When small and medium businesses get started, their focus is to find the first group of customers to walk into their doors. They possibly rely on traditional media such as printed ads (coupon, magazine & newspaper), billboards, or a big poster stick on the obvious side of the road. They even possibly believe that once they offer good product/service, the steps of the customer into their doors is just a matter of time.
However, Small / Medium businesses should target a bigger market instead of just the local market. Being a new-established business, SME should consider a huge marketplace via online; By using digital marketing, businesses can reach an enormous number of audiences in a short time.
• Get to Know Your Target Audiences.
Digital marketing allows you to engage with your potential customers in a more cost-friendly and time-saving way. With digital marketing, you’ll eventually understand your audience and what they are trying to search for. A relatively ‘friendly’ strategy for you to understand your audience is through online conversation.
By communicating and interacting with people via online, you’ll start to get to know what they are searching for, what habits do they exhibit, where their pain is, and what solution can you offer to them after knowing their problems. Instead of picking a lottery or keep guessing, you can make use of digital marketing because it provides you tools and the way of finding out who your potential customers are.
In this way, you can build relationships with your potential customers or even customers. In long term, your business is no longer just a business to them; instead, you’re a trusted partner to them. People are more likely to purchase from the businesses that they are trusted and always bought from.
• Be Accessible to Your Customers.
It’s clear that in today’s digital world, when consumers look for something else, the first thing that comes into their mind is search through online. And, most importantly, they will most likely start to search their desired goods or services on Google. Hence, if you have literally zero online presence, you won’t be found, and of course, you can’t compete with your competitors who made their presence online.
However, if you did have an online presence, but your competitors are easier to find and much more accessible, you might still lose your competition with them. Your potential customers will switch to an alternative if they couldn’t notice your existence. Thus, learning search engine optimization is a strategy for you to reach your potential customer faster than your competitors.
• Let Your Customers Come to You Automatically
With digital marketing, you can reach a larger audience rather than just catering to local prospects. Digital marketing is a way to make yourself accessible to the audience that you are trying to reach in order to offer and promote your products and services.
By creating your presence online, your business continues to operate as usual even when it’s closed. You can create an atmosphere where your potential customer can come to you regardless of whether it is day or night. To bring convenience to your potential customer, you can feature email as one of your contacts and allow potential customers to send you questions regarding your products and make purchases. Besides, with digital marketing, potential customers who have no way to physically contact with you can still do business with you, whether they are limited by transportation, disability or living too far away.
Compared to making your advertisement appear on old media such as TV, radio or direct mail, digital marketing cost is relatively lower and able to reach a much wider audience in the meantime. Using digital marketing to promote your small/medium business will assist you in gaining better chances of success.
• Audience Can Be More Targeted And Focused
One of the benefits of digital marketing brought to us is the ability of segmenting our audience and making them even more focused. If we are about to print our advertisements on traditional media like newspapers and magazines, it could reach a very wide audience. And these audiences could be 55 years old women with secondary education or 12 years old kids with only primary education. However, thanks to the appearance of digital marketing, we are able to track down our visitor/audience data, and observe their behaviour. Facebook marketplace features is one of the many examples that we can make full use of it by narrowing down targeted audiences’ information and to show our ads to those who exhibit a very similar behaviour, interest, location and other identifiers.
• Customers’ Problem Can Be Solved Efficiently
With the use of email marketing and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can always write a solution for your customers whenever they encounter any problem in regards to your products. Most of the social media platforms inserted page/story features and live chat session can also be found in it, you can make use of this live chat features to solve your customer issues efficiently. In another way around, your customer can also write feedback and review immediately with no delays in your live chat session or on your page.
• Opportunity to Earn Higher Profit
Digital marketing offers you the ability of spending less to reach a wide audience in a shorter time as compared to the traditional media. In other words, you can save up and invest less in digital advertising. Thus, the amount of your investment can be returned faster and profit can meanwhile be gained in a shorter time. According to research conducted by IPSOS Hong Kong in cooperation with Google, digital marketing can generate 2.8 times of your revenues (that’s quite a big amount!).
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Prepared by: Wen Hui
Published by: Charlotte
