Small and medium businesses generally have a limited marketing budget and are often caught between the constant struggle of choosing between investing in digital or traditional forms of marketing. Selecting the right marketing mix might be a challenging decision to make for such businesses. However, with the rapid transformation and evolution of technology, small and medium businesses are doing everything to keep up and that involves changing their brick-and-mortar business structure to a digital one or at-least having a mix of the two. Digital Marketing for business comes into play here.
For any business to succeed, its potential buyers should be aware of its existence. Next comes the messaging. Your messaging should reach your target audience, which means that it should be clear, concise, and impactful. You should be able to communicate your idea and intention to your customers and create effective marketing strategies to sell your products.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is when you use digital media to communicate with your potential customers and devise tactical plans and strategies to promote your brand or product digitally. Digital marketing bridges the gap between your customers and you through the digital medium.
Digital marketing is not only about getting traffic on your website. Even if you receive a lot of traffic on your page or website daily, it wouldn’t tantamount to anything if people do not purchase your services or products or let’s say – remember you. In the new world, towards which business and commerce are heading, Digital Marketing tools and techniques provide business owners with the best chances for competition, survival and even business growth.
Let us find out why investing your marketing budget in digital marketing is a no-brainer and how it will help your business grow.
But before we get into that, let’s first discuss what constitutes digital marketing.
There are two kinds of marketing- traditional and digital. Traditional marketing includes Print Media, radio ads, and TV commercials, while digital marketing is all about pushing your product in the cyberspace.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for Business
- Creating and distributing informative and relevant content to your target audience. Content can be in written or video format. These days videos are the most preferred form of content. You must have observed this from the dramatic rise of Tik-Tok videos and influencers. People consume video content more readily than the written one.
- Another form of digital marketing is pushing your product through emails. As the name suggests, it involves sending emails to individuals or organizations after they have signed up with you to inform them about your product and/or any offers.
- SEO or Search Engine Optimization is also an important part of digital marketing. SEO is a tactic that is employed to ensure that your website obtains a high –ranking place in the search results page of a search engine.
- Digital Marketing is incomplete without Social Media Marketing because everybody including your potential users and customers is on social media these days. Social media marketing, simply put, is an attempt to push your brand on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn using various social media tools.
Why should Businesses go Digital?
- Digital marketing transcends geographical boundaries. If you are promoting global business, your communication can reach your target audience in any part of the world and also build allies and network. You can also use paid digital media to reach a larger audience and generate leads (and eventually sales).
- It is cost-effective because you can reach a large number of people at a fraction of a budget of mainline or traditional marketing. A 30-second TV spot to be run over a month would cost you lacs in production and promotion. But a quick digital video on social media would reach its targeted audience at a highly subsidised cost.
- It allows you to measure your performance in real-time. Apart from the fact that digital marketing is cost-effective, it also allows you to measure which Digital media channel is providing how much ROI on your rupees spent. This is one of the most critical value-add digital marketing brings over traditional marketing because it helps you strategize and realign your entire campaign based on the channel that is performing well for you. With digital marketing, you can minimize your possibility of running a campaign that fails completely.
- Don’t Spray & Pray! Target the people you want. If, for example, your business is about eco-friendly feminine products, you can target women urban women belonging to a certain age group who would generally be interested in your content. Most Traditional media does not give you that option. Here, an advertisement on pickles and an advertisement on sanitary napkins would more or less have the same set of people viewing them because of the nature of the media. But with the help of digital marketing, you can share your content with people who would be genuinely willing to listen to what you have to say.
If you own a business or work with one and are on the fence on whether Digital Marketing is for you, hope the above sets the context on why Digital Marketing is extremely important for your or anyone’s business whether you are local or global. If you are confused about where to start, Enrol for our Free Digital Marketing Basics course by registering on www.youngurbanproject.com right now. You will be able to then take the course.
