A small business without a plan for digital marketing is like a ship without a captain. Sounds like an overstatement?
Not when you take into account the stakes involved. More than two billion people are expected to shop online by 2021. That huge figure covers the items as well as services.
Looking at numbers alone, there’s a large online audience that can tap into your small business. With the right digital advertising strategy in place, the company can see an improvement in results, whether that’s revenue, leads or anything.
A small business begins with one main objective in mind: to expand. To do that, people need to be made aware of their name, their products, and their services. They need effective Digital Advertising campaigns to get their product or service out there. The issue now is which technique to use in an advertisement. Perhaps the best response is the one that best fits the company’s vision and goals.
We’re about to address some of the various digital advertising campaigns you can have, but the main underlying point here is that you want your campaign to fit with your goals. For example, if your biggest and most immediate goal is online sales, we wouldn’t recommend investing all of your ad budgets into a campaign that would grow your followers.
See how priorities and strategies aren’t aligned? Having clear objectives will help you avoid this kind of separation.
Details of a digital advertising campaign
Variety is the game name when it comes to ads for digital advertising. Those are the types of campaigns they can choose from for small business owners.
Email Campaigns
Email campaigns need to be a must for advertising campaigns on small businesses. The email newsletters are at the forefront and are very easy to set up. You put an opt-in form on your website, so potential customers can know about your company’s latest updates. Such sign-ups are typically combined with email service providers ‘ courtesy websites.
But what about those businesses which don’t have their own website? Can they use this kind of campaign anyway? Naturally. They just need to use their Facebook page. If they have an email list already, then they can pair it with their Facebook page to launch a nice little marketing campaign.
One type of campaign for email marketing is a drip sequence campaign which is a little more complicated. If you already have an active email list or customer list, this campaign works. Drip sequence campaigns require the automated sending of your emails based on certain actions that the user did or did not take. An example of a campaign with a drip series is if someone added your product to their online cart but did not check it out.
They that automatically be sent an email informing them of the product and urging them to check it out. Choosing between an email marketing campaign based on a newsletter and a drip series campaign only depends on the nature of your company and what makes the most sense for you at this moment.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC ads have become a popular and effective strategy for digital advertising but can also be very costly. In short, PPC helps the website to rank among the top paid search engine results for searching on Google for certain keywords. If your business uses keywords that are deemed common (and other businesses fight for them), then get ready to spend some of the top dollars on them. But you can always use the more economical longtail keywords if you want to stop that and still use PPC effectively.
Longtail keywords provide more choices so you can find cheaper, much more budget-friendly words to use. As for the ad format, making video ads will take advantage of this. Based on a recent analysis of the 2019 IAB Video Advertising Spend Study, video ad spending is on the rise. In reality, this year it has risen to 25 percent.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a great option for driving both traffic and interaction. You can use almost any kind of content that you have in this campaign. You may go with forums, infographics, videos, and more, depending on what you have or want to use at the moment. Your content will be driven by keywords. So what you need here is content rich in keywords, without losing its quality.
Your blog post is the principal driving force for your content. Thus each post needs those longtail quality keywords that drive traffic and leads. The key is using great keywords and coming up with them. You can invent these on your own, or use tools to find great keywords.
Also Read: Content Marketing Benefits for Small businesses.
Social Media Marketing
We all know how powerful social media can be. It offers unparalleled reach other platforms find it hard to compete with. But let’s be clear on one thing. You need the willingness to invest in it to get social media outreach to work. And here, we are thinking about both time and money. The exact social media network to which you want to focus your efforts is also important.
Want to have it on Facebook? Or on Twitter maybe you want to? Our advice would be to spend some time studying your target audience to find out which platform they are most involved in. There may be organic (unpaid) choices, or it may be more of a “pay-to-play” model, depending on which platform you select. Regardless, we would recommend that you set aside a publicity budget to help you achieve your social media goals.
Digital Advertising Gains
You go there, if you want to drive up the brand’s exposure and ultimately its sales, then you can go with one or more of those ads. To continue, it’s best to look at what the top 5 advantages of digital advertising are for small businesses that adopt one of those promotions.
Cost-efficient
Digital advertising is cost-effective, especially when you compare it with conventional, much more costly advertising. Price is quite obviously a big deal for small businesses. Since their resources are limited, they need to be very careful about how and what they spend their budget on. If you’re a small business owner and decide to go with traditional advertising, such as print ads, billboards, a TV commercial, etc., then you’d better be prepared to spend.
When you want ads that look like they’re professionally designed, hiring a graphic designer is a given. There are also charges for getting the ad featured in a magazine or newspaper, apart from the cost of hiring a designer. Then you may want to go the extra mile and have television or radio advertising. That’s awesome and opens up opportunities, but you must also realize that costs are going to spike (and generally not for a lot of ROI, but we’re going to get into it later).
When you want to go digital, you will have no such problems. It’s much more affordable and there are even occasions when it can be cost-free. Posting on certain social media platforms costs nothing to you. You get the unrivaled social media scope while you save money that you can use for other things.
Even if you spend in Google Ads or Facebook Ads etc. in digital advertising, the cost of 1,000 views or cost per click is much less expensive than paying for a billboard or print ad (which may not reach as many people anyway!).
Also Read: Dental Marketing tips to boost ROI.
Quick and easy to plan
The benefit of digital advertising is also that it’s fast and easy to schedule. The same can not be said of traditional advertising which must be prepared ahead of time. It may take weeks or months. Which is not the case for digital advertising. The turnaround time needed for setting up a digital advertising campaign is so much faster than traditional marketing.
Let’s say you all of a sudden decided last minute to run a sale for one of your products. If you are using video, if you have time and know what you’re doing you can run an ad campaign for it almost immediately. Through definition, traditional marketing channels just aren’t as versatile to work so quickly. All you need is to press a few buttons and you’ll be able to see your ad out there soon for the world to see. Going digital also lets you make some quick changes whenever the need arises. Time is such an important commodity for companies, and more so for small businesses and startups. Being able to save time means there is a better chance of earning a return on investment (ROI) much sooner.
Easy to keep up with
It is also easy to track because digital advertising is easy to plan. You can find out instantly from your digital ad campaign if you want to know something about your ad campaign or anything about it.
Would you like to know what works for you, and what isn’t? The digital option makes all the important aspects of your campaign easy for you to calculate. Yes, here we are discussing analytics. And you should use it to see what happens with your ad campaign’s multiple aspects. Your website, for example, has a regular email update, and you want to know how many people open it up.
The solution, right? You just keep track of how many of the people in your email list are opening it and receiving the newsletter. As far as your actual ad is concerned, you can simply track how many times it has been clicked on. Then you can compare it with how many times the ad has been viewed.
Once again, using the billboard example, you could pay tens of thousands more for a billboard than a Facebook ad. But unlike with a Facebook ad, if it resonated with them etc., you wouldn’t know how many people saw the advertisement, the demographics. Make analytics work for you, especially as it’s one of the main benefits that digital advertising offers.
Updation is Easy
Because digital advertising is easy to keep track of, it follows that updating is also easy. That is extremely helpful if you want to make any major or minor changes to your campaign. What if you all of a sudden thought of a better message than yesterday’s one? Or the one you just put out a few hours ago? What if your website is running a short, temporary sale?
Okay, all you have to do is update your message through your ad platform, whether you use Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, etc. You can’t do those kinds of notifications with traditional advertising. When you send out your advertisement there is no turning back, so to speak. If you’re stuck with offline ads, the best practice is to test anything double or even triple before sending it out, the text, the template, the color scheme, all about your ad campaign.
Also Read: Digital Marketing a boon for Education Sector.
Targetting is Easy
Aimed at digital advertising. It means you have absolute control over who is seeing the commercial. And perhaps more importantly, you can ensure that only those who are interested in it see your ad.
What makes it possible to target digital advertising?
This is designed possible by the many tools made available to you through platforms such as social media networks. For instance, let’s say you’ve got a clothing line for kids. You are planning to step up the marketing campaign for the products on your line that are made for people aged between two and three years. You can target specific keywords that parents can scan for your product on Google, or you can directly target parents of infants on social media.
The clear but added advantage of going digital is the infinite scope it has. You can’t simply beat it because you can be anywhere on the globe and still meet anybody you want to sell your products or services to. Imagine what sort of effect such a global reach can have on your small business. It will encourage you to go beyond what you previously thought was limits and allow you to relate to more people. Instead, those people can become your target audience or your future clients. A small business with limited resources in decades past couldn’t expect to be more than just an average brick-and-mortar shop.
The digital revolution is in full swing and for every company that wants to be a part of it, there is no coming back. Last but not least is the role of digital advertising in improving the business’s ROI. That is the ultimate goal and the bottom line for any company, big or small.
Conclusion
There’s no secret to making it happen. A hard-working team that knows what it takes to succeed, combined with the right knowledge, is all that is needed.
It also helps to have the vision and foresight to set the right objectives. So jumping straight into the digital bandwagon is certainly more likely to pay off sooner than later.