Digital marketing for small businesses
Let’s understand how Digital Marketing strategy for small businesses can strengthen the relationship with the public and boost your sales.
Building a successful business is a task that requires dedication and implies overcoming many challenges, especially for smaller ones.
What are the benefits of having a Digital Marketing strategy?
The internet has revolutionized the way in which business interact with their audience, being present in this environment is essential to engage them with the value proposition offered by them.
Follow some of the benefits of adopting the features that the model offers:
Audience targeting
One of the great positives that Digital Marketing provides is the effectiveness in targeting audiences . It ensures that you are in the right place and act in the right way to get leads.
In traditional methods, although there is a prior selection, communication campaigns seek to reach as many people as possible, but this does not portray that all of them have the potential to become customers.
With virtual tools, the interaction process takes place in different stages , as users access materials published by the company, they leave clues about the type of solution they are looking for.
And based on the information collected, the customization of marketing actions gains effectiveness.
Online presence
It is natural that small and medium-sized companies need more dedication to get noticed.
However, in times when consumers are always connected to the internet, whether through smartphones, tablets or other devices, this mission can be accomplished with agility and low investment costs.
Online presence helps to build a virtual identity for the brand, people who already know your products or services will be able to follow the news, maintain a post-purchase relationship.
Brand credibility
The consolidation of an enterprise in the market is inseparable from the element of credibility, but the requirements to reach this level go beyond offering quality solutions, demonstrating how much your company dominates the subject will place it as a reference within the sector in which it operates.
Digital Marketing will also help you to become an authority on what you do
- Corporatewebsite and blog ;
- Content Marketing ;
- Social media.
Competition with Big Companies
Disputing the market on an equal footing with large organizations reflects a very difficult task for smaller producers, as as a rule resources are scarce.
However, once again the online universe emerges as a means of facilitating successful actions, regardless of the size of your business.
This is because, contrary to what many may think, marketing strategies do not always require large investments and, therefore, opened space for small and medium-sized companies to also enjoy efficient communication.
With a good strategic planning it is possible to identify and execute Digital Marketing in the most appropriate way for each model of enterprise, which will certainly increase its power before larger institutions.
After all, it is not about competing with the same weapons or on an equal footing, but using the tools that fit your profile in order to increase the chances of good results.
Customer loyalty
We know the importance of Digital Marketing in the purpose of meeting and qualifying and target audience . However, it is also necessary to be concerned with establishing a definitive link with such consumers that is, feeding the continuity of the relationship.
In this way, this methodology also has precious techniques in the post-sale stage. Today it is more and more common to receive emails with discount coupons, special offers, in short, to build a different experience.
In addition, a good loyalty process will make customers share your brand, helping to expand the network of contacts and reflexively sales.
What are the biggest challenges of Digital Marketing for small businesses?
Analyze Data
All consumer activity on digital channels leaves a large amount of data – Big Data ; they are information, clues about the topics of your choice, the number of times they access a particular page, the type of products they are looking for and despite that, the management of this material is extremely difficult.
More than having this data in hand, the main challenge of micro and small entrepreneurs is in their analysis, interpreting them correctly to make the right decisions.
The company that understands the desire and needs of potential buyers, is aware of the most relevant techniques for its tactics to work.
Adapt to different platforms
The success of Digital Marketing campaigns, from the beginning, is naturally accompanied by its alignment with the choice of media platforms; a task that has never been simple, but has become relatively complex.
Currently, the variety of these channels is infinitely superior, all of them with their peculiarities, complicating the work of making the most of their functionalities and the ability to use them in an integrated manner.
Being able to count on many options is a positive point, however companies need to deal with the obstacle of creating a value proposition that communicates well between these channels and maintains the same level of quality.
That done, the way forward is to define a base platform and associate it with others, in a complementary way.
Increased competition
If, on the one hand, the low cost facilitated the reach of Digital Marketing by medium and small entrepreneurs, this same benefit also had negative implications – the intensification of competition.
As practically all organizations have such devices at their disposal, reaching the attention and interest of customers requires a lot of dedication and constant improvement of the content.
What are the best metrics to monitor marketing actions?
The metrics are solid responses regarding the evolution of the company’s performance over a period of time, the methods capable of detecting whether the goals set have been achieved.
There is no roadmap that is widely applied, and it is up to managers to choose which ones are most consistent with their business. Here are some examples:
1. ROI – Return on Investment
Return on Investment, ROI , is a key metric for for PPC measuring the income of a particular Communication Campaign , allowing the analysis that the resources are being used in the right place.
Therefore, it consists of calculating the profits that Digital Marketing earned in the company’s. To find the ROI, just use a simple mathematical operation: subtract the gains from the amounts used, and then divide by this amount.
So, imagine an investment of Rs 2,000.00 (two thousand rupees) in marketing campaigns, and the figure of Rs 10,000.00 (ten thousand rupees) as total income. Therefore, your ROI will be:
ROI = 10,000 – 2,000 / 2,000 10000
ROI = 8,000 / 2,000
ROI = 4
As a percentage, the return on investment was 400% (four hundred percent).
2. CAC – Cost of Acquisition per Client
The acquisition cost per customer is the instrument by which the entrepreneur finds out how much he needs to invest in order to win a new consumer.
The fact that the project has many customers does not necessarily mean that sales are increasing, it is also important to maintain a constant flow of bringing other potential buyers to your side.
To measure your CAC, go through the following steps: add up all marketing expenses during a specific period, then divide by the number of customers obtained in that interval, follow:
A company “A” disbursed, in 3 months, the amount of Rs 500.00 (five hundred rupees) in Digital Marketing, and gained 10 customers.
Therefore, we came to the conclusion that each of them cost Rs 50.00 (fifty rupees) equivalent to an average of 3.3 new consumers per month. Once the CAC is calculated, it is essential to analyze such information and evaluate the cost-benefit of its actions.
3. CPC – Cost per click
CPC deals with the criteria applied in order to measure the amount required for each interested party to access your ad.
Unlike the other metrics, in Cost per Click the entrepreneur knows the expense of the operation before advertising goes live, given that the platforms themselves have counting systems.
The choice of the keyword, for example, is one of the criteria that can raise or lower the price. There is a tendency for competing keywords to be more expensive.
Building a successful business is a task that requires dedication and implies overcoming many challenges, especially for smaller ones.
Despite all the difficulties, today this type of enterprise can also rely on solutions that, until recently, were only part of the routine of large corporations. And Digital Marketing for small businesses is a fine example of the level playing field.
Have you evaluated how much an active presence in the online world can favor the visibility and consolidation of your small business? Follow in this article the positive aspects of adopting such an approach.