The best way to grow a small business is through digital marketing. Digital marketing allows you to connect with potential customers across various online marketing channels
This blog post is the first in a series we will be publishing over the coming weeks covering all aspects of digital marketing for small businesses. This post is an introduction to the concept of digital marketing and the options available.
In future posts we will be looking at all the various digital marketing options in detail along with tip and tricks on how to choose which marketing channels to use and how to get the best value for money for your digital marketing campaigns.
Why digital marketing?
When searching for information, seeking answers to questions, researching new products or services, a majority of people now use search engines and social media. As such, all businesses and organisations can benefit from increasing their presence online in a planned way with specific goals and objectives in mind.
Compared to traditional marketing and advertising, digital marketing is extremely accessible for organisations of all sizes:
- There is a low cost of entry for any business to start to build it’s digital marketing strategy. You could choose to focus entirely on organic marketing which is essentially free except for the time and effort you need to put in. Equally, for many businesses, paid advertising online is very low cost compared to traditional advertising.
- Return on investment for digital marketing can be significantly higher than for traditional methods.
- Results can be achieved relatively quickly.
- Precise demographics can be targeted with paid advertising. For example, if you want to target advertising to people in the age range 18 to 35 living within a 10 mile radius of your town, you can do that with digital marketing. If you want to know who viewed and engaged with your first advert so that you can make sure they see your next one, you can do that with paid advertising.
- Every aspect of digital marketing can be easily monitored and measured in real time. This allows rapid learning of what works and what doesn’t work for your business and allows you maximise your marketing budget.
But digital marketing is so confusing
The challenge for small business is that there are many digital marketing channels and potentially lots of tasks to complete and keep on top of to run a successful digital marketing campaign.
Not every channel is appropriate to every business or marketing goal and, within channels, not every option is relevant. It can be overwhelming when considering a digital marketing campaign to decide where to start and what might work for your business. Should you consider paid advertising to boost your digital marketing campaign? If so, what channels should you use, what messages should you advertise and to what demographic and what results can you expect?
Over this series of posts we aim to demystify when and how to use the various digital marketing channels and help you establish a digital marketing strategy that will drive growth and success for your business.
Digital Marketing Channels
A marketing channel is simply a way to get your messages out to people. The most important digital marketing channels for small business are:
- Your website
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
A successful digital marketing campaign would typically use a combination of these channels to generate new leads, nurture those leads and close sales.
Organic vs Paid Marketing
Digital marketing work can be split into two main areas:
- Organic
- Paid
All digital marketing channels will, to a greater or lesser extent, offer opportunities for both organic marketing and paid marketing.
Organic Marketing
The term simply refers to growing your online presence via the organic, increase in interest in your brand, products and services over time. This could be achieved on a social media channel by consistently posting interesting information, joining and engaging in relevant groups, gaining followers, etc.
Equally, you may see your website reach the top of search engine rankings as you improve and add content to your website. More people visit your website and your brand recognition and authority increase.
Organic marketing is often seen as free marketing because you’re not directly paying for advertising. However, the key to organic marketing success is time and effort. Because you’re growing your brand organically, it can take time to achieve your ultimate marketing goals. You may have to commit considerable effort into writing and posting on social media, looking for new groups to join, engaging with followers, etc.
Core to all organic marketing is your website. You will certainly need to make sure your website is technically perfect, well organised and contains content relevant to the things your potential customers are searching for. You need to make sure your website is maintained and kept up to date. You will need to keep track of what your potential customers are searching for and make regular updates to your website content to keep it up to date.
Although it can require significant time and effort, organic marketing should be part of any business’ digital marketing plan. To succeed, any business needs to become “well known” or “better known” and respected in its marketplace. This is exactly what organic marketing reflects.
Paid Marketing
Paid marketing, or more accurately paid advertising, allows you short-cut the time and effort required to develop an organic online presence.
For example, if you don’t have many followers on your social media channel, no-one is going to see when you post your next update. One option may be to pay to show your post to people in your target demographic who don’t yet know your business. Your advert could include a “Call to action” to encourage people to follow your social media page/channel.
If your website is not yet organically at the top of Google’s search results for relevant searches, you can pay to show an advert at the top of the search results. That advert can link to your website or prompt people to call you.
Budget allowing, most businesses can benefit from using paid marketing, particularly at the beginning stages of a digital marketing campaign. In itself, paid advertising can provide rapid results and direct return on investment. Importantly, however, paid advertising also allows you to experiment with messages, target demographics, search terms and phrases to quickly see what works and doesn’t work for your business. You can then feed this learning into your organic marketing work to ensure your efforts there are focussed on what works. In other words, it can make your organic marketing efforts more efficient.
Need help with digital marketing?
aento can work with you to define your marketing goals and establish a sensible digital marketing plan for your business. We can fully implement and mange your digital marketing or undertake specific marketing tasks. We can provide you with an online monitoring and reporting dashboard that brings together all of your channels and provides you with results and analytics on how your campaign is running. We can continually optimise your marketing to ensure your budget is maximised and generating the greatest return on investment. For more information and an informal chat please contact us.