Any businesses, including small brick-and-mortar businesses, ought to be taking advantage of digital marketing right now. Marketing online has offered lots of opportunities for small businesses, even to those with a small budget. Digital marketing can be done on any budget and scale up as the business grows to continue fitting the business’s needs.
Digital marketing is a term for measurable, targeted, and interactive marketing of products or services through digital technologies to influence and transform audiences into customers. The aim of digital marketing is not just to receive tons of daily traffic to our site but to get them to conversion, which can be in the form of sales, engagement, or just collecting data.
By investing in digital marketing, your business has a lot to gain. There are a lot of benefits of digital marketing for small enterprises in Nigeria. So, without much further ado, here are a few benefits you stand to gain by investing in digital marketing.
1. Reach Your Customers Where They Are
Everyone is online. If everyone is online, this means your prospect or targeted audience are also online.
85% of adults in Nigeria are online and check social media accounts at least once a week. The remaining 15% are probably senior citizens, which I won’t be surprised if one or two of them are even online.
More than 90% of adults in Nigeria have a Facebook account, and 85% read at least one social media platform daily. That is a staggering number online, and we can assure you that out of this figure, a niche carved with your business name is just there waiting for you to grab.
Consumers are always online. They are on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter, using search engines to discover the information they need, play games, or just watch videos on streaming platforms like YouTube. Small business owners who want to reach more prospects need to be online because that is where their customers are. It doesn’t matter who the business is designed to cater to; the customers are online and could be waiting to discover your company so they can see if what is offered is near them.
2. Generate Authentic Leads and Revenue
The reason for starting a business is to make profits. Unless you are a non-profit organization, your primary purpose will be to rake in profits as much and as consistently as you can.
Digital marketing will help your business generate higher conversion rates by implementing effective, efficient online marketing strategies and techniques. This will deliver tons of good benefits in terms of direct revenue or leads for your business.
Businesses that implement digital marketing strategies generate 78% more revenue than businesses that do not use digital marketing. The response alone from email marketing is high and efficient to draw in sales.
As a start-up or a small business in Nigeria, you don’t need to have a local store to make sales and build your business. Digital marketing can help generate sales just from your website and social media channels. You can grow your business from the comfort of your home until you can afford a local store.
3. Increase Brand Reputation and Awareness
You know you’ve hit success in your business when the first three businesses your customers think of when they need a service or product involve your business. We call this the “Evoked Set.”
This is where digital marketing can help you immensely. You stay on top of mind with your audience; you remain relevant to them even though they are not buying from you at the moment, but what you are doing is staying in their mind, so when they do need to purchase a product, they think of you at least.
Every business also starts with the aim of attracting more customers. The same thing applies to digital marketing. You can start with the goal of gaining the maximum possible clicks to your websites and marketing platforms. Gradually, more people will start to recognize your business, and when you offer them the exact thing they are looking for, the reputation of your business increases. This also helps you win the trust of your customers.
These engagements also give an impression of your business and boost the exposure of owned content, thereby building reliability with your business’s customers.
4. Gives Measurable Results
One major benefit that digital marketing gives to businesses is that you can accurately track what is working and what you need to dump or work on. No other type of marketing offers this feature.
With the help of some specific tools, you can easily measure results for every digital marketing platform. This will aid you to gauge performance and help you to make good decisions.
You can make use of analytics to know when to post. With traditional marketing methods, it can be challenging to determine precisely how effective a method/strategy is or was and what can be adjusted to make it more effective in the future. With digital marketing, however, this is much easier.
Digital marketing also allows for tracking multiple marketing campaigns so small business owners can examine every detail and adjust as needed. With digital marketing, It is easy to see who visited the website, where they visited from, what they spent more time doing, and what will make it more likely the visitor will stop by the local store to make a purchase. Once the analytics are studied, it becomes effortless to adjust a digital marketing technique to make it far more effective.
5. High ROI (Return on Investment)
Another great benefit of digital marketing over other types of marketing is the return on investment (ROI). Digital marketing gives a higher ROI than any other type of marketing. In Email marketing, for example, for every dollar spent, you get $42 from it. And that’s just on email marketing alone.
Digital marketing is scalable, so you can still get started even if you are working on a budget as a small business owner. You will still see a huge return for the time and money spent marketing online and can also adjust your budget as needed to continue bringing in more customers.
Digital marketing is highly efficient and lets small business owners find and reach out to more customers than other types of marketing. Digital marketing is a good investment for small businesses. The main goal for every business is to make sales. With good digital marketing strategies, you would achieve this goal at suitable timing. Digital marketing is a cost-effective sales strategy. It is cheaper than traditional media advertising and very useful in achieving the right goals.
6. Customer Engagement
Digital marketing assists you in connecting with your customers in real-time. You can connect with your prospects as well as learn what they expect from your business. It is much easier to connect with people online than in your local store. Customer engagement is a good marketing strategy because you can continuously improve your business as you engage with your customers to find out what they need. If your business has an excellent online presence, customers would be able to engage with each other. Prospects can come to your website or social media, read reviews from your previous customers, and be persuaded to purchase your goods or service. Good customer engagement would also make your customers trust your business, and this would increase brand loyalty.
In closingÂ
Looking at the above list of reasons, any small business should definitely go for digital marketing. Many start-ups and small businesses choose traditional methods of marketing. Still, the problem with traditional methods is that they are very slow and can only attract customers at a local level. Whereas the pool of potential customers found online is reasonably very large compared to the potential customers that are targeted locally.
Even if you sell something you feel won’t make it online, still try and use digital marketing. You could be surprised by the number of customers you can get just by putting your business online. I’ve seen tons of businesses online, and guess what? I was glad I found them online because I didn’t know where to start looking for them. Now all I have to do is send them a DM if I ever need their service. The same thing can happen to your business.
You might have questions about digital marketing, especially if you have a smaller marketing budget. Still, the possibilities are endless, and marketing online will make it much easier for you to reach most, if not all, of your potential customers.
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