What is digital marketing for small business?

Digital marketing – a phrase that gets thrown around social media, everywhere you browse on internet, at business meetings and basically anywhere you turn.

But what exactly is digital marketing? And what is digital marketing for small business?  Allow us to delve into an easy to understand explanation of what digital marketing is and how you can use it for your small business – without needing to google the definition of every second word.

Digital marketing, very simply, is the marketing and advertising of your business on digital platforms and the internet.  By digital platforms we mean anything from websites, to emails, to mobile apps – if it comes to your phone or computer, it’s digital.

Digital marketing does not include advertising on newspapers, billboards, TV or radio – those are entirely different platforms to digital.  But, why the huge fuss about digital marketing?  Digital strategies can be more cost effective to roll out, as well as the fact that they can reach a far higher proportion of audience than for example, a newspaper advert can.

Once you’ve put anything onto the internet, absolutely anyone who has access to the internet via a mobile device or computer has the potential to access what you have put out there. Anyone. How crazy is that?  Talk about possibilities.

The problem for small business marketing comes in when there is a lack of knowledge and understanding of the digital space, as well as a shortfall of T-I-M-E to even begin to learn, or implement these digital marketing strategies.  So many companies have jumped onto the bandwagon of creating a Facebook page for their small business, but either lack the knowledge or the time to manage it properly – inevitably wasting a vastly prospective platform to launch your business into the hands of your consumers!

Something as simple as understanding the difference between ‘organic’ and ‘paid’ Facebook posts.  Organic refers to any post you load to social media, if you are not paying to advertise it (i.e. push it directly into newsfeeds with a paid budget), it’s organic.  The scary fact is that for Facebook, an organic post reaches on average 6.4% of your pages total likes – so if you have 100 likes on your company’s page, only 6.4% of those 100 are seeing your posts!

Some small companies try to advertise their own posts by means of ‘boosting the post’ (Facebook makes it look so easy)… but quite simply boosting a post is not effective enough on its own.  There’s not as much targeting and customisation available for boosted posts (as opposed to campaign creation), and boosting just any post isn’t going to gain you the traction that you may have hoped for.  Social media is all about the engagement your posts create (getting people to like, share and comment on your posts) – create engagement and your Facebook page will flourish.

But that’s just Facebook – there are so many digital marketing platforms that we could never mention them all.  There’s LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Email Marketing, Google Adwords, blogging (just like this one you’re reading now) and each platform has its own unique purpose… confusing right?

That’s why hiring a marketing company that specialises in digital marketing, who knows everything there is to know about each platform and how to use each platform to reach the specific goals that you are hoping for your small business.  Simply consulting with a well versed digital marketing specialist they will be able to create a customised digital marketing solution that fits your budget and your business needs.

The simple fact is that, digital marketing is here – and it’s here to stay. You either play ball and join in the game or your business will get lost in all of the noise.