Small business owners all over often wonder if digital marketing is worth it.
It’s unfamiliar territory for many of them, leaving them wary of any expenses associated with it.
And that’s a fair concern considering that many small businesses can’t afford to spend money on any form of marketing that they aren’t certain will bring them a return.
But I’m here to tell you that you need to make your brand known online.
Digital marketing is worth it, and here’s everything you need to know to understand why and how.
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You’ll Need To Maintain Patience To See How Digital Marketing Is Worth It
No form of marketing’s going to prove it’s worth quickly unless the results are temporary.
Digital marketing is no exception.
To see that digital marketing is worth it, you’ll need to give it time to take hold.
Results might come early, but they’ll be small and hard to judge your efforts by.
You need time to collect data and adjust your strategy.
But if you take the time to let it work, you’re nearly guaranteed to see the kind of results you want.
Complete digital marketing inevitably creates growth if given the time to take hold.
If you can have patience, you’ll see results.
Let’s Talk About Why Digital Marketing Is Worth It
To understand why digital marketing is worth it, you need to understand what you get from it.
Once you know what you have to gain, I have no doubt you’ll be sold on the idea.
Here’s what makes digital marketing so worth it for your brand and why you need to get on it now.
Learn More About Your Customers
Attracting the right people to your business so you have qualified leads who become customers can be a challenge.
To do it well, you need to know who your target audience is and what they need from your industry, brand, and product.
That’s one of the biggest reasons that digital marketing is worth it.
Effective digital marketing offers you the chance to learn your customers’ online habits and apply that knowledge to help you target your ideal customers.
Not only does it rely on solid market research to help inform your decisions, but it also provides information about your audience’s needs as they engage with your digital marketing content.
Assumptions aren’t your friend when you need to maximize your marketing spend, and the tools that digital marketing requires help find factual answers.
There are a ton of tools available that offer information on search habits, social media usage, audience interests, and even survey results.
Digital marketing is worth it because of how much it tells you about your clients. Click To TweetData from these sources can tell you what they care about, what their pain points are, and how you can talk to them to make sure they love what you have to offer.
Eventually making them into customers.
Not to mention that the existing audience you have makes another great source of information on what the perfect customer is interested in on social media and other content channels.
Ask them questions, too, because they’ll tell you what matters to them.
Remember, an existing customer is an embodiment of who your target audience is, so their feedback is worth a tremendous amount.
All this information feeds into customer personas which help you tailor your marketing campaigns for your different audience segments.
When they get the message the right way, you’ll earn new clients, and you’ll see that digital marketing is worth it.
Compete With Bigger Brands And Win
If you could compete with the biggest brands in your industry on a level playing field and potentially win, you’d be ecstatic, right?
That’s another major reason digital marketing is worth it.
Digital marketing isn’t budget intensive, nor does it require an array of tools that might break a small business’ bank account.
More than the few required tools, all you need to get noticed, make sales, and grow is in-depth knowledge and experience.
What you know and how well you know it does more for your digital marketing efforts and, by proxy, for your brand than fancy tools.
Integrity and creativity always have an advantage over a large marketing budget in the digital marketing world.
Competing on a level playing field with bigger brands makes digital marketing worth it. Click To TweetSometimes the fact that you’re a small business is enough to build your reputation and improve your sales.
Take advantage of an option like digital marketing to put you on the same playing field as the big brands, but with a leg up on them.
Millennials, who make up the 25-40 age bracket and, typically, are your primary customers, love small business.
A built-in advantage like that, when expressed through digital marketing, creates a strong desire in your target audience to work with you.
Big brands don’t have that advantage, and their budgets don’t offer them digital marketing benefits.
With a lead like that at the start, you can see that digital marketing is worth it for your brand.
Build Better Customer Relationships
If you’re a normal small business, you have trouble retaining customers and bringing them back.
It’s one of the biggest issues that small businesses in the US face.
Those customers, it’s safe to assume, are online daily using social media, reading articles on different websites, watching videos, and listening to podcasts.
Digital marketing is worth it for your small business because it puts your brand in those spaces.
With thousands of new businesses started in the US every month the odds of someone else earning your existing customers are higher than ever.
But, depending on the knowledge and experience you can share you can keep your competition from taking your customers.
Old-school marketing, especially the buying experience, often stops once your audience owns your product.
Marketing messages fail to target them and there’s no incentive to keep marketing to them until the customer lifecycle brings them back around to the beginning of the buying phase again.
That’s not how it works with digital marketing, though.
Continuing to send targeted messages to the consumer once they’ve bought allows you to transform your customers into brand ambassadors.
Once they’ve bought, you’ll focus your message on their ownership and many of the phases your customers go through.
This lets them know that your brand is still there for them, even though there isn’t an obvious financial incentive to be.
So, how does digital marketing help keep loyal customers?
Social proof, follow-up emails, social engagement, remarketing and retargeting all reinforce to your customers that the relationship isn’t over and that you haven’t abandoned them.
Follow-up actions like this take little effort, and some can be automated, but they have a massive return.
More proof that digital marketing is worth it.
The ROI Is Easy To Measure
Most small businesses understand that traditional marketing is worth it even though measuring its success can be convoluted and difficult.
One reason digital marketing is worth it is that the ROI is easy to measure to see what’s working, what’s not, and most importantly, why it’s getting those results.
That gives you the unique ability to start small and see your early results, adjust, and get things right before you dive in all the way.
Tracking digital marketing success and associating the spend to the revenue might be hard for you to picture, though.
But, because digital marketing allows for so many instantly trackable metrics, it’s very easy to connect the two.
You can use tools like Google Analytics to track:
- How many people come to your website
- Which page they go to
- The number that leaves the page without doing anything (and where on the page)
- Who engages with the page they land on
- Which visitors convert
These are all key ROI metrics that help you attach the revenue value to the cost of earning a lead.
Consistent improvement is also achievable using A/B testing.
Make minor changes to your landing pages, calls to action, marketing copy, and numerous other factors to find out what works best based on real feedback and interactions.
Finally, pay attention to how much revenue each customer earned through digital marketing channels brings, then compare that to the cost of earning the lead.
All these steps can be automated and calculated without effort, making it easy to determine the ROI.
Compared to traditional tracking, digital marketing is worth it for this alone.
Reach Potential Customers In More Places
Do you have any idea how many places your target market is going online to look for the products and services they’re going to purchase?
Between social media, e-commerce, and media outlets (like YouTube or blogs), consumers are searching everywhere for the answers to their pain points.
Because it puts your brand in all those places, plus creating a better result on search engines, digital marketing is worth it.
Every place content exists on the web is another place digital marketing can make your brand known.
That includes common social channels, like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
But it also the less common content locations like Reddit, Quora, and TikTok.
Blogs, emails, PPC ads, podcasts, and videos are all a part of digital marketing as well.
There are so many available channels to use that it’s almost impossible not to be seen by your target audience.
Unless, of course, you’re not taking advantage of digital marketing.
It might seem overwhelming at first because every digital marketing channel requires a different approach to sending your message.
However, it’s still a unified message that gets sent, so all you have to do is tweak the delivery.
Once you know what message your audience needs to hear, spreading it around is easy.
Increasing conversions is simply a matter of matching the “language” of the platform.
Remember that not every customer receives messages in the same way.
While some prefer email marketing, others want to hear from you on social.
Still, others will come to you through targeted ads.
The best way to earn more of your audience as leads is to make sure you’re reaching them everywhere.
As the only marketing method capable of that, digital marketing is worth it.
Much Of Your Competition Is Already Ahead Of You
Digital marketing isn’t a new option.
It’s been available for brands to use since the beginning of the internet but made its true footprint around 2010.
With that long a life, most of your competition is likely already using it.
I know that might make you question if digital marketing is worth it.
But think about the advantage in that for a minute.
Your competition is either successful with their digital marketing or they aren’t.
Judging this is as easy as using a few free website tools and looking at their digital marketing content yourself.
Are they getting inbound traffic (which can be checked using a site like SimilarWeb)?
Does their audience engage in the comments on their social media or blog?
Even Facebook allows you to see what kind of ads they’re running.
Learning about your competition’s efforts will tell you how your digital marketing strategy will work.
Their successful content covers topics that your target audience wants to know about.
And you can use that to plan your digital marketing content.
All the data you can gather from your competition’s efforts assures that your digital marketing is worth it.
Remember that data is the key to successful digital marketing.
Your competition is already creating data for you to learn from.
Yes, they may be ahead of you in their efforts, but they’re teaching you how to beat them faster.
Spend Less Money With Better Results
Traditional forms of marketing are expensive.
If you’ve ever looked into running a television, radio, or billboard ad campaign, you’re aware of that.
The cost of entry is why digital marketing is worth it for small businesses.
Two of the most effective digital marketing formats – organic search and social media – cost nothing to earn a return on.
Aside from the time you need to make them work.
A third – email marketing – has a 4300% ROI and can cost as little as $9 per month to manage.
There’s no reason that you shouldn’t be looking at digital marketing as a viable option.
Especially with the cost of entry that low.
Compare that to a television spot, which typically costs around $115,000 for a 30-second commercial, plus the cost to make the commercial.
It’s an easy decision to make.
Most digital marketing options don’t even take talent or money to produce.
Take your company’s Google My Business Profile, for example.
All you need is a little time to answer the basic questions about your brand for Google’s search information.
You’ll boost your search visibility (especially locally) and you’ll improve the number of in-store visits you get.
Plus you’ll add another location to display social proof – Google reviews.
For free.
Even Facebook and Instagram ads are easy to get into.
They allow budgets as little as $1 per day with a user-decided expense cap as low as $5.
Get used to working with it and build as you can.
Cost should never be a limiting factor in building your brand.
Digital marketing is worth it because it makes that true.
Digital Marketing Is Worth It For Small Business
The biggest benefits of digital marketing are a level playing field and easy to measure ROI.
And, with a low barrier to entry, it’s easy to see why digital marketing is worth it.
There’s no more reason to wait to get onboard.
Start learning about your audience and competition so you can build your strategy asap.
You don’t want to keep waiting to see the growth that digital marketing can earn you.
