Table Of Content:
If you’re thinking that either digital marketing can give you benefits or not? Then before everything, before you read the full content let me answer in one word “Yes”, It can work for you no matter if you have a small business, big, or even if you’re doing the job.
Yes even in a job also, because you can’t ignore your personal branding. Let me introduce you to the benefits of digital marketing.
Introduction
To make a Long story short, let me answer you- It Depends.
What does it mean?
It simply means that it depends on how you use digital marketing strategies in your business. Yes, there is a lot about strategies like building up a website, Developing Your App, SEO (maybe you heard about it) i.e. search engine optimization, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, Social Media Management, Social Media Marketing, Local SEO, YouTube SEO, and Blah Blah… Right?
I observe a market where most business owners make this mistake, they ask for what is packaged for all these digital marketing activities.
You need it all in a package, but your business needs strategies w.r.t time.
First of all, you need to find out your criteria in business. You need to check do you have a start-up business then you have to implement completely different strategies from big-scale companies,
If you have a local business you’ve different strategies from start-up and big-scale business and if you have a big business or enterprise then you can’t run ads to sell one product or service to an individual.
So, it depends on the nature of your business type:
Small Business Or Start-up
Local Business
Large Businesses or Enterprises
All categories have different goals and different strategies that can generate results for the business.
If you’re reading this content till now, then hopefully you’ve categorized your business clearly.
So, now I will elaborate on each category and what will be beneficial for them from starting from scratch.
Benefits of Digital Marketing For Small Businesses/ Start-up's
In the beginning, I know it is not easy to adopt digital marketing for start-up's or small businesses. It seems like an expense where there may be no returns.
But the truth is something different.
When you start adapting digital marketing in a proper way according to your business need then it will become cheaper than traditional marketing most important if you think you can work without digital marketing then keep the point in mind that your competitor will not neglect it, and all the quality customers can go in the account of your competitor, no matter your product is more valuable, the thing matter is the visibility of the business.
The one who is visible will get the opportunity at the moment in time.
- Inexpensive Customer Research:
Research is something that’s the root of every planning or business, and most people leave it and start working on the implementation.
If we talk about offline research people believe in asking others about their plans and on the basis of that recommendation they start and most of them are not able to scale or fail.
When it comes to online, there are a lot of tools & techniques to research your plan on the basis of data & facts. People make decisions that help them to grow from learning from mistakes that already people make and they post on the internet to share their experiences.
You can use analytics and data mining tools for your competition research like the number of user clicks, Keyword searches, how much your customers are spending, what is the bounce rate, frequency of shopping, etc.
You can put questionnaires on the social platform to understand the better requirements of your customers.
You can join groups where your clients or customers are active to observe their behaviour.
You can give early access to your product or service for testing purposes.
Connecting & following industry leaders for new learning.
This will not cost you a bit but it will make you learn a lot of things that can’t be learned by starting or making mistakes that are already mentioned on the internet.
- Develop brand awareness
Making brand awareness and getting customers, the story is over.
No, building up a brand is a consistent & long-lasting game, You’ve to be consistent with your values, ethics, and deliverability.
For building up a brand you need to Identify your target customers and then you need to influence your product & services on them.
You can think of the example of COCA-COLA, somewhat they also start it from a small scale towards the brand.
You can start with Social Media
Content Marketing can play an important role.
Your Logo design gives an impression to the customers.
Your Tagline should be remarkable.
Connecting with Influencers for mouth marketing.
These points are important to make trust with your target customers.
- Improve customer engagement
To make your brand more engaging & successful, first, you need to make good interactions with your customers. For that to happen you need to first define the journey of your target audience (customers). Before purchasing your product or service and after purchasing engagement is the key that defines your scalability.
Working on customer engagement helps your brand to not worry about more new customers. If you start interacting with your existing customers, these people only give you more valuable business as your brand advocate(Mouth Marketing).
Keep your myths, and assumptions, aside, and try to think like a customer because you don’t have an idea what your customer likes or dislikes. You need to make a decision on the basis of data, analytics, and the behaviour of your customers.
There are some ways to increase customer engagement:
Sharing Company's Story, Mission, and Vision, so that your actual customer can relate their goal to your start-up
Try to become an active listener, before going on any decision
Offer genuine help with no hope of liking or dislike.
Make a plan for the collaboration to define your credibility.
Try to collect some feedback from your existing customers.
There can be more ways to engage your customers, but the root starts with genuine help. If you’re helping your customers with a genuine approach, then don’t worry about anything keep doing, you will start getting influence in the market soon.
On the other hand, big companies or corporations have a proper CRM(Customer Relationship Management) System to handle the relationships with their customers. They hire people for this process like customer relationship managers, executives, etc.
- Influence purchasing decisions
If you’re a start-up then influencing purchasing decisions can be one of the big factors for your growth. After all the steps customers come to this step to purchase anything but this step totally depends on all the previous steps that customers have taken.
You need to understand the steps one by one.
Your customer first notices the credibility of your product & service.
Then slowly they start the research process.
That comes to generate more interest.
Then comes the point of who will provide that product or service on a basis of trust.
Only this is the game, what are you doing?
You’re focusing on the 4th step, instead, you’ve to capture your customer from the end of the 1st step and Digital Marketing helps you to gain your customers from the topmost funnel of the conversion. Now, what do you need to do?
You need to help your customers from the starting phase i.e. research process, then you’ve to generate interest of your customer in your product or services, and then come to the buying decision.
Now there are some various factors on which buying decision depends:
Reviews of your customers
Recommendations from people
Simplicity or user friendly wins the buying decision.
Unlimited words have next-level power for buying decisions.
Social Media Influence
Emotional connect
Sometimes people are trying to make a decision to influence others, or their own status. You need to understand first what they really want then according to that research you have to start implementing your digital marketing strategies for your business.
- Testing New Ideas With Your Target Market
According to the BRAIN FACT: Every day your brain processes about 70,000 thoughts.
And these thoughts get converted into ideas if we start thinning on it but it’s not compulsory that what you think will definitely work.
For that purpose, testing is important before investing a lot of money in some ideas you’ve to check with your target market what they think about it.
You know, In 2016, Tesla tested purchases in a unique way: they announced the Model 3, and people could put down $1,000 deposits for it. Around 400,000 people did that, which gave Tesla the confidence that their car would sell.
Digital Marketing can help you out throughout your market research & testing of your product & ideas:
You can do a pre-launch campaign & check the engagement.
You can give some quantity in less amount to the first 100 customers.
You can launch an offline event.
You can do much more but it becomes easy when you adapt digital marketing for your testing because most importantly it’s cost-effective & start-up's can afford it according to their budgets.
You only need to collect data & check the behaviour of your customers which can be possible with digital marketing easily.
- Digital Marketing Services Recommended For Small Businesses/Start-up's
If you’ve a start-up or a plan to start your venture then I’ll guide you regarding which digital marketing services can help you and save you from burning your money.
I’ll divide services into 2 categories i.e. Top Priority & Priority.
Both are important for you but it depends on the budget you need to invest in the start.
Top Priority Digital Marketing Services For Start-up
Web Development is your own platform where people can trust you.
Content Marketing: Start writing, answer all the questions that your customer has and submit on your website & others as well.
Start Building Email List: Get to capture emails of your audience and build community.
Priority Digital Marketing Services For Start-up
Google Profile Management, Social Media for brand reputation.
Google Ads for acquiring new customers on a small level.
Enough!
Nothing more than that.
If you’ve a good budget and you don’t worry if it goes burn out than you can try everything, but if you have a limited budget then first try to cover top priority services after covering then comes on the priority services.
- Best Digital Marketing Service Provider For Start-up's
Catnyx Digital Media is one of the best digital marketing service providers with a result-oriented approach, working with more than 140+ start-up's.
Understanding your goals, building a path to reach the final position from scratch, building up relationships with you, and generating results is the core competency of Catnyx Digital Media.
Expert Services For Start-up's:
We suggest only what you need at a moment of time. After having experience in handling start-up businesses we will not let you repeat the mistakes that other start-up's did.
About Author Umair Riaz
Umair Riaz is a leading Brand Consultant in the market, helping businesses to get their digital branding digitally strong & efficient, Started their career as a web developer in 2017, and Establishment of the company Catnyx India Private Limited in 2019, as the best digital marketing agency in Aligarh. At Catnyx, Umair works closely with their team members to analyse each project & develop strategies. In 2020, He also wrote a book for students “Start Your Career With Digital Marketing”.