Are you wondering how your small business can connect with more people for free or for a low cost?
There are an endless number of digital marketing strategies out there for you but which one is best?
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all approach and be warned, all of these tactics will take time, research, learning (and unlearning what you may have thought to be true or effective before).
As a small business owner, you’ll need clarity before jumping into digital marketing and determine what your particular business requires, and most importantly, what you can do to provide the most value to your customers.
Let’s go over some of the advantages you have as a small business.
Advantages That Small Businesses Have Over Larger Ones
- Small businesses have a quicker response time to customer services; hence problems can be solved, and responses offered very quickly due to a shorter chain of command.
- A small business has the flexibility to change, manipulate and bend the rules depending on necessity at that particular time, unlike a large company that is stuck in a predicament of legalities and policies.
- Large businesses tend to only focus on highly searched content dependent on their services, whereas small businesses have a chance to hone in on their niche and focus on it. (let this be a key takeaway!)
- Small businesses can give time, and personal attention to their customers since their customer service can change the rules and make decisions depending on who they are serving, unlike in a large company where the approach is standardized.
Small businesses are geared towards change with due time because of their small size.
Changes have better reach and require less training, unlike large companies that require a lot of money, effort, and time to enact small changes due to their large size and complex organizational structure.
- Small businesses have a flat structure meaning there is easy communication. There is often a single point of contact by the business to its customers, unlike large companies where a customer goes through multiple agents before receiving a service.
- Most small businesses are specialists, hence their small nature and can do well in overlooked or under-serviced tasks by most large companies. It gives the business a competitive edge over the large companies forming the competition.
Does Digital Marketing Work for All Businesses?
The answer is yes. Digital marketing can work for any business regardless of its industry or size.
Digital marketing is an excellent tool for any business as it allows the owners to reach a larger audience and provide information to the customers. With a strong marketing strategy, digital marketing is achieved relatively quickly.
The concept of digital marketing has an overall generalized idea, but it is not to say that every business should implement the same digital marketing strategy.
Being unique is what sets your company apart from another based on the plan.
It Can Help Your Business Attain a Global Reach
Digital marketing lets your small business reach new and larger markets to trade across the globe at a small investment cost.
It helps you in growing your customer base.
With digital marketing, you can achieve a competitive edge at both the local and global levels.
A target market needs to be selected, and a detailed objective of the marketing strategy is incorporated for you to take advertising to a worldwide level.
It Helps You Understand Your Target Audience
Digital marketing provides the opportunity to engage with your prospects.
With the proper digital marketing techniques, one can quickly know what the customers want.
One way to attain this is by running a survey and paying attention to the customer’s responses.
The customer’s feedback can be a basis in developing your products and services.
In this way, the business develops relationships quickly with its potential customers, thereby becoming a trusted partner.
It Allows For Your Customers To Easily Reach You
Digital marketing is considered a way that makes your businesses’ products and services accessible to the individuals seeking them.
It helps to increase the entire scope of your business behind its walls.
The customers can reach you easily as digital marketing creates an atmosphere where customers can contact the business at any particular point in time.
Potential customers who cannot get you can still purchase products from your business through online stores.
Idea: Create a free livechat or chatbot connected to your website!
It Helps You Build Long-Lasting Customer Relationships
Marketing is exceedingly beneficial to a business as it boosts sales and helps your small business grow and remain afloat.
Digital marketing helps develop these long-term relationships with potential customers, which allows in repeat business by creating a pool of loyal customers.
Exposure comes in handy when customers refer your company to other people, increasing sales and the number of loyal customers.
Digital marketing builds relationships by methods such as customer surveys, feedback, communication, and customer satisfaction.
It Helps You Generate Higher Conversion Rates
Having effective digital marketing techniques and a website will help to increase your conversion rates.
With a website, a customer is only one click away from purchasing without physically visiting your store.
They can buy at the comfort of their own homes. Through digital marketing, a business can reach out to its target audience and generate leads to increase its conversion rates.
Digital Marketing Saves You Money (it’s Cheaper)
On average, the marketing budget of a small business is usually proportionate to its current size.
Digital marketing advertising is 40% cheaper compared to other traditional advertising methods.
A well-planned digital marketing campaign managed properly can help a business reach the right customers in a short time at minimal financial costs.
Digital marketing lends a hand to businesses to minimize expenses while promoting products and services.
It Helps You Take Advantage of Social Media Marketing
There is an increasing number of social media platforms such as; Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in the world today.
When used properly, your business can hit the headlines by helping people with the right content with great quality.
Social media can shape a user’s decisions, preferences, choices, and opinions in any subject.
Digital marketing on social media platforms will depend on the type of product or service requiring promotion and how to reach an interested target audience.
Example:
One thing your small business can do is not worry about ‘big’ influencers.
According to studies, micro-influencers (influencers with 1,000 – 10,000 followers) have the highest engagement rates.
They will also be less expensive to work with.
Perform a bit of research, check their engagement with their followers and assess how well they might be able to help you connect with your ideal customers!
It Allows Competition With Other Corporations
Traditional marketing strategies require a large operating budget to achieve more desirable business growth, and competition with large businesses that can afford these expenses is not easy.
However, through digital marketing, small businesses and startups can get a much higher return rate at a lower cost since digital marketing allows a company of any size to become noticeable and grow in any location across the globe.
The online world will enable one to create and operate an online platform such as an online store, to interact with the customers regardless of location.
This way, you can improve your business with high-quality, fast services that will give you an edge to compete with larger companies at little costs.
It Enables You To Provide Real-Time Customer Service
In any business structure, customer service is essential as it is vital in helping to establish a thriving market presence.
Fast and easy communication brings about credibility and trust, meaning your business will become reliable and shared with others.
Traditional marketing methods offer no practical way to connect businesses and customers directly.
Therefore, most businesses benefit from how digital marketing allows them to interact effectively with their customers.
It Helps Your Business to Stay Competitive
Digital marketing has become a vital marketing strategy that every business should engage in.
A business that fails to use digital marketing will always fall behind the competitors.
Healthy competition is required for any market to grow; hence your business should create marketing strategies that favor your needs and strengths.
A business needs to attain a competitive advantage by paying attention to competitors’ marketing strategies to acquire an edge. Knowing what your competitors are doing will help you determine which design ideas are working and which ones are not.
One Thing That You Shouldn’t Ignore as a Small Business Owner: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an on-going process. As mentioned above in the previous sections, most large businesses only focus on the ‘big’ wins such as highly-searched keywords and the biggest influencers.
The advantage you have as a small business is that you can focus on smaller wins. These small wins over time will combine together to give you the success you’re looking for.
Example:
I’ve been guilty of focusing too much on ‘search volume’, meaning how many times people search for a given term each month.
But it’s important to remember that 15% of all searches on Google are new and have never been searched before!
You can assume that this is occurring on other search engines as well.
That means there’s a lot of room to help out your ideal customers by answering the questions that they have.
You can do this for free without any tools, just perform searches and see what shows up in the autocomplete as well as the ‘people also ask’ fields.
Your Secret Weapon – Video Marketing
I personally thought that video marketing would have been farther along by now but you can’t escape videos when you hop onto the major social media platforms.
One crazy stat is that nearly 5 billion videos are watched each day on YouTube!
The best advice I’ve heard is to just get started making videos because you’ll naturally get better at it with practice.
From a personal standpoint, I don’t like seeing myself on video or speaking in front of the camera.
My wife and I started a YouTube channel to improve our content creation skills and for me to test things out.
We’ve gotten considerably better in terms of quality of content and production over the course of a year and it’s been incredibly fun.
Here’s an example of an opportunity that we took advantage of:
We found a canned milk tea at the supermarket, did a bit of research and found that there was very little content for the brand itself ‘Inotea’.
After publishing the video, it took a bit of time before it started to gain traction – roughly 1 month.
For a small channel that averages 100-300 views per video, we now have more than 1,500 views.
This stat above shows that Google Search accounts for 37.9% of our traffic outside of the YouTube platform.
As you can see above, our video ranks first in the video section of the results page on Google.
The brand Inotea in this instance, has missed out on opportunities to use video marketing to their advantage.
These types of opportunities are out there, you just need to put in some time for research!
Bottom line
Digital marketing is one of the best things for your business.
There are an endless number of opportunities for you to understand the content that connects with your customers and finding ways to deliver it to them using the techniques listed above.
As a small business, you have the advantage to get a large number of small wins that turn into big results over the course of time.
Are there any other ideas you have or need help expanding on an idea? Hit the comment section below!
