Posted by Have you ever written an essay in school about the pros and cons of Social Media? And what effect it will have on the youth of tomorrow?
Little did we know that it would be a good addition to marketing strategies.
Marketing is such an important tool for a business/brand to grow. It allows you to show people who or what you are and why they should choose you instead of your competitors. It helps you grow your business by expanding your audience/user base.
Digital marketing is being used more and more in comparison with other methods of marketing like news publications, magazines, radio, etc. This is because Social Media is one of the most used online platforms globally. Businesses are taking digital marketing to new heights every day.
One of the most important factors for the success of small businesses is a growing and ever-expanding customer/user base. And the only way to achieve this is through marketing, digital marketing. Here I’ll list down a few reasons why digital marketing is good for small businesses and their growth.
1. It drives engagement
Using digital marketing to interact with and engage your audience is a very smart move. Once people realize that you’re interactive and fun and keeping up with trends, they’ll automatically gravitate toward you. They’ll talk about you and share their own experiences with their own audience, friends, family, etc. This is one of the most important reasons to use digital marketing for your business/brand.
2. It helps you understand your audience to further personalize your products/services
Once you interact with your audience over the digital marketing strategies you’ve executed, you’ll be able to understand your audience base more. Like what services your Facebook followers gravitate toward or what products your Instagram or Twitter followers would be more inclined to purchase. This way you’ll be able to create and sell exactly what your user base wants.
3. Interaction and new ideas
Because of all the interaction, your audience will be tempted to talk more and more about the things they expect from you. They’ll be comfortable asking you to introduce new products for them and they’ll even go so far as to explain why they think it’ll be a good addition to your brand. You basically have your product research and development team at your fingertips.
4. It involves brand loyalty/advocating
Because you’ll already have so many people following you because of your marketing tactics online, you can find the ones that seem most excited about your brand and its growth. You can make deals with them and have them advocate or market your brand for you. Here you can see how your own digital marketing strategy can branch out into a new kind of marketing called influencer marketing. If their followers and audience base trust them enough, you can be sure that it will add to your own numbers.
5. Support at any stage of buying; making it accessible to all
Using digital marketing assures your audience that you’re available online for any of their questions or concerns. Let’s face it, the most important thing in Customer Support is the fact that your audience knows they can rely on you for quick and reliable support. When they publicly complain about something and you’re quick to resolve it for them, others will automatically know that you care about your customers and their concerns.
6. Save money
Digital Marketing is a very efficient way to boost your sales without having to actually spend as much as you would using other forms of marketing. Plus when your plans eventually lead to influencer marketing, you’ll be saving a lot of money. If you research social channels well enough, you’ll be able to get optimum engagement and results while avoiding burning a hole in your pocket.
7. Increase revenue
With digital marketing, your user base is increasing which means there’s more money flowing in. When more people see what you’re doing and that you care about what your customers want, they’ll understand that they can trust you. It will be an easy choice for them to switch brands if they know they’re going to be taken care of. The easiest way to show this is through digital marketing.
Plus you’re already spending less by using digital marketing so you can divert funds to other things.
8. Competitor Analysis
With Digital Marketing, you can keep track of what your competitors are doing through their marketing channels. You can analyze their moves and understand their patterns. This will help you anticipate what you should be doing before they get to it. Or a different way to approach this would be to do something different from what they’re doing. This way you can stand out in your own way rather than just aiming to be better in what everyone else is doing. People tend to like different ideas, innovations, creativity, and quirky things.
9. Reputation
When your digital campaigns and strategies are working well, people will start talking about you. And maybe it won’t just be friends, family, or your influencers. The story of your growing business can get picked up by news publications, magazines, radio, etc. Thus going full circle and getting marketed on the traditional channels too without having to pay for it. You’ll become well known not just locally but because it’s digital, and there are no geographical boundaries, you slowly grow to be famous nationally and even internationally.
10. IT’S FUN!
Creating digital content for marketing through memes, reels, TikToks, etc. is so much more fun than maybe say a news article. Even though you have to do more in-depth research to understand your target audience, you can be sure that everyone would prefer Digital marketing over traditional marketing methods. When you enjoy your work, you’ll automatically put in more effort and give it your all, showing your audience that you should be the obvious choice. It’s possible to grow your business at a very quick pace when you know what your existing and potential audience will eat up!
These are just a few of the reasons why start-ups or small businesses should opt for digital marketing. It will clearly lead to traditional marketing ways anyway, without having to pay for the latter, so you may as well get 2 for one.
It seems to me that the main reason our teachers or professors asked us to write those essays was to gauge how much importance we’d give the digital world and how much power it would have over a whole generation. Do you think anyone figured out then how important digital marketing would be to rocket launch your startup or small business? Did you?