How Important Digital Marketing For Your Business

Silver Lining for Smaller Businesses

Imagine you are running a small business in your town. Suddenly, a giant like Amazon or Flipkart comes in and crushes all local enterprises, thanks to their nationwide recognition and massive funds. What do you do? Back in the day, before the arrival of digital marketing, there was little you could do. But times have changed, and now technology ensures that smaller players too have an almost level playing field when it comes to promoting their business.

Digital marketing is great news for small businesses, be it e-commerce, brick and mortar shops, or personal brands. It allows you to compete with a much smaller advertising budget, which, when managed effectively, enables an extremely sharp focus and precise control over where and how you spend your money. Once you get in the groove by experimenting and refining your strategy, you will eventually have enough data to make smarter decisions, ultimately resulting in top-ranking positions.

Know Your Audience

While traditional marketing usually limits you to specific regions and markets, there is no such limitation when you go digital. A print or television ad will allow for some control, but how many among the audience will be your target? How many will convert into potential buyers?

Social Media Advertising and Search Advertising, or PPC (pay per click) allow you to narrow down your target audience using plenty of filters like age, gender, location, education, profession, buying behaviour and many more. The benefits of digital marketing are two-fold – while you get to reach out to a massive potential audience, you can also explicitly target who sees your ads by dissecting huge demographics and sorting them into targeted groups to get laser-focused on specific types of people. Ads created in such a manner will connect to your audience on a level that more traditional marketing simply cannot match.

Access to Detailed Analytical Data

Traditional marketing is typically a pain to analyze and draw results from. Do you know how many people read your company’s flyer that was included in the morning newspaper? Or how many people actually watched ABC brand’s television ad aired thrice a day? The agency might shed some light, but data is generally hazy when it comes to actual reach, increased awareness, and sales.

With digital marketing, on the other hand, every step is measurable, as it works in real-time showing the benefit (or flaw) of every single technique used. This allows you to experiment, test, and make changes, thereby streamlining your campaign for better results. Digital marketing gives you extremely detailed data. For instance, statistics will show if your audience interacted with the ad, if they liked it, shared it or even helped create a sale. You can also learn more about people most interested in your ads, what they do online, what search terms they use, what triggers them to take action, and so on. Free analytics software like Google Analytics is your best bet if you are starting out, or you can opt for paid tools for even more insight. Essentially, you need to reduce spending in areas where you aren’t seeing a return on investment and increase spending in areas that promise good results.

Increased Conversion

Digital marketing and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) helps you measure conversion rates in real-time by identifying the proportion of viewers who get converted into leads, subscribers, and finally, buyers. SEO, social media marketing and email marketing are methods that translate into a high conversion rate as they are able to generate a quick and effective communication channel with the customer. While all the traffic that your website receives may not be useful, digital marketing lets you reach out specifically to only those who have the need for your kind of service, thereby offering better lead conversions.

Interact With Mobile Customers

Haven’t we all used our smartphones for purchasing on the internet? Be it buying something from Amazon, ordering food from Swiggy or hailing a taxi via Uber, mobile transactions are on the rise, and increasing at breakneck speed. Even Google insists that websites have to be mobile-friendly in order to rank better on SERP. In addition to the actual buying and selling process on mobile, customers are also using their smartphones to discover new products, read reviews and chat with customer care. Digital marketing helps you integrate the mobile experience with the physical experience; for instance, a review of your service, or a selfie taken in your store or with your product, all of these can be used as an opportunity to enhance your business.

Cost-Effective

As a small business, you might be having limited resources, which you need to carefully utilize before you start making profits. Digital marketing provides the ability to reach out to a large, targeted customer base within a set budget. You have the power to plan your marketing strategy in such a way that only utilize techniques that lie within your budget are utilized.

Scale and Adapt Easily

Another important advantage that digital marketing offers is the ease with which you can scale and adapt your marketing according to your business requirements. There is an initial investment required to get traffic flowing, just as with any other form of marketing, but the benefit here is that you get to choose your daily budget for social media campaigns, display ads and search ads.

Unlike traditional advertising, once you start seeing good results and increasing revenue, you don’t have to renegotiate a new contract to keep the ad running; just raise your daily budget and keep increasing your conversions. Similarly, it is easy to scale back. And if something isn’t working out as planned, there is no requirement to wait till the ad contract runs out – you can simply make the necessary changes and relaunch the ad. The keyword here is instant – digital marketing enables you to track results in real-time, and instantaneously make changes in order to increase revenue.

Fixing Customer Issues

The benefit of being online is that you can address customer pain points immediately. Your social media page can be a forum where customers ask questions, give suggestions, and raise issues, and get immediate solutions either via customer service or from other users. This not only raises credibility and interaction but also takes your customer association to a much higher level. Websites, email marketing, and live chat services are other means by which you can offer customer solutions to their problems.

While all of these are doable, many startups either don’t have the time or the manpower to devote to PPC, SEO, SEM, and digital marketing. Which is why you should get in touch with Viral Mafia, the best digital marketing agency in Kochi, to address your requirements.