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The ubiquitous nature of the internet has made digital marketing a valuable asset to many small businesses. Traditional marketing campaigns display advertisements to everyone within reach regardless of whether they are interested in that ad or not. With digital marketing, small business owners can target the specific demographics that will likely want what they are selling.
It is also faster to set up, more cost-effective, and has the potential to reach a wider audience than traditional forms of advertising. Small businesses can leverage it to grow their customer base, increase their brand visibility, and inform the public of their latest promotional offers. There are many forms of digital marketing, and the one a small business chooses is down to their personal preference or what a marketing consultant tells them is right for their business.
Types of Digital Marketing
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective form of advertisement because it delivers messages directly to the recipient’s inbox. Small businesses can build their email lists by persuading their customers to subscribe for periodic notifications and updates on promos and bonuses. Prompts to sign up for an email newsletter can pop-up when a customer spends a long time on the website, or when they are about to checkout their purchase.
For best results, do not be aggressive with your emails. Send just enough messages to keep customers aware of your latest offerings without getting the urge to click the unsubscribe button. Also ensure the messages are personalized to some degree so they do not feel generic to the recipient.
- Video Content
People respond favorably to video content, evidenced by TikTok becoming one of the most popular social networks on the planet. Small businesses can repeatedly make relatable videos marketing their products and post them to various social media platforms. Some of these videos can go viral and attract a lot of attention. This attention can grow a customer base, drive new sales, and encourage existing customers to come back to make more purchases.
Video marketing also drives engagements, so people that view and like the video can drop a comment. This gives the business owner the opportunity to interact with their audience and directly address their concerns.
- Search Engine Optimization
Small businesses can use search engine optimization (SEO) to boost their visibility on search engines. If content that is carefully curated and decorated with keywords relevant to a specific niche is placed on a company’s website, search engines will rank it high when people search for those keywords.
This high search ranking will generate traffic to the website in question and give the company that owns it popularity and credibility. As a business owner, you do not have to pay a search engine for SEO. But you have to structure your content such that it is relevant to your niche and the keywords you use.
- Search Engine Marketing
While this appears slightly similar to SEO, they are totally different. In search engine marketing (SEM), business owners pay for advertising spots. These spots are usually at the top of search results, but the search ads have clear indications that they were paid for. To gain the top position of the ad slots, your ad has to be most relevant to the keywords that you are running the ads for.
SEM sometimes needs businesses to bid on keywords, so the highest bidder will get top priority when the ads are displayed. This form of digital marketing runs mostly for short periods because it is expensive to sustain for long. However, it is worth the cost because it brings the ads in front of the intended audience quickly.
- Social Media Marketing
Many internet users visit social media every day, making those platforms fantastic places for small businesses to find and interact with their potential customers. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have over two billion combined daily users. That is over two billion people that can potentially see your social media advertisement every day. With attractive copies, well-targeted ads, and a call-to-action, you can increase traffic to your website, and drive more sales.
- Affiliate Marketing
To drive more traffic to your small business, you can make deals with bloggers and influencers that will have them create content linking your products. You will pay them a commission every time someone buys your product through their affiliate link.
Affiliate marketing is effective because the blogger or influencer already has an established audience that will listen to their recommendation. It would be best to work with content creators that operate in your business’s niche, because their audience will already be interested in what you are selling, and will likely buy from you.
- Display Advertising
With the cookies you collect from users when they visit your website, you can target them with display adverts. If they add an item to their cart but fail to checkout, you can retarget them for a few days after that occurrence. The display advertisements will show on the other websites they visit, so they can be reminded to complete their purchase.
Business Growth with Digital Marketing
All businesses that have an online presence can benefit from digital marketing, even digital marketing agencies. There are many marketing tools businesses need to run effective marketing campaigns. Some of these are CRMs, email marketing tools, and sales funnel software.
However, there are marketing platforms that can perform many of these functions at once. One prominent example of such platforms is HighLevel (aka GoHighLevel). To know more about what this SaaS platform has to offer, and what others think about it, read this GoHighLevel review.
To get expert-level results from your digital marketing campaigns, you can work with a marketing agency or take advice from a consultant. Trying to figure it all out on your own is possible, but challenging, and will lead to a lot of trial-and-error.
Endnote
Small businesses should embrace digital marketing as it can quickly put their brand in front of the right people. There are different forms of digital marketing, so it would help if a company explores all of them to know what will give them the best results. When done right, digital marketing campaigns will generate new leads, and increase conversion rates because the system mostly relies on consumer data to target people with ads.