Small businesses just starting off in the market, often have trouble adjusting and finding the best marketing strategy. The struggle to find new customers and grow, is a hard task. In most cases, small companies may rely on traditional forms of advertising such as newspapers ads. However, these have proven to be less effective over time. But, take a minute and think about it: what if your new customers were online? What if the future of your business was relying on the vast internet marketplace?

In this article, we explore a few reasons why we think digital marketing is the future of small businesses.

Digital marketing helps you reach a bigger and yet more targeted audience

Objectively, the number of customers you can reach online is much larger than the group of people you can expect to reach locally. Thanks to digital marketing, you can now increase the online presence of your business. This means reaching more potential customers while saving money. Along with the exponential growth of online communities, using online marketing allows you to reach out for bigger audience. While enhancing the scope of your business, you are getting more customers to know about you. Those who could not physically approach you before now can buy your products, day and night!

 A great tool to track and measure your online performance

Implementing a digital marketing strategy means that you now have analytics tools at your disposal. They can provide you with data and traffic information in order to know how effective your campaign is. Hence, digital marketing becomes the most measurable form of marketing. Small businesses can easily know if their marketing strategy is working or not. They can also track the performance of their ads in just a few clicks!

Digital marketing is more cost-effective than traditional marketing

Online marketing being more cost-effective than traditional marketing, it can be a great asset for smaller businesses which have little to no resources to allocate to their advertisement strategy. When considering traditional marketing, it is very hard for small businesses with limited budget to compete with big companies for ad space. Plus, the latter form of marketing often comes with various hidden costs. Digital marketing on the other hand only costs a bit of time and energy.

As a matter of fact, it has been estimated that a small business can reach no less than 1,000 people for $3 using social media and the digital space. The same exposure through direct mail or television ads would cost between $28 and $57! Likewise, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (Demand Metric). A difference that is thought-provoking as it would allow your small business to compete with much bigger companies in the same market.

 A better way to connect with your customer base

In addition to that, the growing use of internet as a marketplace has tremendously transformed the way people consume and buy. Hence, businesses must follow the trend themselves and keep up with the consumption habits of their targeted audience. When a potential customer has an interest in an item or in a business, the first thing he or she is likely to do is to research online and see what he or she can find. More than often, they expect to find a website, some sort of social media presence and even reviews from former customers. It has even been found that 86% of consumers use the Internet to find a local business (WebVisible survey) and 79% of them prefer to find information on local merchants via search (WebVisible survey). A business that does not have an online presence will appear as less legitimate and there is a good chance that customers will not buy from it. They will more likely purchase from a website with a proper online marketing strategy.

Therefore, think of digital marketing not as this vague and unknown (maybe even scary) concept but rather as a way to make yourself and your business more accessible. And what a better way to increase your accessibility than Google Ads? Google being the most used browser out there, promoting your business through paid ads could be incredibly advantageous.

An efficient online marketing strategy differentiates you from your competitors. As we have seen, there are a lot of perks to investing a bit of time and energy into digital marketing. With the click of your button you can reach a vast audience, something which would be hard to do with the old traditional methods. With times changing, small businesses have to change their practices as well. It’s time to dive into the digital world!  

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Instaon helps small businesses taking their first steps into the digital space. By providing an easy to use, fully automated and free service, Instaon cancels out the time-consuming aspect of digital marketing and helps you take your business to the next level! Come join our growing community of 100,000 users and benefit from the Instaon experience!