Key benefits and importance of digital marketing for small business

Most businesses have, or should have, a website to promote their products or services. A website is a digital shopfront allowing you to always be open for business.

Most customers will undertake online research before making a decision to purchase products and services. If you don’t have a website or other online presence you may be missing out on customers.

If you had to choose between spending all your budget on classic marketing on billboards and magazines, or targeting the right people on social media and using strategic SEO methods to reach your audience, then you should probably opt for the second one

The world has gone digital but too many businesses today are still relying on traditional marketing techniques like newspapers, magazines, telephone books, radio, and TV. This is a problem. Startups and small businesses today can’t afford to be stuck in the 1970s when trying to get their brand, product, or service in front of people. Keeping your customers engaged will require meeting them though their preferred channels. Nothing against TV or radio ads or billboards but the money spent here can be much better spent, for instance, on developing your mobile marketing strategy.

1.Cost-Effective

As mentioned previously, you can work with whatever budget you have, whether this is £0 or £10,000. In comparison to advertising in print which can be very costly to keep the paper/magazine running, advertising on social media and Google may be a cheaper and more effective option.

There are methods such as PPC (pay-per-click) where you only have to pay for each person that clicks through to your website, or options such as sponsored posts, where you can place content on other websites for a fee, hoping that people will click through to your business site.

Plus, you know people aren’t going to throw your advert in the bin and completely ignore it.

2.Targeted

Let’s say that you’re advertising a women’s clothing brand specifically for petite ladies on a billboard. The chances of a woman passing it is just 50% – as the other 50% will be male, and the chances of it being a petite woman are even lower as majority of people that pass could be over 5’3- that’s if they actually bother to look at it of course.

However, marketing your company digitally would mean that you are able to select who sees the advertisement, making sure that it is only seen by those that are genuinely interested. There are many digital marketing tools and options on social platforms such as Facebook that allow you to select the gender, relationship status and geographical locations.

3.Long-term marketing:

If your website ranked higher for certain keywords as per your Search Engine Optimization Strategy then it’s a long-term gain for your business from digital marketing. It’s also if your email marketing campaigns build a strong database of customers then you can use that database for helping other people in a personalized way. Similarly, your social media pages like, shares & positive reviews on your google my listing will provide you long-term benefits. Long-term marketing means here is that you have invested one time in building the presence of your small business then it will remain there.

4.Speedy

If you decide to advertise in your local paper, then you need to wait at least a week for it to be confirmed and for it to run. However, the internet is a pretty clever tool as you can post your latest marketing campaigns at a click of a button.

Digital marketing allows you to instantly spread your news, whether you’ve won an award, you’re doing something great for the community or you’ve got a new innovative product. People want to hear good things and I doubt customers will care about a product launched a month ago as much as they would on the day of the launch.

5.Brings in Organic Traffic

To bring in organic traffic, you don’t need a huge budget. Using relevant keywords that help describe both your business and your product/service will help bring in more traffic directly from search engines. Using strategic SEO can help you climb up the search rankings and increase site traffic.

A company blog can be your place to communicate to customers and an audience, and answer everything that they want to hear. If you keep an eye out on current trends in your sector, then you’ll see what is being talked about in the news and online. Customers often search for longtail terms such as ‘how do I’ and ‘what happens if’ so it would be a great idea to answer these questions in your company blog.

6.Powerful Marketing Tools and Methods:  

Google Ads, Advertising on Facebook, Video Ads on YouTube Videos, Landing page conversion, Search Engine Optimization, content, marketing, and display advertising on niche websites are the greatest, fastest, easiest methods to market any kind of business.

Digital marketing is for everyone. It’s not that only big companies can use the internet for marketing, everyone from a teacher, freelancer, small sellers to home-based businesses, and handicrafts manufacturing everyone can use digital marketing to reach more customers. They just need a digital marketing strategy and skilled team.

7.Easy to scale up according to the responses:

if you’re getting a good conversion rate from search engine ads after investing a small amount then you can invest a big amount for a longer period. You’re not bound to invest everything in once. You can use each platform and digital marketing methods to invest your money. If you’re getting good results from content marketing, you can keep that doing. If you’re getting leads from social media advertising, you can keep that doing. And once you think you want to grow it or shrink the digital efforts, you can do it very easily.

8.Video marketing
Video has become a unique niche of digital marketing due to the viability of video sharing as a means for branding your product. With one billion unique users visiting YouTube each month, the platform has become a critically important and often overlooked channel for publicizing your brand.