Why Digital Marketing Is a Modern Necessity for Small Business

Where would we be without small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit? There are many great small businesses out there that when given a chance, could easily outshine their larger competitors. The problem is that small businesses are up against some great hurdles. Like, for instance, 70% of small business fail within 10 years while half of them fizzle out by year 5.

Those might seem like pretty dismal statistics, but what if those same businesses were able to connect with a larger audience, engage with more visitors and nurture the person who expresses casual interest along the path to conversion. Our money says that we’d begin to see those dismal statistics turn around.

Today, small business lack opportunities to accomplish all of that and more with digital marketing. More consumers are choosing the internet as their primary marketplace, and small businesses that know how to use digital marketing to maximize their visibility are better positioned to keep their open signs up for years to come.

What Is Digital Marketing and Why Should Small Businesses Use It?

When small businesses begin, their goal will be to get customers through their door – that door could be a physical location or their e-commerce website. Some businesses open without giving much thought to marketing or will be least aware of everything it entails. Marketing has never been straightforward and today, it is even more complicated.

Digital marketing is a term used to describe the various ways in which businesses build visibility and reach out to their target market online. In the simplest terms, it involves any digital strategy that a business uses to spark growth – including SEO, PPC, social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and more.

Businesses today need to know how to reach their audience on the digital platform, and that involves not only understanding consumers behavior but also knowing how to maximize results from multiple digital marketing disciplines. Fortunately, individuals and businesses with a desire to learn Digital Marketing can pursue the course meant for it.

How Google’s Free Tools Help in Creating Brand Awareness

There’s no denying that Google is the driving force of the internet. Yes, other search engines get plenty of traffic of their own, but with Google being down for just 5 minutes caused the global amount of web traffic to drop by 40%. Considering that Google processes about 40,000 searches per second, think about the potential and what it could mean for a small business.

It still takes a lot of work to get noticed on Google, with tens of thousands of searches coming through every second. Not only does a small business need a dedicated approach to digital marketing, but it should also know how to use Google’s tools – many of which are free – for optimizing their brand awareness online.

Google’s free tools are great for small businesses that want to get serious traction out of their digital marketing strategies but are working on a bare bones budget. Knowing what these tools are, and how to use them, helps businesses learn more about the market they’re competing with and how to make it to the top of the heap in Google’s ranking system.

For beginners, Google Analytics is one of the most important free tools that the search engine offer. Google Analytics is essential for analyzing web traffic and uncovering the avenues that are going to connect small business with their target audience.

Then, there are the Google tools that can perform magic for local businesses. For instance, optimizing the Google My Business page or including a Google Map on your website are the two free and easy ways to help the audience connect with local businesses.

Google offers several other free tools like Gmail or perhaps Google mail, Google Voice, Google Drive, Google Docs, and Google Calendar help small businesses get organized and structured by presenting themselves as established and professional companies without no strain to their budget. Knowing how to maximize the performance of these tools goes far in boosting a business’s potential for success online.

How Digital Marketing Is Useful for Small Businesses

Digital marketing performs in multiple levels for small businesses. Generating a boost in traffic and revenue are the primary goals while digital marketing is useful for businesses in many ways. Here are a few most important ones.

Levels the Playing Field

In a world where big box stores can crop up at any moment and pose a threat to local businesses, digital marketing is a way of leveling the playing field and staying competitive. While most of the time, small businesses and large companies aren’t competing directly with each other, the giants can enter the scene and snag away potential customers based on the brand recognition alone.

Digital marketing not only helps small businesses build visibility, but it also puts them in front of the audience that they have a competitive edge with.

Reaches Customers Where They Are

Today’s consumers expect brands to reach out and engage with them in a way that feels purposeful and personal. Traditional marketing is far too broad to accomplish this on its own. Through digital marketing, small businesses learn where to reach their customers in the digital landscape and how to approach them best to initiate a relationship.

Analytics Help Small Businesses Zero in On the Target

With digital marketing, businesses learn more about their audience – which in turn allows them to tailor their marketing message and strategy better. The use of marketing analytics tools provides businesses with insights about how their strategy is performing and how their audience is interacting with it.

For example, you might have distribution numbers from a magazine ad, but it’s impossible to know how many people stopped and looked at that ad or how much time they spent doing it. Take that same ad and put on a digital platform and suddenly there are all types of information to analyze, beginning from demographics to how long they spent engaging with it and what specific behaviors the ad prompted. With each additional insight comes the ability to maximize results.

Exceptional ROI

Money matters, and for small businesses that are operating on a limited budget, digital marketing offers the highest payout  with minimal input. Just as how email marketing comes with an ROI that averages $38 for every $1 spent, digital marketing is also easy to adapt as marketing budgets grow and contract through the seasons of every business’s life.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a small business that wants to understand more about digital marketing to spark growth or an individual who’s looking to build a career in an exciting and growing field, you can go ahead to leverage the benefits of digital marketing. Digital Marketing is continuously evolving, so start adopting it as it has huge potential to help businesses achieve their goals.