It’s common for small-medium businesses to put their main focus on how to get their first customer through the door when they just get started. However, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, small to medium businesses’ practice will never be the same again. The traditional forms of advertising such as print ads, TV, radio, and coupon mailers wouldn’t be possible anymore.
As the internet has become entwined with what we do, there is a better and simpler way for businesses to consider: Digital Marketing.
A Bigger Picture About Digital Marketing
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is a promotion of brand to connect with its potential and existing customer through an electronic device and the internet.
Business can make use of digital channels on the web includes but not limited to search engine, social media, email, or even website to communicate online with its audience.
Businesses shouldn’t forgo or overlook this opportunity regardless of their size because digital marketing has a very wide coverage for their choice, ranging from SEM, SEO, social media marketing, content marketing and more.
In addition, nowadays when someone has an interest towards a specific product/service, the first thing they are going to do is to search online and see what they can find about you.
Reason #1: Be Accessible And Searchable To Your Customers
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
As of 2021, there is a total of 4.72 billion internet users and 4.33 billion of them, which is equivalent to 55% of the world’s total population, are social media users.
In a nutshell, we can say that social media is integrated to everything people does in their daily lives. Whether are they going to do school assignments, to work, to gain entertainment, to shop around, or to hangings out with friend, social media will never be apart from them.
Image is taken from statcounter
Up to 71% of social media users are Facebook users and one of the top reasons people say they’re on social media is to buy products online.
When it comes to buy things online, having both business website and social media platform is a plus because people tend to search product or service information from search engine result page (SERP) before they actually purchase it.
According to 2021 Small Business Website Statistics, 79% of entrepreneurs with a business website are expected to grow at least 25% in the next three to five years.
Image is taken from statcounter
However, having a business website and sharing contents on social media isn’t enough for the growth of your business’s online presence over time. You need a proper social media marketing strategy and a responsive yet well-designed website.
Based on the graph provided by Statcounter, there are up to 55.31% mobile user as compared to 41.46% desktop users worldwide.
Reason #2: Your Competitors Are Already On The Line
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The very first step for your business to be successful is to know and pay attention to what your competitors are doing and learn from them. Place yourself in the position of learners when your competitors have something valuable to teach you.
By referencing the contents that they are using, whether would it be video, graphic, or just blogging, you’ll know what is working and what isn’t working regardless of what industry is your business in.
Oppositely, if you are not competing on digital platforms, you will never know how your competitors communicate with their customers and what makes them to be unique. At the end of the day, you’ll lose against your competitors because your potential customer cannot find your business and they’ll automatically switch to the replacement offered by your competitors instead.
In a nutshell, a website is especially important for businesses in this digital era because most of your competitors are on the web.
Reason #3: Get To Know Your Audience And Make Them As Your Target
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Digital marketing allows you to get know to your audience and what they are hoping to find on web through various analytics tools.
By interacting with people online, you’ll eventually get to know what they are looking for, where is their pain, what is their expectation, and of course, what can you offer them. With digital marketing, you will know the reason why are these people on the web because it offers you tool for finding out who is the one you should target on.
Always communicate with your customers digitally make you become more than just a business, but a trusted partner. Customer will stick to your brand whenever they need a similar product/service because people tend to buy from the same brand that they bought previously.
With digital marketing, you’re also allowed to reach back and retarget those customers who have visited your site with retargeting ads campaign on your business social media platform.
Reason #4: Get To Measure Whether Your Marketing Effort Is Successful
Photo by Stephen Dawson on Unsplash
Most traditional advertising methods like print ads, radios and billboard may take up few months to analyze how an advertising campaign performed. However, with digital campaign, ads performance can always be analyzed within days or even hours with the used of digital marketing tools.
With digital marketing, you can easily access to your customer demographics and other relevant information and how they engage with your website as well as advertising campaign.
Example goal of a digital advertising campaign:
Goal doesn’t need to be complicated and confusing. Here are some examples and what digital marketing metric you should use to monitor and ensure your advertising campaign is working fine and be on track:
- Brand Awareness: Focus on the impression graph and work to keep the cost per thousand (CPM) impressions as low as possible in order to get as much reach as possible.
- Leads Generation: Keep an eye on the click-through-rate (CTR) and conversion rate and optimize both of these as much as possible.
- Online Sales Conversion: For this goal, pay as much attention as possible to the e-commerce sales and cart abandonment rate.
Without a goal to reach, you’ll never know how is your campaign performance. And in order to set a goal, it’s better to start with the end of mind: what is your ultimate expectation as the result of the campaign.
Conclusion:
The group of potential customer that are found online is a much larger group of people than you can attract locally. By using digital marketing for your business, you can reach an enormous audience in both cost effective and measurable way. Zoewebs is recognized as 1 of top b2b marketing and digital advertising agencies in Malaysia.
Are you ready to see how digital marketing can make to enhance your business performance? The team of digital marketing experts at Zoewebs are ready to help you discover the power of digital marketing tactics. Contact us today to get a free digital marketing consultation and our digital marketing team will help to see how you can get started.
