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The internet has revolutionized business, creating a whole new avenue for businesses to advertise in affordable, quick, and effective ways. The emergence of eCommerce businesses and the growing prevalence of social media and mobile browsers means now more than ever it is crucial that your small business can be found - online and offline.
Digital marketing allows you to bring your business online, where about 33% of people are searching for local businesses daily. In the past, you would have to go out and find these customers for yourself through advertising methods. Now, a quick search online and they are looking for you!
Digital marketing is essential to an effective, comprehensive, and cost-efficient marketing strategy that will help ensure your business thrives.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
There are a variety of different reasons digital marketing can work for your business, but here are some of my favorite reasons to get started with a digital marketing firm today.
Cost-Effective
Good marketing isn’t just about reaching a ton of people. It’s about staying within your budget and getting a good return on investment (ROI) for your marketing dollars.
When it comes to getting the most bang for your buck, many (myself included) believe digital marketing offers unparalleled possibilities. With essentially all aspects of advertising taking place online, there is a very low startup cost to implement new strategies. You don’t need to design and print materials, worry about shipping, or store marketing materials - everything is digital!
For example, once you create your website, adding and maintaining a blog is essentially free (if you provide content yourself) or very low cost if managed for you. However, the potential impact it can make in your search engine rankings can drive organic traffic that offers exceptional ROI.
Email marketing is another low-cost but highly effective marketing channel. When done correctly, it produces an average of $44 in revenue per $1 spent. This means you can grow your business for pennies on the dollar and create a more comprehensive marketing campaign with your advertising dollars, making it one of my favorite strategies.
Expands Your Local Reach
In the past, local businesses relied on word of mouth and physical advertising to bring new customers in. Unless you drove by and saw the sign or someone told you where the business location was, it was much harder to find what you were looking for. Nowadays, the internet makes it incredibly easy for businesses like ours to be found by local searchers thanks to local search engine optimization (SEO) practices like targeted keywords and Google My Business.
In 2018, a survey found that 82% of smartphone users made a “near me” search to find a local business. Using location services on a phone, this search pulls up results based on the GPS location of the phone. To be listed in these results, you need to create a Google My Business listing that provides comprehensive information about your business for local searches.This will also contain your physical location, providing geographical relevance that allows you to be found by “near me” searches or with keyword searches by location. Once you do, geo-specific searches such as “seamstress near me” or “marketing agency Dallas” are more likely to display your listing, earning
targeted traffic to real potential customers.
Leverages Social Media for More Exposure
Do you like free advertising? Of course you do! Now, what if your advertising wasn’t only free, but it also spread itself to new customers for you? With social media marketing, you can achieve that.
As business owners, we should be doing what we can to go viral online and reach more potential customers for free. And while not every business will take over social media like Wendy’s Twitter has, you can still implement social media marketing to create a self-sustaining marketing strategy by emphasizing and taking advantage of shareability.
Shareability refers to the potential for a single post of yours to be shared from one follower to another. For example, a follower shares your advertisement to their 100 followers. Of those 100 followers, 2 also share that post to their 250 and 200 followers respectively. As long as the content is shareable (think giveaways, promotions, valuable information, or positive reviews), every share offers exponential free advertising to a wide range of potential customers. This is especially valuable for local businesses whose followers are likely local as well, providing targeted traffic to your page.
Effective social media usage can also provide valuable social proof for the 54% of social browsers who are researching businesses before visiting. A well-managed page with positive reviews, loads of information, and customer service can go a long way towards earning the trust of a new customer.
Easy to Track What Works
The internet is a hub of information second to none, and digital advertising makes incredible use of the data available online. Digital marketing has the benefit of providing a ton of actionable data you can use to refine your strategy. While there’s no way to see how many people see a sign or actually open your direct mail, many online advertising methods will.
When someone visits your website from an email, social media link, or search result, this information is stored and available to view with tools like Google Analytics. You can see the source of the traffic, what pages they visited, where they’re visiting from, and more. With this data, you can see what marketing strategies are working and which aren’t, allowing you to make changes to find more customers for less.
Allows For High-Converting Targeted Marketing
When it comes to digital marketing, there are primarily two styles of digital marketing strategy: general and targeted.
General marketing refers to increasing the overall visibility of your business online through social media, Google My Business, and SEO. These are generally longer-term strategies that improve brand awareness, but don’t necessarily directly result in conversions. By improving brand awareness, you can raise the level of trust customers have in your brand, stand out against competition, overall increase your sales potential within your industry.
Targeted marketing involves finding a specific demographic online and ensuring your marketing efforts reach them. While there are ways for you to find high-converting leads with physical marketing materials such as a mailing list, it is much simpler using the internet.
Marketing strategies like Facebook Ads and Google Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads are able to make use of user data, such as search history, browser history, likes, and more to identify who is a likely target audience for your business. If someone searches “buy a wedding dress Dallas”, that is the kind of traffic you want your bridal boutique to receive. To accomplish this, you can create ads with the platforms above that are only shown when someone searches for a keyword like “wedding dress” or “flower bouquet” - terms that show interest in your products or services.
However, be ready to pay for these high-converting leads because while they are efficient, they are not always cost-effective. You will pay for every time the ad is clicked, which can get expensive quickly if you aren’t familiar with PPC advertising. That is why I always recommend our managed marketing for anyone looking to implement PPC advertising safely so that we can do the hard work to save you money.
Expand Your Business Online with Our Local Agency
If you’re new to the digital world of marketing, it can be intimidating to learn all the new options and avenues that are available to you. Fortunately, our marketing agency in Dallas can help you achieve your goals with an online expansion or help achieve cost-effective results for your ongoing marketing campaigns to help stretch your marketing dollars further.
When done correctly, investing in digital marketing can take your local business to new heights. Contact us today for a risk-free consultation with our team of experienced marketing professionals who will help you discover how you can create a comprehensive, coordinated, and effective digital marketing strategy to help build your business’s online presence.
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