Everyone wants their company to be successful and reach their business and marketing goals, but if you work for a small or medium-size business your marketing budget is usually limited. You may want to start an all-out marketing campaign for your company, but unless your last name is Rockefeller (or Kardashian for those who don’t get the reference), your business probably doesn’t have the money.
This is where digital marketing comes in. Digital marketing utilizes social media, email and the internet to accomplish marketing activities for a fraction of the price of traditional marketing and with more accuracy. The beauty of digital marketing is that any business, no matter what size, can do it and use the same basic tools. Obviously, the way you use the tools all comes down to implementation, but when used correctly, digital marketing can help you reach your business goals and more. Here are 7 reasons digital marketing is vital for your business:
- Access to the Same Tools as Much Larger Companies
Remember the kids in school who always had the newest and greatest toys and you always wanted to be them? Well, guess what. You’re still not them. The same thing goes for those big companies with large budgets. You want to do everything they’re doing and be like them, but you simply don’t have the budget to do so. Digital marketing helps to even the playing field and puts your business almost on the same level as the big companies because you have the same resources they do. Sure, they may spend more on Facebook and Google ads, but you can create the same awareness about your company, find your audience and compete in broader areas. Just because you don’t have the budget the big companies do for a massive marketing campaign, doesn’t mean that you can’t use the same tools with digital marketing to be successful.
- Set Your Company Apart and Become Personable with Social Media
The one size fits all advertisement doesn’t generally work today. Being a smaller company, you have to speak to your audience like they’re your neighbor. People want something that speaks directly to them. You’re more likely to listen to someone who you know and trust. Someone who seems to understand you and knows what you like and dislike. This is where social media enters the picture. Facebook, LinkedIn and number of other social media platforms allow you to pick a specific audience to talk to. If you are targeting joggers aged 18-34 in the Milwaukee area, you can make those selections and your ads will be seen by those who fit that demographic. You can tailor your ads specifically for them. You can also create more of a voice and personality for your company with social media. Instead of just being seen as a faceless business like the larger companies, you can seem almost like a friend with posts about or directed at your audience. Make things personal by engaging with your audience when someone comments on a social media post and encourage them to “like” or “follow” your page or product. A “like” or “follow” is just another step in building a relationship and trust with your audience and when someone does “like” or “follow” your page, their friends see it on social media and that can create a whole new relationship with a whole new person.
- Target Email Marketing Works
We all get a lot of emails from a lot of places. But, if the email doesn’t apply to you, you’re just deleting it right away. Larger companies will just blanket an area with emails and not actually look at who they are actually sending it too. As a smaller company, you want to reach a certain group of people who want or need to hear from you and have them read your messages. Many email marketing platforms allow you to track the actions of the recipients. You can tell who opened the email and which links they clicked on and create targeted email campaigns based upon the actions people have on your website. You could follow up with them by sending automated emails based on their actions on the previous email. From there, you know what they like or what they’re looking for and you can put that personalized message right in their inbox. And, if a person finds the email valuable, they can forward it on to another and another. How many times do you hear if “someone got that email with that one deal” and they’ll “forward it over to you?” You can get quite a few marketing miles off of a nicely written email campaign plan.
- Costs Less Than Traditional Marketing
Do you know how much a super bowl ad costs? Okay, that might be over the top, but television, radio, billboards and print ads are all pretty pricey, they normally pre-charge for an incremental period of time and you can’t really be sure what you’re getting from the deal. Larger companies don’t have to worry as much about their budget so they can spend the cash on a variety of marketing platforms. To get the most bang for your buck and see results, look to social media, email marketing or Google Ad campaigns. Each one of these digital marketing platforms allows you to reach the exact audience you are looking for by entering the demographics you are looking for into their database. You can also see exactly how your ads are performing in real-time and adjust them accordingly. So even if a campaign is performing poorly, you can catch it at the right time and change things up. And, with most digital campaigns, they don’t charge you for a quarterly or monthly total at the beginning, so you’re not stuck with the bill if you caught your declining campaign at the right time.
- Measuring Results Improves Marketing Strategies
You never really know how many people saw that billboard you put up and the whole thing could’ve just been a waste of money, but you can tell exactly how many people clicked on your Facebook ad or how much time someone spent on your webpage by looking at a few analytics. From email opens, to links clicked, and page views, digital marketing platforms track almost everything. These platforms have special areas devoted just to analytics to tell you what you need to know. From analytics, you can determine what part of your campaign is failing. If you’re running an email campaign and have a low open rate, you can try changing the subject line up. If you’re running a social media campaign and have link clicks but a low time spent on your webpage, you can change your webpage content up. Each analytic helps to mold your campaign and tell you exactly what is working and what isn’t. You can then determine what to do with your overall strategy. If social media is more effective for a client, push social. If Google Ads is working, push Google Ads. You can tell exactly where your marketing campaign is by utilizing measurable results.
- Make Stronger Campaigns with A/B testing
Which social media ad should you run? Which one performs better? The big companies may not care much, but you need to. Thanks to analytics you can easily do A/B testing with your two ads and quickly see which one performs better. Once you determine which one is yielding the best results, you can go and just run that one ad. Or, better yet run a number of ads that are pushing out high results and cut the ones that aren’t performing. Think of it as getting rid of the weakest link.
- Focus On Bigger Picture Items with Marketing Automation
There’s only so much time in the day, you have a massive number of tasks to do and you don’t have the marketing staff to help you complete everything. No worries here! That’s where marketing automation steps in. Marketing automation allows you to utilize a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to automate a plethora of tasks for a project. Want to send your audience a special email on their birthday? Send an automatic reply to someone requesting information on your product? Don’t worry, it’s covered. With the right CRM system, you can quickly and easily change a couple of settings and it’s taken care of. Now instead of adding that attachment and manually sending the same message to everyone who inquires on a form on your page, you can set the system to cruise control and move on to the big picture.
If you are already using digital marketing ask yourself, are you doing everything on the list above? If your email marketing is successful are you ready for a more advanced software like a CRM system to help automate tasks? Have you measured your results to find the best possible digital marketing strategy?
While your current marketing strategy may be working well, you can always add more to it by utilizing digital marketing tools. Leveling the playing field with competitors, creating a personal relationship with your audience, having measurable results and overall cost efficiency are just a few reasons why your company needs to be using digital marketing. Digital marketing gives you the tools to be successful and if you’re not using them, your company could be missing out.
Want to learn more? Join our FREE webinar on Tuesday, October 6th, 2020 at 11:00 AM to learn how to utilize Google Adwords. RSVP here.