Why Digital Marketing is Important for Small Businesses

Congrats on launching your new small business! That’s no easy feat. But you’ve only cleared the first hurdle to ensure your enterprise is successful. You must start marketing, and you can’t rely on word-of-mouth marketing or a sandwich board in front of your location as your only tactic. Yes, you have a long list of new operational responsibilities, but you can’t let digital marketing for your small business fall down the queue.  

Digital marketing can seem like a massive undertaking – especially when you have several tasks piling up – but it's more manageable than you might think. Targeting your ideal customers on the relevant channels is vital to brand awareness and sales for your small business. To help you get started, here’s a quick primer on how you can launch digital marketing without maxing out your time or your budget. 

What the Heck is Digital Marketing?

For the uninitiated, digital marketing includes using online channels such as Google search, email, social media, and content marketing to promote a business or service. As these channels have evolved, it’s become easier to find your target market so you can serve the right message at the right time.

What’s more, digital marketing can help you build brand awareness, increase your visibility and reach, improve customer engagement, enhance audience targeting, generate leads and sales, and drive website traffic. When done right, it’s also a cost-effective method for driving customer engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

It’s OK to Start Small

When you launch digital marketing for your small business, you don’t have to be on every channel right away. When you target every channel at once, you risk spreading yourself and your budget too thin. Identify one to two online channels where your ideal customers spend their time. 

Social media and online search are great places to start. Consumers use social media channels – like Instagram or TikTok – to get answers to questions, engage with brands, or gain inspiration. Also, online search – think Google Search – helps potential customers find your products, services, or location if your website content is properly optimized. 

If you start with social media, schedule one to two social posts every two weeks. You can post a “Day in the Life” video or a “behind the scenes” picture showing what it’s like to own your own business, interact with your customers, or news about your product or service. Affordable social media tools like HootSuite, Later, or Buffer can help you automate and optimize your posts.

Measure and Adjust Your Strategy

One of the best advantages of digital marketing is that you can quickly learn what is working or not and adjust accordingly. Many tools offer reporting to help you understand how your content is performing on the online channel. 

Social media tools will tell you if your content is getting the desired amount of likes, comments or shares. And other tools like Google Search Console or GA4 can tell you if you’re driving traffic to your website.

If you’re seeing success, then it’s time to double down on the digital channels and increase the frequency of posts or diversify the content. Conversely, if you’re not seeing any traction or success, you may need to revise the content or shift your strategy to another channel. 

The idea is to use this data to inform how your target audience and potential customers interact with your brand so you can drive engagement, loyalty, and sales.

If managing and monitoring digital marketing for your small business is still too time-consuming, outsource it. Origin Story can step in to effectively run your digital marketing efforts end-to-end at a cost that won’t break the bank.

Let’s Grow!

Don’t wait any longer. Investing in digital marketing allows your small business to unlock your brand's potential to generate growth and success.

Contact Origin Story today to learn how we can help you create, manage, and optimize digital marketing campaigns that get you noticed!