Why is Digital Marketing Important For Small Businesses?

You can reach a larger audience in a shorter time period. Technological advances have resulted in considerable attrition of the customer-base of traditional marketing agencies & departments.

Over the past three decades, marketing has had to keep up and contend with leaps in technology and our relation to it ever since. Without a crystal ball, it’s impossible to see what the future holds, but to look forward, we need to look back.

While the sales era witnessed the invention of the telephone, swiftly followed by the rise of television and the marketing department era. In a world where over 170 million people use social media on a regular basis, every working professional is expected to be familiar with at least the core tenets of digital marketing.

In simple terms, digital marketing is promoting of products over the internet or any form of electronic media. Very soon, traditional marketing platforms will disappear, and the digital market will completely take over. There are a number of advantages in digital marketing. Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is more affordable.

You can reach a larger audience in a shorter time period. Technological advances have resulted in considerable attrition of the customer-base of traditional marketing agencies & departments. People have moved on to tablets, phones, and computers, which are the areas where digital marketers have gained the most ground.

In a Nutshell

This blog will clearly demonstrate the precise points as to why business owners or individual entrepreneurs, working professionals, or students need Digital Marketing today. A lot of small or medium business owners get encouraged to make necessary affiliations, tie ups with popular industry websites such as Justdial, Alibaba or IndiaMART, and bring them a lot of relevant inquiries to begin with.

Also, a lot of them have switched to the ecommerce model, thereby earning good profits. However, now let’s talk about those businesses which are not into any products and cannot be listed on these wholesaler websites. How would they benefit from the digital marketing?

What is digital marketing all about and why is it trending?

Today, customer interactions come at a premium. If you aren’t wowing your customers with personalized content or starting a real conversation with them, you’re falling behind the curve. While some businesses are on the cusp of the latest marketing trends, many others are still playing catch-up to what was hot a few years ago. To help you where the trajectory is heading in 2020, we have listed five marketing trends that you can take out advantage for improving your marketing strategy and come out with the desired outcome.

1)Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is sure to be at the heart of global business and industry in the future – and it’s already taking over many simple jobs. Divorced from all the implications of popular science fiction movies, AI is a computer or robot that can gather facts about a situation through sensors or through human input. It can then use this information to solve problems or perform tasks.

More specifically, AI is a computer system that can perform a task which normally requires human intelligence. AI has numerous potential applications in marketing. It is mostly used today to identify trends, drum up data, and do competitor research.

In 2016, Gartner predicted that 20% of all business content would be “authored by machines” by 2018. While the accuracy of this prediction hasn’t been tested yet, most people are already reading AI-written articles in one fashion or another.

2) Chatbots

Chatbots are without a doubt one of the most crucial elements in modern businesses. From handling customers queries to resolving issues, chatbots are becoming more popular than ever. But where is the future of this technology headed?

We are already witnessing the role of voice-activated bots with devices like Alexa and Google Home. However, this technology is yet to be incorporated in chatbots. In the new decade, we are very likely to witness chatbots that would understand what we speak. The Indian telecom giant Reliance Jio has already taken a major step in this aspect. The company recently launched is artificial intelligence-powered video bot that understands what we speak.

3) Conversational Marketing

We’re seeing a huge maturity in the market, and that’s being measured by organisations beginning to realise the value they can have from conversational artificial intelligence, and it’s also coming from enterprises trialing, testing and failing with different solutions that exist.

For example, we’re seeing our professional services consultants now providing support to these centers of excellences and they’re being asked to mentor, provide expertise and guidance for how an organization should be deploying these solutions.  This illustrates a definite shift and clear sign of maturity. The conversational AI assistants motivate the buying decision of the customers in a way which is more impactful than human sales executives. Considering the fact, conversational AI has become a much-sought technology of the present business world. The prospects and trends of conversational AI are driving the attention of the decision-makers of enterprises across the globe.

4) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of word-of-mouth marketing that focuses on using key leaders to amplify your brand message to a larger market. Influencers can be well-known celebrities, but more often they are Instagram or YouTube personalities with a huge niche following who can help spread the word about your business or product through their social channels.

For this reason, Iceland, a popular British supermarket chain, switched from ads with celebrities to a campaign that features real-life moms. Influencer marketing is also going to be affected by artificial intelligence. With each year, AI is making the process of finding the right influencers to partner with easier and faster. It’s helping identify those with better engagement, fewer fake followers, and a higher chance of generating a positive return on investment.

5) Visual Search

Visual search is an emerging development in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) which has the potential to revolutionize how consumers find and buy products. By streamlining how we search, companies can move closer to the instant gratification that many consumers demand.

The move towards visual search is not going unnoticed, as the statistics below demonstrate:

Not surprisingly, Pinterest has jumped on the visual search bandwagon. They came out with Lens, a visual search tool that allows users to take a photo of an item to find out where to buy it online, search for similar products or view pinboards of related items. And Pinterest is not the only one with visual search. Google Lens is a visual search engine by Google, which recognizes objects and landmarks through a camera app. There are also some other platforms of visual search which serves the same purpose like CamFind and Bing Visual Search.

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