Impact of Digital Marketing on Small Business

Small businesses have always faced an uphill battle when it comes to competing with the industry’s giants. But if you want to give your operation a fighting chance, it’s hard to imagine achieving sustained success without a dedicated approach to digital marketing. 

As these highly accessible methods give you a clear path to engage your customers and encourage them to make a purchase, establishing digital marketing tactics that make sense for your business is imperative to reaching your goals.

If you’re confused about how to get started, First Page Australia’s talented team has helped thousands of small businesses achieve their potential and carve out a profitable piece of the pie. Here, we outline some of the most effective online marketing tips so you can do the same.

Why Every Small Business needs Digital Marketing

There’s no doubt that most customers use the internet to find the products and services they need. In fact, a Google survey from 2019 found that 51% of online shoppers say they use the search engine to research purchases before deciding to commit.

By using digital marketing tactics to increase your brand’s visibility in search results and spread awareness across the rest of the internet, you can lead targeted consumers straight to your website. With an approach that outperforms the competition, achieving a flourishing small business is within your reach.

Ready to find out more? Check out these top reasons why small business services benefit massively from a carefully tailored digital marketing campaign.

Low-Cost Marketing

It’s no secret that many small businesses don’t have a large amount of spare cash to sink into a marketing campaign. This typically rules out large-scale advertising via traditional routes like television, newspapers and radio. 

However, digital marketing provides a low-cost alternative that delivers far better results in many cases. This is because a targeted strategy has the potential to generate a massive ROI, as you encourage your precise target market to check out your brand. 

Don’t commission a costly production company to produce a television commercial that results in uncertain sales. Instead, benefit from a measurable digital marketing campaign that can be easily fine-tuned by an experienced team.

Boost Conversions for Less

Every business wants to level up its conversion rates for the lowest possible financial output. Fortunately, a carefully considered digital marketing strategy optimised for your specific products and customers can ensure you generate a top-notch ROI. 

For example, a data-driven Google Ads campaign has the power to reach your target audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. This means you can achieve objectives ranging from widespread brand awareness to immediate conversions.

In addition, long-term digital marketing strategies like search engine optimisation can help your business climb the rankings page and overtake the competition. As this increased visibility drives more website traffic, taking your conversions to the next level is made possible.

Level the Playing Field

Your business might be a long way off the resources of the biggest names in your industry. But that doesn’t mean you have to give up hope about reaching and converting your target audience. 

Digital marketing is one of the best ways to promote a small business because it means savvy organisations can convince their target market to choose them with the right combination of tactics. 

Invest in a bubbly social media marketing campaign to showcase the very best of your visual products or use Local SEO to drive more consumers into your brick-and-mortar store. These digital marketing tactics are great for expanding your reach where it matters most.

Skyrocket Revenue

Finding ways to increase revenue is the holy grail for every small business. But as the entire shopping landscape is trending online, doing so without digital marketing is becoming an increasingly challenging prospect. 

Cutting-edge digital marketing techniques like micro-influencer marketing, video campaigns, chatbots and a raft of mobile-friendly features can convince engaged customers to pay attention to your small business services.

However, the top companies in your sector are likely exploring the same options. Alongside the talented team at First Page Australia, we can ensure your business maximises its revenue streams and won’t get left behind.

Reach the Ideal Customers

Digital marketing services help small businesses seize opportunities like brand awareness and sales by reaching and converting the ideal customers with an optimised campaign. Although audience targeting is essential to high-quality digital marketing, this process is not as easy as it sounds.

So how can you generate revenue for your business? By conducting comprehensive research on your most desired customer base, you can identify their most important problems and promote your brand as the solution. 

This ranges from a detailed understanding of their core demographics, such as age, gender, location, interests and behaviours, while also determining a content strategy that gets them to engage. With a carefully tailored message, you can ensure customers choose your business.

Stay Current with Consumer Trends

The rapid pace of change across society means that consumer behaviour is constantly evolving. Your customers might respond wonderfully to a specific message one day while finding it out of touch only a short time later.

However, staying up to date with the latest digital marketing tactics means you can keep pace with shifting consumer trends. For example, most customers shop online using their mobile phones, ensuring you need a mobile-friendly website to capitalise effectively. 

In addition, consumers are increasingly concerned with how their private information is being used. However, a transparent message that clearly explains how customer data is used to market your products and services can help alleviate any concerns.

Drive More Brand Awareness

Generating brand awareness is one of the most crucial aspects of digital marketing for small businesses. Why? Because you can’t expect customers to trust your business enough to make a purchase when they don’t know anything about you. 

Using digital marketing to promote your small business, you ensure customers learn why your brand is different. Perhaps you have better pricing than the competition or a dramatically improved online shopping experience. 

Alongside an array of top-notch digital marketing tactics, you can inform your ideal customers about how your brand is the best choice for their needs and ensure they head to your website in huge numbers.

How to Promote a Small Business with Digital Marketing

Now that we’ve covered the main reasons to use digital marketing to promote your brand, you probably want to know what small business marketing ideas are bound to generate massive success. Below, we look at some of the most common digital marketing strategies and how they can be used to your advantage.

Social Media Marketing

If you’re looking to reach your target market, there’s nowhere better in the modern age than social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok. But considering basically every business owner has the same idea, you have to produce incredible content to stand out.

While this might not sound so difficult on the surface, communicating with your consumers in a way that drives them to visit your website and make a purchase requires a genuinely impressive strategy.

By understanding what makes your customers tick, it’s possible to produce content that captures attention and drives people to take action. Alongside a personalised social media marketing campaign, you can boost brand awareness, increase loyalty and generate trust.

Growth Hacking

The online landscape is becoming super crowded, meaning brands must take a more creative approach to digital marketing to grab attention. This has led to the digital marketing field of growth hacking which, as the name suggests, is all about advancing your business through experimental techniques.

Although there’s plenty of overlap between digital marketing and growth hacking, the latter area sees businesses utilise numerous exploratory techniques to discover the most effective way to grow the business. 

By moving from one strategy to the next faster than a traditional approach to digital marketing, the objective is to strike gold ahead of schedule. For example, detailed remarketing campaigns, a burst of targeted emails and exit pop-ups on your website are all techniques used by growth hackers.

Affiliate Marketing

Establishing a productive affiliate marketing programme can help your business reach the next phase incredibly quickly. This digital marketing tactic involves paying affiliates a commission to successfully send traffic and sales in your direction.

So how does affiliate marketing work? You need to attract affiliates with the skills to reach your target market. For example, some styles of affiliate marketing involve freelancers creating their own SEO campaigns to drive sales for your products. Meanwhile, you might engage popular social media influencers to convert a like-minded audience.

As affiliate marketing is like having your own sales team working around the clock, the typically small commissions you must pay out will look tiny compared to the revenue these extra conversions produce.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is one of the most productive techniques for getting customers to engage with your business. However, it’s only possible to achieve success when your strategy is designed around your company’s precise objectives, target market and products.

Alongside a detailed understanding of your target market, you have to generate a strategy that captures their attention. For example, a business selling baby products might get active on a community forum where mothers chat about products that make their lives easier. 

Alternatively, a restaurant that relies on local visitors must track and respond to online reviews. Even if some reviews are negative, crafting a genuine response that highlights your store’s willingness to improve has the power to drive more visitors in the future.

Content Marketing

Getting customers to explore your website and get to know your business is made so much easier with a razor-sharp content marketing strategy. Across blog posts, YouTube videos, Youtube Ads, infographics, podcasts and much more, these channels help position your business as the best in the industry.

Despite the widespread popularity of content marketing, 63% of businesses don’t have a documented strategy. This means you have a great chance to surpass your rivals when you invest the time, money and cash to outperform their approach.

In a world where businesses with blogs experience 434% more website traffic compared to those who ignore this essential digital marketing tactic, don’t make a mistake by overlooking content in your business plan.

Google Ads

Google Ads is the world’s leading online advertising platform, with the Google Display Network ads alone capable of reaching over 90% of internet users worldwide. Unfortunately, some small business owners believe paid online advertising is outside their budget. 

However, the reality is that these companies have most likely never used a properly optimised campaign. Backed by research-driven methods that capitalise on first-class audience targeting, generating a campaign with a stellar ROI is a distinct possibility.

The team at First Page Australia knows what it takes to determine your ideal target market and reach them with comprehensive keyword research. Alongside a host of forward-thinking methods, you don’t have to break the bank on Google Ads. 

SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) isn’t only a technique used by big businesses. In fact, it’s highly effective for those operating lower down the food chain as it helps companies identify customers, generate leads and develop a supremely user-friendly website.

Yet, none of this is possible without knowing how to conduct extensive keyword research. As this allows you to optimise your website’s landing pages and content marketing with terms used by relevant consumers, you can significantly boost your visibility in the ideal search results. 

SEO also helps shape your content plan and expand your brand’s presence. Through link-building campaigns, mobile-friendly website changes and user-experience improvements, the best time to launch your campaign is today.

Chat to the Experts

Small businesses don’t have to remain passive in the marketplace. By using these small business marketing ideas to reach your customers and promote your brand, you can steadily increase your standing until you’re the one at the top of the totem pole.

However, a digital marketing campaign can only achieve your goals if it’s designed and executed to the highest possible standards. Fortunately, the experts at First Page Australia lead hugely productive campaigns for the world’s top businesses every day.

Ready to get started on your path to digital marketing glory? Reach out to our elite team to discover why we’re considered one of Australia’s leading full-service digital marketing agencies.