Today, pretty much every business requires a strong online presence to be successful and to grow their market share. Businesses have known the importance of having a website for years but now they are realizing that there is a lot more involved in getting their website to show up at the top of Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and getting people to click on their link. The problem is that a small business owner is likely an expert on the product or services they are selling and not on digital marketing, which is required to increase SERP rankings and click throughs.
Why is digital marketing important?
Digital marketing is important because it reaches people where they spend most of their time and money. The number of people shopping online is growing each year and the growth is not expected to slow down. Statista.com estimates that 224.1 million people made purchases online in 2019 and that 230.5 million people will purchase goods and services online in 2021. Sales through social media have grown exponentially in the last several years, with data from Hootsuite.com showing that the average internet user has 7.1 social media accounts and spends spend almost 2.5 hours on social networks and social messaging every day. There is huge opportunity but businesses need a good social media marketing strategy designed by a digital marketing specialist that will cut through the noise.
Top 3 reasons a small business benefits from working with a digital marketing specialist
1. A digital marketing specialist helps small businesses compete with the big guys
It can be extremely difficult for a mom and pop store to compete with big corporations. It’s partly because they have buying power that allows them to offer products at lower prices but it’s also because of their sophisticated digital marketing strategies. A digital marketing specialist can help small businesses compete with large companies by creating an effective digital marketing strategy that keeps them ranked at the top of the SERP for both organic and Google Ads. They can also help small businesses cement brand loyalty by delighting their target audience(s) through catchy social media ads. All of this can be accomplished on a small business sized marketing budget.
2. A digital marketing specialist knows how to target your audience
One of the major advantages of digital marketing is the ability to easily reach your target audience based on their online behavior. But how would the average small business owner know about the online behavior of their target customer? When you place Facebook ads for example, you don’t want to be guessing about who to target when you fill out the custom audience feature. That’s where a digital marketing expert comes in. They will have access to data that identifies the time of day your target audience is online and the types of interests and searches your potential customers are making. They can identify their location, income range, profession, goals, challenges and more. They will also understand your audience breakdown between male and female and their age range. If you have more than one target audience, a digital marketing agency can easily employ segmentation to cater your marketing efforts to each audience. MailChimp, for example, offers a way to segment e-newsletters, which they say increases the likelihood of subscribers opening the message by 14%; your digital marketing specialist can help with this. The use of data and segmentation dramatically increases your chances of seeing a return on investment (ROI) from your digital marketing dollars.
3. A digital marketing specialist can provide more advanced analytics
Every business owner wants to know what they are getting for their marketing dollars. A digital marketing expert will be able to provide regular reports about how many people saw your ads/posts, their age range, gender and what action they took (if any). They can identify increases to your web traffic, where the people came from and the keywords they searched that took them to each page on your website. The digital marketing agency can then use this information to make tweaks to your online marketing efforts in order to maximize exposure and results.
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