In this blog, let us understand how digital marketing can help small and midsize businesses to grow digitally. There are many benefits to using the digital marketing process for businesses of any size, but in the case of smaller and medium-sized enterprises, there are particular advantages there. While big companies have more resources and may be able to spend more on marketing and advertising, smaller businesses have to be much more strategic about their marketing efforts. Digital marketing can help level the playing field by providing different tools that every business can use, regardless of its size.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a broad term encompassing many different online marketing strategies. It is simply a process of promoting products or services through online means such as websites, social media platforms, search engines, email, and other forms of online media. There are two main approaches to digital marketing: inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound and Outbound marketing:
Inbound Marketing:
Inbound marketing occurs when a prospect finds you through various online channels like blogs, social media, and your website. The more people come across your content on different digital platforms, the better chance they’ll buy something from you based on an online reputation!
Outbound Marketing:
In contrast, outbound marketing happens when you reach out to a customer directly through paid advertising or an email list you’ve built. Digital marketing comprises three core pillars: owned, paid, and earned media. Let’s take a look at each one individually.
Owned Media:
Content that you have direct control over is called owned media. It includes your website, social media profiles, and email campaigns. These are the in-house channels that you own and have direct control over.
Paid Media:
Paid media is the opposite of owned or earned media to help drive traffic to your owned properties. Paid media is any channel you pay to promote your brand or company. It can include online ads (Google AdWords) or offline ads (like billboards).
Earned Media:
Earned media is free! Earned media is any channel where consumers share information about your brand or product without compensation from your company. It can include activities like Yelp reviews, Facebook comments, and blog posts from other people who write about your products. Digital channels used in the above three media are called digital channels. Let us understand in detail about each channel.
Website:
Based on your business goal and digital strategy, have an online presence by building a website identical to your business name. The website name is called a domain name in technical terms. Similar to coming to a physical shop, visitors will enter your website name to reach your website using the internet browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Your website is to be built and showcased based on your product types. There is no written rule to build a website. But your website should give a better User Experience (UX) to your visitors. Hence your website should showcase your products or services, get leads and sell goods or services (e-commerce) online. Due to the COVID pandemic, online ordering usage has increased. As consumer behavior changes in certain groups of customers, it’s advisable to have your online presence. As per recent data, in 2021, 140 billion USD were invested through venture capital in digital shopping businesses globally! Think of competition and imagine your business position in the next five years to survive in front of digital giants!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technical word. The buyer searches for particular products or services on the internet are called Keywords. The website they use to search is called search engines (famous ones are Google, Bing, and Yahoo). As of date, there are more than 100,589 searches per second done on Google each day! The content on various websites gets matched by search engines criteria such as keywords, user-friendly site (better UX), tags, and link titles. Matching websites shown as a search result is called the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When your website gets listed on the search result is called an organic search result (unpaid or free listing). You are not required to pay any amount to the search engine provider as your content matches with keywords and matches the criteria set by the search engine provider.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC):
There is an option to show your website link as part of paid advertising in search engine results and on search engine sponsored links. When a searcher clicks on your website link, you need to pay a fee. It’s like buying visits to your website.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the opposite of search engine optimization (SEO) since it is a paid service to list your website on the top portion of the search result. To be successful on SEM, you need SEM expertise to help this process as matching keywords to be maintained to list your website. SEM is an umbrella of SEO and PPC.
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
As per recent data, around 4.62 billion users are on Social Media (SM) platforms. So, choose the right SM platform to target the right audience at the right time. It’s wise to use relevant Social Media to promote your business products or services where your business persona exists maximum. Say TikTok may not be the right SM platform for a Marketing Consulting agency. It can be on Facebook or/and LinkedIn. Moreover, the SM account is free, and you can set up your business page and keep posting regularly about your products or services and promotional offers. Periodically sharing the right content on SM would influence your current and new customers (video ad, promo flyer, text). Regular posting and monitoring of social media is part of the responsibility of the Social Media Management process. Boosting/promoting your content to the right audience will yield various commercial benefits to your business, such as creating brand awareness, collecting leads, and sales conversion. SMM helps interact with customers virtually and hear their interests, conversations, and current trends.
Video Marketing:
Create a video to tell your brand story on why you started your business and what problems you are solving. According to analysts, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words! Create a simple, short, and attractive series of videos to showcase your products/services and testimony from your existing customers to share their experiences with you. Share these videos on your website, social media pages, and YouTube.
Email Marketing:
Email to be used for marketing your products or services, including periodic promotional offers to the current and prospective customers who subscribe to receive the newsletter. Sending customized emails to customers will establish a better relationship. Sending an email to customers to remind them about an abandoned cart might increase the sale where they added products or services to their shopping cart but did not check out. This way, it reminds or can influence customers to make the purchase decision.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing is the heart of successful digital marketing. Create content for various purposes based on your digital strategy. Use content for one time for unique promotion, reuse it for seasonal promotions), or repurpose it on multiple digital platforms. Contents can be in different forms such as text, email, pictures, video, or audio. The blog is also part of content marketing to brief your product or services offered. Contents that you create should engage your customers as they are the consumer of your content as well.
Digital Marketing Benefits:
Digital marketing has several benefits for small and mid-sized businesses:
Measurable results: With digital marketing, you can track how people interact with your ads and website through analytics software. It makes it much easier to see what’s working and what isn’t so you can improve your campaigns over time.
Targeted: While traditional advertising targets a broad audience, digital marketing allows you to target specific demographics of people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.
Worldwide visibility: Your website, social media pages, and blogs can be seen by anyone worldwide as these are available on the internet. You may get international business inquiries if your products or services solve problems beyond international territory.
Versatile: With digital marketing, you have the freedom to create engaging content.
Cost-effective: Digital marketing has a lower initial investment than traditional marketing. You no longer have to spend money on printing, mailing, or gas costs. Plus, the results of your campaigns are much easier to track with digital marketing than traditional methods.
How much do I need to spend on Digital Marketing?
Basic Digital Marketing: If you are running a small business or startup, you need to allocate a budget to spend on digital platforms to build a website and boost/ad on your social media pages regularly.
Intermediate Digital Marketing: If you are running a midsize business, you can spend on SEM, including SEO, PPC, and basic digital marketing activities.
Advanced Digital Marketing: Large enterprises having high revenue can spend more money on digital marketing doing activities mentioned in primary and intermediate with advanced digital strategy to reach customers in all massive digital channels.
How can I create a digital marketing strategy?
• Write down what you want to achieve in the short term and the long term using digital platforms. It could be building a website to have online sales, showcase your products or service online, or get leads online to make prospective customers visit your shop or get calls. • Identify who is your potential customer (persona) and analyze popular social media digital platforms where most of them are available and active. Choose digital channels accordingly. • List out how you want to measure your result on digital channels usage. Say more visitors to your website, online sales, more likes on your SM pages and posts, and spread the word by sharing your post on SM. • Have a plan to adjust your goal during the digital journey to boost when it works more than expected and reduce where it’s not giving the desired result.
Conclusion: As digital is part of our daily life, it’s encouraged to use digital platforms to promote your business to achieve your desired goal. It’s not too late to start, but don’t be behind the digital race, as large companies are already on all digital channels and dominating! Make your presence online soon, be a competitor on the market, and keep using trending digital platforms to be closer with your customers to accelerate your digital growth.
Which digital marketing channel works best for your business, and where do you need expertise? Leave your comments.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a broad term encompassing many different online marketing strategies. It is simply a process of promoting products or services through online means such as websites, social media platforms, search engines, email, and other forms of online media. There are two main approaches to digital marketing: inbound and outbound marketing.
Inbound and Outbound marketing:
Inbound Marketing:
Inbound marketing occurs when a prospect finds you through various online channels like blogs, social media, and your website. The more people come across your content on different digital platforms, the better chance they’ll buy something from you based on an online reputation!
Outbound Marketing:
In contrast, outbound marketing happens when you reach out to a customer directly through paid advertising or an email list you’ve built. Digital marketing comprises three core pillars: owned, paid, and earned media. Let’s take a look at each one individually.
Owned Media:
Content that you have direct control over is called owned media. It includes your website, social media profiles, and email campaigns. These are the in-house channels that you own and have direct control over.
Paid Media:
Paid media is the opposite of owned or earned media to help drive traffic to your owned properties. Paid media is any channel you pay to promote your brand or company. It can include online ads (Google AdWords) or offline ads (like billboards).
Earned Media:
Earned media is free! Earned media is any channel where consumers share information about your brand or product without compensation from your company. It can include activities like Yelp reviews, Facebook comments, and blog posts from other people who write about your products. Digital channels used in the above three media are called digital channels. Let us understand in detail about each channel.
Website:
Based on your business goal and digital strategy, have an online presence by building a website identical to your business name. The website name is called a domain name in technical terms. Similar to coming to a physical shop, visitors will enter your website name to reach your website using the internet browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera. Your website is to be built and showcased based on your product types. There is no written rule to build a website. But your website should give a better User Experience (UX) to your visitors. Hence your website should showcase your products or services, get leads and sell goods or services (e-commerce) online. Due to the COVID pandemic, online ordering usage has increased. As consumer behavior changes in certain groups of customers, it’s advisable to have your online presence. As per recent data, in 2021, 140 billion USD were invested through venture capital in digital shopping businesses globally! Think of competition and imagine your business position in the next five years to survive in front of digital giants!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technical word. The buyer searches for particular products or services on the internet are called Keywords. The website they use to search is called search engines (famous ones are Google, Bing, and Yahoo). As of date, there are more than 100,589 searches per second done on Google each day! The content on various websites gets matched by search engines criteria such as keywords, user-friendly site (better UX), tags, and link titles. Matching websites shown as a search result is called the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). When your website gets listed on the search result is called an organic search result (unpaid or free listing). You are not required to pay any amount to the search engine provider as your content matches with keywords and matches the criteria set by the search engine provider.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC):
There is an option to show your website link as part of paid advertising in search engine results and on search engine sponsored links. When a searcher clicks on your website link, you need to pay a fee. It’s like buying visits to your website.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the opposite of search engine optimization (SEO) since it is a paid service to list your website on the top portion of the search result. To be successful on SEM, you need SEM expertise to help this process as matching keywords to be maintained to list your website. SEM is an umbrella of SEO and PPC.
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
As per recent data, around 4.62 billion users are on Social Media (SM) platforms. So, choose the right SM platform to target the right audience at the right time. It’s wise to use relevant Social Media to promote your business products or services where your business persona exists maximum. Say TikTok may not be the right SM platform for a Marketing Consulting agency. It can be on Facebook or/and LinkedIn. Moreover, the SM account is free, and you can set up your business page and keep posting regularly about your products or services and promotional offers. Periodically sharing the right content on SM would influence your current and new customers (video ad, promo flyer, text). Regular posting and monitoring of social media is part of the responsibility of the Social Media Management process. Boosting/promoting your content to the right audience will yield various commercial benefits to your business, such as creating brand awareness, collecting leads, and sales conversion. SMM helps interact with customers virtually and hear their interests, conversations, and current trends.
Video Marketing:
Create a video to tell your brand story on why you started your business and what problems you are solving. According to analysts, one minute of video is worth 1.8 million words! Create a simple, short, and attractive series of videos to showcase your products/services and testimony from your existing customers to share their experiences with you. Share these videos on your website, social media pages, and YouTube.
Email Marketing:
Email to be used for marketing your products or services, including periodic promotional offers to the current and prospective customers who subscribe to receive the newsletter. Sending customized emails to customers will establish a better relationship. Sending an email to customers to remind them about an abandoned cart might increase the sale where they added products or services to their shopping cart but did not check out. This way, it reminds or can influence customers to make the purchase decision.
Content Marketing:
Content marketing is the heart of successful digital marketing. Create content for various purposes based on your digital strategy. Use content for one time for unique promotion, reuse it for seasonal promotions), or repurpose it on multiple digital platforms. Contents can be in different forms such as text, email, pictures, video, or audio. The blog is also part of content marketing to brief your product or services offered. Contents that you create should engage your customers as they are the consumer of your content as well.
Digital Marketing Benefits:
Digital marketing has several benefits for small and mid-sized businesses:
Measurable results: With digital marketing, you can track how people interact with your ads and website through analytics software. It makes it much easier to see what’s working and what isn’t so you can improve your campaigns over time.
Targeted: While traditional advertising targets a broad audience, digital marketing allows you to target specific demographics of people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.
Worldwide visibility: Your website, social media pages, and blogs can be seen by anyone worldwide as these are available on the internet. You may get international business inquiries if your products or services solve problems beyond international territory.
Versatile: With digital marketing, you have the freedom to create engaging content.
Cost-effective: Digital marketing has a lower initial investment than traditional marketing. You no longer have to spend money on printing, mailing, or gas costs. Plus, the results of your campaigns are much easier to track with digital marketing than traditional methods.
How much do I need to spend on Digital Marketing?
Basic Digital Marketing: If you are running a small business or startup, you need to allocate a budget to spend on digital platforms to build a website and boost/ad on your social media pages regularly.
Intermediate Digital Marketing: If you are running a midsize business, you can spend on SEM, including SEO, PPC, and basic digital marketing activities.
Advanced Digital Marketing: Large enterprises having high revenue can spend more money on digital marketing doing activities mentioned in primary and intermediate with advanced digital strategy to reach customers in all massive digital channels.
How can I create a digital marketing strategy?
• Write down what you want to achieve in the short term and the long term using digital platforms. It could be building a website to have online sales, showcase your products or service online, or get leads online to make prospective customers visit your shop or get calls. • Identify who is your potential customer (persona) and analyze popular social media digital platforms where most of them are available and active. Choose digital channels accordingly. • List out how you want to measure your result on digital channels usage. Say more visitors to your website, online sales, more likes on your SM pages and posts, and spread the word by sharing your post on SM. • Have a plan to adjust your goal during the digital journey to boost when it works more than expected and reduce where it’s not giving the desired result.
Conclusion: As digital is part of our daily life, it’s encouraged to use digital platforms to promote your business to achieve your desired goal. It’s not too late to start, but don’t be behind the digital race, as large companies are already on all digital channels and dominating! Make your presence online soon, be a competitor on the market, and keep using trending digital platforms to be closer with your customers to accelerate your digital growth.
Which digital marketing channel works best for your business, and where do you need expertise? Leave your comments.
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