Marketing is how you connect with your audience. When you have an online business, the majority of your marketing will be online using digital platforms. How you use digital marketing in your business can help you achieve new heights or keep you from achieving the level of success you desire. Keep reading to learn about the role of digital marketing in your online business and how you can be sure that you’re using it effectively to make an impact.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the umbrella term for all marketing activities done electronically. Here are some examples that you may or may not be using in your business, though this list is not exhaustive.
- Search engine optimization: Your SEO helps you to rank higher on Google, and other search engine results pages, so you get more organic traffic to your website. It’s a powerful strategy that you can apply to your blog posts, videos, website pages, and even images and infographics on your web pages.
- Social media marketing: Your social media marketing incorporates using social media platforms to build brand awareness, share valuable content, generate leads, and connect with your audience on a more personal level. You can use options such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for your social media marketing.
- Email marketing: Your email marketing can be used to welcome new members of your audience, nurture your audience, share valuable content as well as promote your offerings directly to your list.
- Paid advertising: Your paid advertising strategy can get your business in front of more eyes quicker. When using pay per click (PPC), you are charged every time your ad is clicked through options like Google Ads and Facebook ads.
- Content marketing: Your content marketing includes the content that you create and distribute (e.g., blog posts, white papers, ebooks, infographics) to build your brand, increasing your traffic, generating leads, and building relationships with your audience.
The Role of Digital Marketing in Your Business
When marketing to your ideal client, you can use digital marketing strategies to attract leads, nurture leads, and improve your overall conversion rates as they move through your sales funnel.
Build Brand Awareness
Initially, digital marketing helps to build your online brand. Today, most companies have an online presence, whether that’s their website, a Facebook page, LinkedIn account, or Youtube channel. If your potential client is like many people, they’re looking for the solution to their problem online, so you want your company to have an established presence showing your expertise in whatever you offer.
Help Your Company Grow
As a small online business owner, you can use digital marketing to help your company grow. Even if you’re starting and have $0 to spend on marketing, you can implement digital marketing strategies to connect with your ideal customers and start getting sales. As your business grows, you can adjust your budget and refine your plan to get better results from your marketing efforts.
Increase Your Conversion Rates
As an online business owner, you want to keep your conversion rates high because the higher percentage of leads that you convert into paying customers, the more money you make for your efforts. Some digital marketing strategies lead to higher conversion rates than others. Still, in general, your digital marketing strategy will guide how you are connecting with the right people and improving your conversion rates.
Establish Trust
These days anyone can start a business and make claims about how they support their customers or clients. You differentiate yourself by developing a digital marketing strategy that doesn’t just tell, but shows. Shows your expertise. Shows your consistency. Shows how you connect with your audience. Shows that you can be trusted. The more you show up and provide value, the easier it will be to establish trust with your audience.
Help Your Audience Achieve Wins
Before anyone invests a dollar in your business, your digital marketing strategy can help them achieve a win. This could be due to content that helps them consider a new perspective, change their mindset, or take action that leads to an improvement in their life or business. You want to help solve a problem for those in your audience before they ever invest monetarily in your company.
Provide Cost-Effective Marketing
Digital marketing can be very cost-effective. As mentioned previously, you can start getting results with a $0 investment, just some sweat equity, and free online tools. But when you are investing financially, you can take even a small budget and start seeing results such as more leads, more engagement, and more sales.
Track Your Success
Many digital marketing strategies allow you to quantify your results. That means you can determine the outcome of your efforts down to the dollar, percentage, or number. For example, if you use Facebook ads, you can see exactly how many new subscribers you get and 3 months down the road how many of those subscribers became paid customers. This data allows you to track your progress and pivot within your digital marketing strategy if necessary.
Expand Your Reach
When you use digital marketing strategies, you have the opportunity to connect with more people faster and at a higher frequency. Your plan can determine how often you connect with your audience and who you’re targeting. The options are endless.
How Will You Implement Digital Marketing into Your Online Business?
Digital marketing can provide endless opportunities for your business. Whether you’re at the very beginning stages or you’re looking to scale your company, you can use digital marketing to help you achieve your business goals.
I specialize in supporting online business owners with various digital marketing techniques related to lead generation, launching courses and programs, and delivering webinars. If you’re ready to take your digital marketing to the next level with the support of an OBM to handle set up and management, let’s chat.
