Why Does a Small Business Need a Digital Marketing Budget?

As a digital marketing agency, we have heard every excuse in the book about why their business is too small to justify spending money on digital marketing. While marketing budgets should always be made with cash flow and current goals in mind, failing to have any digital marketing budget will only hold your business back.

According to RetailDive, in 2018, 87% of buyers started their buying process by searching for products online. While that number is enormous, it’s highly likely that it is even higher today. When businesses fail to invest in digital marketing, they are missing out on the vast majority of research that goes into purchase decisions. Most importantly, digital marketing helps small businesses build a multi-channel approach to attracting leads, converting leads into customers, and building long-term relationships. Digital marketing also helps small businesses:

• Compete against large businesses
• Build on-going relationships with customers
• Save money compared to traditional marketing
• Measure Return on Investment (ROI)
• Beat their local competitors

A website, onsite optimization and other SEO work should be a big part of any digital marketing budget because it allows businesses to attract, capture, and convert leads into customers.

A digital marketing budget with a multi-channel approach

While the goal of converting leads into customers remains the same, there are many digital marketing channels a small business can use to reach their audience. Each channel has its pros and cons and requires a different approach; it simply requires some work to adjust your message to fit into the channels that will appeal to your target segments. A multi-channel approach to digital marketing is the best way to engage potential customers in the way they want to be engaged.

Website

A website built for internet marketing today should have some fundamental elements to attract and convert customers. At its heart, web design for digital marketing means building a website that targets content to your target audience or buyer personas.

Landing pages

A landing page, also known as a "lead capture page", is a single web page that appears when an internet searcher clicks on a search engine optimized search result, marketing promotion, marketing email or an online advertisement. Landing pages are one of the best ways to convert web traffic into leads. Start by creating a dedicated landing page for each campaign goal to capture that specific campaign’s inbound web traffic. Monitor how many people are coming to your landing page, how long they stayed and what percentage converted into buyers. (Google Analytics tracks these metrics).

SEO

Small businesses need SEO to compete against other businesses, both locally and nationally; big and small. When you invest in SEO, your business shows up in relevant search results so your potential customers can find you.

Social media

According to blacklinkinfo.com, 70% of the US population had active social media accounts in 2019 and this number is likely to have grown. On average, people are spending more than two hours a day on social media networks and 54% of consumers browse social media to research products.

While Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn are the market leaders, small businesses will want to figure out where their target audience is hanging out and build a social media presence there. Look for opportunities to interact with your audience by creating engaging content and responding to communication in a timely manner.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a great tool for small businesses to help differentiate you from your competitors by creating an ongoing relationship with your customers and opening up new markets and customer bases. Build a strong customer database that can be broken into segments and tailor emails to each segment – you want to provide relevant, engaging content to each segment that reaches them where they are on the buyer journey.

Blog

A blog is the perfect partner with your SEO strategy because search engines respond to relevant content. The more relevant content you publish, the easier it is for search engines to recognize your website as an authority in your area. The more blog content you create, the more your site will show up in search engines and drive organic traffic to your website.

Digital marketing help with Softwired

Softwired provides digital marketing solutions for our clients and partner agencies. We’ve got you covered for web design, blogs, landing pages, SEO, local online presence and optimization, digital marketing and advertising, and social media marketing. We build websites with WordPress themes and have also been using the HubSpot platform to build blogs and landing pages since 2012.

Over the years, we’ve worked with lots of clients who need help with web engineering and digital marketing tasks but don’t have in-house staff. Finding freelancers can be a nightmare and cause a lot of problems when promising delivery of service. Whether you’re interested in web design only, digital advertising help or more; we’re ready to help you get started!