I don’t even have to tell how important marketing is for a business. Without marketing, you can’t tell people about your brand, you can’t sell, and you can’t sustain as a business for long. Some people think that digital marketing is a function performed by big companies only. But they are sorely mistaken. Even roadside shops do marketing. Displaying your products, putting up a signboard, dealing with visitors—all this is marketing.
Now, questioning the importance of digital marketing in the contemporary world is like questioning the relevance of marketing all together. We live in an era where digitalisation has swayed every field possible in some or the other way. Hence, marketing on digital platforms has become crucial for business.
The same misconception exists for online marketing as it does for traditional marketing—it is not for small businesses. While the fact is that it is all the more important for small and medium businesses than for already well-established big companies. In order to sustain and grow business in the current highly-digitalised world, it is important for small businesses to market on digital platforms. In this article, I will talk elaborately about why we need digital marketing for small businesses.
Small businesses need digital marketing for the following reasons
Below, I have curated a list of some of the many ways in which digital marketing benefits small and medium enterprises.
1. A pocket friendly method of marketing
Small businesses start with limited seed money and hence very less to nothing to spare for marketing. Marketing on digital platforms is simply way cost effective and even free of cost at times.
A general perception (or better say misconception) outside the ecommerce world is that marketing on internet and other digital platforms is expensive. Well, it is exactly opposite. Traditional methods of marketing can put a great dent on your budget while one can start with digital marketing without spending a single penny. In fact, you can still market your brand on digital media even if your business doesn’t have an official brick-and-mortar establishment.
For example, many people sell homemade chocolates online.
And in fact, if your business grows and you decide to invest in online marketing, there are many competitive digital agencies that can give you a great value for your money and take your business to a whole new level.
2. Better targeting
Proper targeting is a fundamental function of marketing. If you market your brand randomly to anyone you can find in your way, you will end up with a disappointing return on investment. And not to mention, your time, efforts, and money will be wasted. Therefore, it is crucial to identify your target audience and market your brand accordingly.
Search engine optimization is one of the building blocks of digital marketing. With this, you can improve your reach and visibility on the internet without having to pay hefty amounts for paid marketing.
Millions of people run internet search regarding various products and services on Google every day. SEO helps you make sure that your website appears in the top results organically.
In fact, there are many SEO agencies in India and across the globe that can help your business attain higher visibility and reach on search engines. This will eventually improve your conversion rates and maximize profit, plus brand recognition.
Email marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing, social media marketing, etc. are some of the ways you can refine customer targeting.
3. Create brand awareness
Since I have left the last point at “brand recognition”, let’s talk a bit more about how digital marketing can help you with that.
Events of 2020 have almost killed the physical market space. (I’m not saying it’s totally gone, but it has shrank substantially.) While online shopping has been gaining popularity increasingly from a past few years, 2020 has accelerated the change like anything.
In fact, people are now more comfortable engaging with businesses on digital platforms than in real life. The absence of you brand on the internet and other digital platform is quite close to having to none at all. Hence, it is now all the more important to marketing your brand on online channels.
If your business is restricted to its brick-and-mortar presence, you’d be at the mercy of people passing by your establishment. In fact, you may lose a chunk of potential leads from such visitors as well if your business doesn’t have an online presence. This is because consumers are now more comfortable with researching a business on the internet than doing so in the physical market space.
Therefore, create brand awareness for your small business by digitalising your marketing system.
4. Effectively monitor performance and get measurable results
Needless to say, monitoring performance and obtaining measureable results is important in marketing. It helps you identify your strengths and a weakness which further helps your business improve.
Monitoring performance of traditional marketing methods is often difficult. Also, it generally provides vague (and at times even misleading) results. Not to mention, these results are hard to measure. The point being, offline marketing reports generally do not communicate much meaning. And hence, it gets difficult to identify problems and improve.
Digital marketing, on the other hand, provides meaningful and measureable results that can help you optimize your marketing program. There are various software solutions to measure and monitor the efficiency of different functions of digital marketing paradigm.
From paid search to social media campaigns, SEO, and so on—there are a number of tools that can help you monitor your marketing elements on digital platforms.
5. Maximize profits
Due all the benefits mentioned above, digital marketing helps in maximizing profit. Just like traditional marketing, profit earning lies at the heart of the digital marketing objectives. The only difference is that the latter has more profitable outcomes.
Apparently, with refined targeting, increased brand awareness, and the better understanding of your business’s strengths and weaknesses, you will be able to optimize lead generation. This in turn will eventually improve your conversion rates and you will be earning higher profits.
Moreover, since you won’t have to spend too much on marketing, you will save more money for core the functions of your business. This way, small businesses can maximize profit-earning with digital marketing.
Key Takeaway
Small businesses generally start out with limited capital and hence don’t have much to spend on marketing. This is why; digital marketing is better suited than traditional marketing for such businesses. Along with that, you can increase brand awareness, target better, and improve with the aid of measureable results and effective monitoring. Eventually, your small business will be able to earn higher profits. So, if your small business doesn’t have any presence on the digital marketplace yet, it’s time it should.
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