Digital Marketing in 2022: Reasons for Small Business you Need
Digital marketing
Let’s begin this article with a statistic that should be enough for any small business owner investing in digital marketing. Shop Dive reports that 87% buyers search online for products. Eighty-seven. It is an enormous market to ignore and, arguably, the most important reason you should invest your money in digital marketing. These are just 7 reasons, and here are some ways to do it.
1. Digital marketing can help small businesses establish lasting customer relationships
Keap received over 1,190 responses from small businesses located in the US. They stated that their third greatest challenge in 2019 was to retain and re-engage customers. We can safely assume that most of them use the internet daily. This will make it easier to increase digital marketing efforts in 2020.
Over half of a million businesses are starting every month in the US. Therefore, “losing” customers has never been easier than it was 20 or 30 years back. If you are able to get to know your target customer and your product, digital marketing can be a powerful tool to keep them coming back for more.
Digital marketing is not like in-store purchases. It goes further to make sure that a customer buys for the brand and becomes an ambassador.
Digital marketing has some advantages over traditional ways of keeping loyal clients:
- Digital testimonials of happy customers are better than word-of-mouth. These testimonials should go on your website.
- You can send automated, personalized thank you and follow-up email campaigns rather than sending letters or pamphlets. You can reach more people for a fraction of the cost and still send the right emails at the right moment to the right persons.
- Social media is a great way to engage customers after they have left your shop or bought your product online. It will keep your product fresh in their minds so that they come back for more.
- Remarketing and retargeting allows them to try out “this additional product” that complements what they have already purchased.
2. To be more profitable in your customer service, you will need to know more about them.
Small businesses face another challenge, as shown in the graphic. They must attract, capture, convert leads into customers. For small businesses to succeed in this endeavor, they must first identify their target customer requirements so that they can meet those needs.
Digital marketing is a great way for small businesses to learn about the online habits and preferences of customers in order to target their ideal customers. The next step in digital marketing is determined by solid market research.
Smart small businesses don’t make assumptions. They use online tools to find out what their target customers search for and what they need.
Google Analytics, Google Search Console SEMrush and SurveyMonkey are digital tools that can help you determine what your ideal customers like, what drives them, and how to approach them with a highly personalized, warm proposal. This will ultimately lead to them becoming customers. Use social media and your existing customers to discover what interests them, what posts they respond to and what questions they have.
You can then create one or two customer personas after you’ve done the research. You can create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns that target specific groups of people and then turn them into customers.
3. Digital marketing uses multichannel approaches to increase conversions
Potential customers are everywhere online.
This is how it looks:
- 41% U.S. buyers search Amazon and then purchase, while 28% search Google first and then shop on Amazon. So small business SEO is still important
- Today, social media is used by 42% or 3.2 billion people worldwide ( Emersys, 2019).
- Market leaders are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Reddit is also available. LinkedIn offers 82% of social media B2B leads.
- These individuals spend an average of 2 hours and 22 seconds per day on social networks while 80% is spent on mobile .
- 54% Consumers Use social media to find products
- 73% marketers believe they are able to use social media marketing in a way that is somewhat effective for their business.
- 83% marketers used video marketing for 2019, and 87% stated that video was helping them to achieve “a good return on investment”
- Delaying customer responses by even 10 minutes can lower the chances of a sale . Consider using chatbots to improve your digital customer support
Email marketing. Facebook and Google ads. Social media marketing. SEO. You can go on and on. Small businesses can use many different digital marketing channels to reach customers and ultimately get them to buy their products or services. Each channel will require a different approach. But once you have a strategy and made preparations, it’s easy for different audiences to be reached and to increase conversions.
Some potential customers respond better to personalized email campaigns while some prefer blogs and a combination of targeted ads .
The multichannel digital marketing approach is a great way to find and engage customers online, no matter their preferred platform.
4. Small businesses can compete with large companies using digital marketing.
It doesn’t require small businesses to have expensive tools or large budgets to digitally market. However, it is important that they are able to stand out and be noticed. Although some tools are necessary, a lot depends on the owners’ knowledge and experience. Digital marketing can help you to understand your target audience better than any fancy tools.
Ann Smarty, a prominent digital marketer, stated this in her article for Digital Marketer.
“The beauty of digital marketing is that creativity and ingenuity can win over large marketing budgets.”
There is no greater truth than this. Even if you’re a “small business”, sometimes your campaigns can be more successful than investing millions in video production. Example? A viral Christmas advert was made by a small hardware store located in Wales. It was shot by the owner. His son recently starred in it. The video received over 2 million views on YouTube. Many of the comments shared the same sentiment: “I want buy from this small company after seeing this advertisement.”
5. Digital marketing is less expensive than traditional marketing
Many small businesses are unable to afford a TV, billboard or radio advertising campaign. However, many small businesses can afford digital marketing strategies to reach ideal audiences.
How much is digital marketing cheaper than traditional methods of marketing?
Email and social media marketing are two examples. For $38, email asked you to only invest $1 in 2015. In 2018, email marketing had a cost per lead of $53. It’s second only to online retargeting (31). This is a clear advantage over events/tradeshows (811) and TV/radio ads (611), which are also easy.
Moving forward, free organic search still leads web traffic over traffic from paid campaigns. Let’s take, for instance, the claim and optimization of a Google My Business Profile. That’ll:
- Boost your local SEO search visibility
- You can increase foot traffic if your business is a local one, especially from mobile users
- GMB reviews are a free way to improve your business’ online reputation.
It’s absolutely free! is the current version. All you need to do this is have internet access and a smartphone or computer.
Facebook ads can be a little more difficult to manage because it’s easy to lose sight of how much you are spending. However, you can start by spending 1 per day and then build on that.
6. Digital marketing delivers measurable ROI
Digital marketing is different from traditional marketing methods. It’s targeted and provides credible metrics to help you determine which tactics are working.
A small business can make small investments in online marketing. They will see results quickly before they invest more.
Are you having difficulty associating your digital marketing spending to revenue? Track Maven identified many SMBs as.
Create a dedicated landing site. You want to get inbound traffic to a particular campaign.
Monitor how many people are landing at the landing page from there. Google Analytics allows you to track the ROI metrics such as bounce rate (and where they were at the page), engagement with the page and conversions.
A/B tests can be used to identify which online marketing techniques, copy, calls, or page layouts are most successful based on customer interactions.
You can use the tests to determine if you should be more specific. You might also want to cut down on the content of your landing pages to increase conversions. Or if adding more above-fold call to action buttons can boost conversions.
7. Your competition uses digital marketing to propel ahead
The survey showed that half of the small-business owners who participated in the survey indicated they would use online marketing strategies to increase their business in 2019. Many already do. The obvious conclusion is that most of your competition are also using online marketing strategies.
How do you know what digital marketing strategies they use? You can start by looking at their website and on social media. Are they able to update their blog regularly? Are there regular updates on Facebook and do they share photos on Instagram? Facebook also lets you see which ads your competitors are running. Just click on the page info to access their ad library.
You can then do a Google Search for their brand name to check if other sites are linking to them. You can also use tools like Ahrefs’ site explorer, to find out which websites link with your competitors. You can also use similar Web to view the traffic sources and see if your competitors are using paid search ads. has more information about ads tracking and what tools you can utilize.
Remember to record all your findings, from how many people follow you on social media to which keywords they are interested in. All of this data is useful for any type digital marketing campaign. Although there are many different tools and templates for competitor research available, Excel sheets work best.
Don’t wait! 2022 is likely the last train on the digital marketing train. There are many tools now available for small businesses that are either free or at a reasonable price. All you need is a fraction of the traditional advertising budget and some time to learn.