88% of consumers research into the company and product before they decide to purchase (PYMNTS) making it vital for businesses to optimise their digital marketing presence and strategy.

I present to you the importance of digital marketing on SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises). I have also added some platforms you can start with to make your digital marketing journey a little bit easier.

Become More Accessible

Customers might want to browse your product/service, see your reviews or look at your overall company, creating your online presence and having a website makes you more accessible to potential customers at any time of the day.

Being a trustworthy business is one of the keys to success, digital marketing unlocks the opportunity for a business to be transparent and present their values, this then prompting customer loyalty and increase in conversions.

You may also want to set up ‘chatbots’ these can be implemented into your website or onto your social media pages for automated responses to any questions or queries people may have when you aren’t around to answer.  

Measure Performance and Effectiveness

Unlike traditional marketing, you can do a lot more in terms of measuring performance and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Digital marketing is a lot more productive enabling you to track your cost against revenue, finding improvements from your previous campaigns and implementing new changes. This equips you to respond quickly, adapt and refine your strategy while seeing results within a matter of hours.

The wide range of analytical tools can draw data from your website/pages and provide useful metrics enabling you to create reports, download, and document. This can give you a better insight into your audience enabling you to tailor to their needs and behaviour.

Here are a few things that you can measure using web analytical tools:

• Number of website visitors
• Costs and Revenue
• Bounce Rates
• Page Sessions  
• Number of purchases
• Subscriptions/newsletter sign-ups
• Phone call sessions

Drive New Enquiries and New Customers

Being online enables you to communicate with new and existing customers aiding you to build rapport and drive more conversions.

When conducting online advertising, for example, Google, Facebook or Microsoft Ads (previously known as Bing), this will allow you to use specific audience targeting to seek out the audience best suited to your business. These can be elements spanning from interests, demographics, recent searches and topics. There is not a one-size fits all in the real world, digital marketing will enable you to tailor and personalise your customer base which is the biggest advantage over traditional marketing.  

Helps With Rebranding

When your company wants a breath of fresh life and change of perception, rebranding becomes such a HUGE task. Many things need to be considered and planned to best suit modern changes and audience requirements, using digital marketing as part of your strategy will enable you to do so effectively. By changing your website, social media, overall image, values, and promotions.

Here is an example of an SME that rebranded using digital marketing successfully, once a medium business in 2008, Airbnb rebranded digitally in 2014 and used a wide range of strategies to help get them there, with a huge success they were a global trending conversation on Twitter for 8 hours.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJCELrIWdik[/embed]

Cost Effective

Many SMEs don’t have the budget to commit to traditional marketing such as billboards and print advertising that unlike the bigger businesses, that's what makes digital marketing so brilliant.

With digital marketing you can easily manage your ROI (return-on-investment), maximise your investment, you can control how much budget goes into advertising and ensure the return, this can help your business generate more income by having set daily or monthly budgets for advertising. This puts small and medium businesses back in the game with the ability to compete for website traffic against the bigger companies.

Build Brand Awareness and Increase Conversions

Building brand awareness is another key component for small and medium businesses, making your presence on people’s feeds and pages is very important, even big businesses are still doing it!  

Brand awareness is the degree of a brand’s consciousness in the minds of its target customers. This is easily done digitally as you can target and tailor a wider audience globally.

Wide Range of Digital Tools and Platforms You Can Use To Optimise Your Business

• Being able to measure online performance and presence e.g. (Google Analytics  and Facebook Attribution)
• Can use online advertising to generate leads, clicks, brand awareness, purchases and drive customer loyalty e.g. (Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Microsoft Ads)
• Able to receive feedback, testimonials and create case studies.
• Can be creative with content, can publish videos, images and other assets e.g. (Renderforest for Videos and Canva for Images)
• Can begin using classic SEO practices to improve your website ranking when searched e.g. (Moz)
• Can mass schedule and upload your organic social media content and analyse e.g. (Buffer and Sprout Social )
• Can re-market to previous customers, cart abandoners or page visitors e.g. (ReTargeter)
• Website Creation offering both coding and templates e.g. (WordPress)
• Create an online newsletter, blogs and subscriptions for your audience to sign up to and engage with.
• Use of email marketing to send bulk emails with news, updates and offers e.g. (MailChimp)
• Mass communication with customers e.g. (Zendesk)

1 in 5 SMEs don’t use any digital marketing (TDM), CampaignHero’s goal is to try and improve that statistic and aid small and medium businesses to optimise their digital strategy.

We understand there are many daunting barriers to taking your first step into the digital marketing world including costs, resources, and knowledge. (Google) studies have found that for every $1 spent on Google Ads, there is a return of $2. In terms of resources and knowledge, this is where CampaignHero can help, our app can give you help to start up your online advertising and optimise for its success. We offer in-app chat support where you can ask all your questions and get the guidance you need, it's a free, simple, all in one place helping track, manage and analyse your accounts.

Stop letting competitors get ahead, consider digital marketing for your new business strategy.