Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses l Parkfield Commerce
You started your business to help people. You created a product to solve their problems and make their life easier. Great job! Give yourself a pat on the back, you deserve it.
Now here comes the fun part: selling your product. There are hundreds of ways to do it, but in today’s increasingly online world, one takes the crown: digital marketing.
What makes digital marketing so special?
Its cost-to-effectiveness ratio.
You can start with a specific budget and then adjust it as your business grows.
And when you have a well-designed digital marketing strategy that engages your target audience, the profits roll in and you can even scale your business and marketing budget to match your momentum.
Sound too good to be true?
Nope!
Here’s why:
Why is digital marketing important for a small business?
To keep a business running, you have to make a profit by increasing sales and decreasing costs. But your product won’t sell itself...at least not when nobody knows about it.
By leveraging the power of digital marketing, you can reach your ideal customers and offer them the perfect solution for their problems - no matter how small your business is.
Everybody’s gotta start somewhere!
With the right strategy in place, digital marketing boosts your profits, which you can then reinvest into improving your product and scaling your business growth.
Ready to boost your small business with expert digital marketing strategies?
Benefits of digital marketing for small businesses
Let’s now look more in depth at how digital marketing impacts business growth and performance. What do you actually get out of digital marketing? And how can it bring your business to the next level?
Here are the major benefits of digital marketing for small businesses:
- Higher conversion rates
Digital marketing done right boosts your profits.
Take an ad for a plumbing service, for example. Running it on television is pointless: how many people will see your ad on TV and think “Hey that’s exactly what I need!” and call you? Zero? Yeah...
Now compare this to the power of Google Ads. Someone needs a plumber and your website appears in their Google search results. Someone needs you, and you conveniently appear when they look for your service.
Which situation is more likely to net you a sale? And which one is cheaper? You can probably guess correctly without our answer.
- More targeted customers
As opposed to the highly ineffective, mass market TV ad approach, digital marketing enables you to pinpoint your marketing campaigns on those who need your product the most and are most likely to purchase.
Want to sell dog collars? Then promote an article teaching your ideal customer everything they need to know about choosing and buying dog collars. You might try running Facebook ads targeting dog owners, pet supply stores, and dog trainers. Whichever route you take, targeting the RIGHT customers drives down your business costs significantly and improves your profits.
- Higher profits through optimization
Digital marketing is way more cost-effective than traditional marketing, which means you’ll have higher margins on your sales. It provides a better ROI (Return On Investment) than any other marketing channel - but that only happens in tandem with the right optimization strategy.
As we mentioned above, you can start small and then scale your efforts as your business grows. This “scalability” comes when you refine and tweak your marketing strategy to consistently increase your conversions and reduce costs, otherwise known as optimization.
- Increased brand awareness and customer confidence
Today’s customers do a lot of research online before buying. Through digital marketing, you can demonstrate your product’s features, your brand’s values, and what differentiates you from your competitors.
If customers know they can easily engage with your business from all touchpoints, it’s much easier to win their trust, which is the best currency in today’s digital landscape.
- Gives you a competitive edge
In business, momentum is important and having a well-oiled sales and marketing machine makes everything easier. With consistent conversions, you can reinvest the generated profits into your business and let it snowball from there.
If your competitors aren’t doing digital marketing, or are doing it poorly, they’ll end up losing a lot of customers to you.
- Augments your customer service
Improving your online visibility makes it easy for people to find answers on their own. They won’t need to contact your customer service to find out more about your business.
This reduces inquiries about your product, so your customer service can focus on helping the customers who need it.
- Drives company growth
By engaging with the market, you gain valuable insight into your product. Do people like it? Do they wish it was different?
Digital marketing enables you to learn about how people are reacting to your offering, and how to improve it (hint, hint again on the importance of “optimization”). Creating products and services that your ideal audience is asking for is a surefire way to grow your business.
Digital marketing tips for small businesses
There are a million different things you can do in digital marketing. It is a vast and complex field, but there are some best practices you can follow to improve the way you engage with your customers online.
Here are a few tips you can implement today to improve your marketing campaigns drastically:
- Know your audience
You know your product better than anyone else. Leverage this knowledge and consider whose life you can make easier by selling them your products.
Start by creating your ideal customer persona and ask yourself the following:
- Is your ideal customer a man or a woman? Or both?
- Do they have children?
- Do they work in certain fields?
- Where do they live?
- How much money do they make?
- What language do they speak?
- How old are they?
- What are their values, hobbies, and interests?
You can (and should) dig deeper. Knowing your audience also helps you personalize your campaigns, which in turn boosts sales.
- Understand and map their buyers’ journey
The buyer’s journey is the process your customers go through when they realize they have a problem and look for its solution.
Think about how you can help them at every stage of their journey and then turn this into your marketing strategy. If you offer them advice and help them, they’ll see you as a trustworthy and reliable expert, which makes it more likely for them to purchase your product.
- Aim to always serve, educate, and entertain your audience
People buy things from people they like. So how do you get your audience to like you?
Start by creating valuable content.
You don’t need enormous investments to create great content, just a willingness to ask the right questions, experiment, and assess if your efforts are paying off.
Make videos and articles that are genuinely helpful to your audience.
For example, if you sell a woodworking tool, you could create videos on how to use your tool to make a workbench, a table, or a chair.
Keep the content relevant to your audience’s interests and make it helpful, and you’re well on your way to marketing success.
- Engage with your community
Show your audience you care about them. Engage with them on social media, share their stories, and answer their questions.
Your customers are your best brand ambassadors. Treat them poorly and they’ll talk poorly about your business. Treat them well and they will repay you with loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing.
- Know when to collaborate with a digital marketing agency
While it isn’t hard to get started in digital marketing, creating successful campaigns requires knowledge and experience. You can do it by yourself, but it will take lots of time and tests before you can produce consistent results, and you risk ruining your business image in the process.
The right marketing agency and business growth partner saves you time and money by creating the best possible marketing campaigns for your business and customers.
Take your business to the next level with digital marketing, see how we can help you
Parkfield Commerce: a digital marketing agency for small businesses
Your business is our passion. We specialize in helping small businesses like yours thrive in an increasingly competitive online environment.
When you work with us, you get the flexibility you need for your business. We understand small businesses can change overnight, and we are equipped to deal with that.
There is no one-size-fits-all marketing plan. That’s why we’re committed to offer you a tailored solution that perfectly fits your business needs and your vision.
Don’t take our word for it, check out these case studies to see how we helped brands grow.
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