How Digital Marketing Can Help a Business Succeed

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How Digital Marketing Can Help a Business Succeed

In today’s business landscape, digital marketing is an essential aspect of any marketing plan. Digital marketing helps businesses attract and target new customers and leads, communicate with target audiences, and collect data on customer behavior and campaign performance. A digital marketing strategy usually encompasses multiple channels, like a website, social media, email, digital advertising, and online search.

Key Takeaways

  • Digital marketing can help businesses increase their online visibility, build brand awareness, and reach a larger audience than traditional marketing channels like print, TV, or radio might be able to.
  • Critically, it also allows for targeted audience reach, enabling businesses to tailor their messaging and marketing efforts to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors.
  • Digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods.
  • It’s important to track, measure, and analyze key metrics to assess the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
  • The Good Impressions program is an initiative established by Investopedia’s parent company, Dotdash Meredith, to award minority and LGBTQIA-owned small businesses with digital marketing consultation packages.

With the sheer number of available channels and tactics, small business owners may find it overwhelming to navigate the digital marketing landscape, especially if they don’t have a marketing background or the resources to experiment with different strategies. The wealth and social gap between white-owned businesses and minority-owned businesses can further exacerbate these issues.

Investopedia’s parent company, Dotdash Meredith, established Good Impressions, a pro bono media and marketing consultation program that awards minority- and LGBTQIA-owned small businesses with digital marketing consultation packages. The impact that the program and digital marketing had on some of these businesses is highlighted below.

Benefits of Digital Marketing for a Business

A strong digital marketing campaign can help a business in numerous ways. Digital marketing can be impactful regardless of whether a business is based at a brick-and-mortar location, operates on a hybrid model, or is conducted primarily through an e-commerce store.

According to research by Clutch, 45% of consumers are likely to visit a business’s physical location after searching for it online, and 76% of consumers will search for a company’s website before visiting their physical location. Meanwhile, eMarketer’s forecast for 2024 predicts that online shopping will comprise 20.1% of all global retail sales, up from 18.8% in 2021.

Some of the many benefits are discussed in detail below.

Increased Online Visibility

A good digital marketing strategy can help businesses increase their online visibility by sharing content with a wider audience than they might reach through traditional channels. A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can also make it easier for customers to discover a business’s website or content online.

For example, Harshit Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Madhu Chocolate, says, “The Good Impressions program helped drive a lot of brand awareness for us. We got the opportunity to be featured in Food & Wine and Real Simple, and saw a huge bump in website traffic following the two articles.”

Cost-Effective Channels

Digital channels like websites, social media, email, and blogs tend to be more cost-effective to operate and advertise on than traditional marketing methods, such as print, TV, and radio. When it comes to creating marketing content or running communications, many tools are free or offered for a small monthly subscription fee, making them well-suited to small business budgets.

Targeted Audience Reach

Digital marketing tools offer a wealth of data to businesses aiming to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. By gathering customer data through various channels, businesses can effectively segment their audiences and tailor marketing strategies to engage these specific customer niches. For example, many email and advertising tools allow for audience segmentation and provide insights that help create customized campaigns that resonate with targeted groups.

Building Brand Awareness and Loyalty

Businesses can also use digital marketing to build brand awareness and establish or maintain a positive reputation. Cultivating an online presence that reflects your brand personality and company culture can help create affinity and connection with both new and existing customers.

Rahama Wright, founder of Shea Yeleen, is one of the business owners who won a Good Impressions digital marketing consultation package. Speaking of the impact it had on her business, she says, “Being featured in InStyle and on the Parents’ social media accounts gave our brand tons of visibility and exposure. Those placements, as well as some digital banner ads, secured us around 1.2 million impressions, which was a huge awareness lift.”

Lead Generation and Conversion

A digital marketing strategy can help businesses generate leads and convert them into customers using avenues like email marketing, social media advertising, and content marketing. By offering multiple touchpoints and communicating with customers through their different stages of interaction with the company, a business aims to persuade a customer to complete a desired action, whether it’s booking a demo or consultation, signing up for a trial, or completing a sale.

Adapting to Changing Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is constantly changing—and so is digital marketing. By tracking key performance indicators, or KPIs, and other core metrics, many digital marketing tools allow for trend analysis or even prediction. This enables businesses to evolve their strategies in tandem with their audiences’ preferences. 

Track Results Accurately

Digital marketing can help businesses leverage the sheer quantity of online data regarding customer demographics and behavior. For example, a business can see who’s clicking on its ads, visiting its website, and following and engaging with it on social media. In turn, this data can offer insights and feedback on your online presence and campaigns, shaping decisions about future strategy.

All of this takes resources that small businesses may not have. “Without the Good Impressions program, we wouldn’t have been able to afford any of these campaigns,” Wright says, “and they allowed us to see what could work in terms of future marketing investments. Moving forward, we now have something to show content creators to demonstrate where we’ve had success and where it makes sense to input time and energy.”

Stay Ahead of Competitors

Digital marketing not only provides much-needed visibility on customer behavior; it also offers a rich landscape of information on industry and market trends. Businesses that stay up to date with digital marketing best practices for their industry, like local SEO, can often create a competitive advantage for themselves in relation to competitors who aren’t as savvy.

What Are Some Advantages of Digital Marketing Over Traditional Marketing Methods?

Digital marketing can be more efficient, cost-effective, and flexible than traditional marketing methods like print, TV, and radio. It also offers more data on performance and customer behavior that can drive key decisions and inform future strategy.

What Are the 4 Ps of Digital Marketing?

What Are Some Examples of Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of channels and tactics, but some examples include posting or advertising on social media, creating an email campaign, or optimizing a blog post for SEO.

What Is the Most Affordable Form of Digital Marketing?

Many digital marketing tools are free or available for a small monthly subscription fee. Most social media channels are free upon sign-up, as are many website and blog platforms. Email can be another cost-effective marketing channel when operated on a relatively small scale.

Should I Hire a Digital Marketing Agency for My Business?

Small business owners who aren’t sure where to start with a digital marketing strategy might find it useful to hire a digital marketing agency to advise or execute on their marketing efforts. However, there are also many free resources available online if budget is a consideration.

The Bottom Line

A strong digital marketing strategy can contribute to many different aspects of business success. Whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, or a competitive edge, businesses can benefit from creating an online presence that supports their business goals.

Madhu Chocolate’s Gupta noted, for example, that the Good Impressions program provided a digital advertising budget for the company to run Facebook and Instagram ads from September to December, which gave it a “huge boost in holiday sales.” The digital marketing campaign was “a great way for our small business to get more brand awareness; having this big backing from a marketing company was really great. We were hoping to get the word out about our story and what we do, and they listened to our needs and definitely delivered.”

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