go online at least daily, and 31% are online almost constantly. ((resource data – https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/digital-marketing/)

This shows that Digital Marketing can be the backbone for small business owners who are just getting started and running for 4-5 years.

Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

• Cost-Effectiveness – Digital marketing channels are cost-effective if we compare them with traditional marketing methods, also tracking digital marketing campaigns is as easy as traditional marketing. With its cost-effectiveness, you can leverage digital marketing to grow your small business.
  
  
• Easy Targeting and Personalization – Small businesses face issues in finding their targeted and right audience for their services, Digital Marketing channels are most useful to target specific audiences, demographics, ages and locations with the right approach in marketing campaigns, marketing channels have detailed targeting options that make an easy to choose a targeting audience and personalization.
  
  
• Improved Customer Engagement and Interaction – One of the benefits of using digital marketing for small business owners is they can communicate with customers in real-time via social media platforms and build relationships through consistent engagement.
  
• Measurable Results and Analytics – With digital marketing tools, tracking and measuring of social and search campaigns are easy, with proper reports of tools & analytics we can measure the success of our marketing campaign and re-optimise our marketing strategies.
  

Key Digital Marketing Channels for Small Businesses

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is a process to improve visibility and organic traffic to your website. SEO involves many components like searching for the right keywords, website content, page URLs, website structure etc. for your website to make it correct for users and search engines. Google and other search engines update their algorithms from time to time to remove spamming and low-quality sites from SERPs.
  
  
• Social Media Marketing (SMM) – Social media marketing is to use of social media platforms to market your products and services. Social media can be very good for small businesses if they know which platforms are best for them. There are many social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Linkedin, Pinterest etc. With the right approach to the SMM platform, you can build customer trust and create your unique identity.
  
  
• Email Marketing –  Email marketing can be useful for small businesses, email marketing is normally used for communication with clients or prospecting clients, also it’s also used for sharing promotional messages, new updates, events, newsletters etc.
  
  
• Content Marketing – Content Marketing can be used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating meaningful content in the form of articles, blogs, videos & podcasts etc. Content Marketing plays a very big role for any business to succeed online and build trust in the audience.
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) – Pay-per-click is a paid marketing channel, it’s used to get instant traffic to your website and helps your business to get customers. With the right marketing campaign, you can generate good quality customers, but for using PPC you need expertise to do it for your business.
  

Implementing Digital Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide

1. Setting Clear Goals and Objectives – For small businesses the first step is to plan a digital marketing strategy, and set clear and achievable goals. The goals should be aligned with your business objectives and provide you a clear vision. It’s necessary to know what you want to achieve with your marketing, whether it’s brand awareness, or generating leads, driving online traffic to your website etc. By setting these benchmarks you can track your progress.
2. Understanding Your Audience – It’s essential to have a deep understanding of your audience. You should know the demographic information, preferences, pain points, and purchasing behaviour of your customers. If you have clear personas you can easily create the right marketing efforts & campaigns for your audience.
3. Developing a Digital Marketing Plan – With your goals set and your audience understood, the next step is to create a digital marketing plan for your business. This plan should cover the strategies and tactics you will use to achieve your business objectives. This plan should include all types of marketing channels like Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, and PPC.
4. Execution and Monitoring – Once you have a digital marketing plan, it’s time to execute your strategy. Consistency and attention to detail are key during this phase. Regularly publishing content, engaging with your audience on social media, monitoring your ad campaigns, and continuously optimising your efforts based on performance data help you to get success in online marketing. Monitoring your progress through analytics tools is crucial to understanding what’s working and what needs improvement in your marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is very important for all small businesses, it offers the ability to compete with larger organisations create our own audience and build successful businesses. If we compare it with traditional marketing, online marketing is very cost-effective and easy to measure the results.

In the competitive market, digital marketing comes with multiple changes over time, so it’s essential for all the small businesses to implement all the marketing trends that fit in your business.

And if you don’t want to take all these hurdles, so digital marketing agencies help to do that for you. You can also hire Digital Braino for all your marketing needs.