There is increased pressure on businesses of all scales to cut down costs and improve the efficiency of their marketing spend. And traditional marketing leaves hardly any room to achieve this effectively, with their high costs and blanket approaches. But digital marketing can help overcome many of these challenges and maximize the ROI of your marketing activities. This article explains 4 distinct ways your business could use digital marketing tools to increase the efficiency of your limited budgets.
There was a time when digital marketing was all the buzz. Now, it has become an indispensable element of big brand strategies. However, many small businesses are yet to make it an important part of their marketing plans.
Understandably, working with limited budgets could be quite tricky and it won’t leave you with much room to experiment. Putting money into unfamiliar marketing tools may seem like an unnecessary risk that could eat into your already tight resources. So, opting for tried and tested traditional marketing tactics could become the obvious choice.
But digital marketing can bring a level of efficiency to your marketing budget that’s hard to achieve with traditional mediums. Let’s look at 4 ways it could get your marketing dollars to work twice as hard and what it could mean for your small business.
1. Spend with precision to boost your marketing ROI
When you invest in a TV commercial or billboard, your decision is often based on broad estimates about the potential audience and the ROI. The reality is that it’s virtually impossible to access in-depth data using these types of mediums. You will often end up depending on vague geographic and demographic data like the number of households or the amount of traffic.
Now, this is all fine for big brands with mass appeal. But what about the niche products or small local businesses? The high costs of many traditional mediums are often unbearable to them. Besides, many of these broad audience groups will never even buy their product in the first place.
But with digital marketing, you get to spend with precision and, thereby, boost your marketing ROI. For example, the hyper-targeting power of social media will help you to invest in the right audience with meticulous profiling, improving your chances of making a sale.
And pay-per-click tools allow you to link your spending to measurable audience engagement. So, you only spend based on predictable results. Then, SEO and search advertising can help your brand turn up when a potential customer is actively searching for content in your product niche. So, your marketing dollars are used to target a precise audience who is more likely to engage with your brand.
All these will enable you to make better use of your limited marketing budgets. It’ll prevent you from wasting money on catching eyeballs that will never convert into sales. Instead, you get to spend where it matters with much greater accuracy and improved predictability. And you will also get to link your marketing spend to measurable results.
2. Low-cost of tweaking allows better agility
With digital marketing, evaluating the impact of your online activities and tweaking them as and when it’s required is much less costly compared to the traditional marketing mediums.
Imagine changing a printed billboard advertisement, the direction it’s facing, or its location. Needless to say, it’s a costly affair, from redesigning content to production and installation. Compared to all these, changing your marketing messages, content formats, or even the targeted audience is much easier and less expensive with digital marketing tools.
You even get to own some of the digital publishing platforms like your website, blog, and social media pages. So, the cost of tweaking is often limited to areas like copywriting and designing.
And when you’re able to make changes to your marketing activities without busting up your budgets, your small business can react faster to market changes and customer needs. And, most importantly, you get to avoid costly mistakes. In the long term, all these could help cut down costs and boost the efficiency of your marketing spend.
3. The power of social sharing can multiply the return on your marketing dollars
Word of mouth has been a highly cost-effective and efficient tool used by marketers for centuries. But digital word of mouth is a much more powerful marketing and PR tool that could help your brand equity soar overnight.
Digital sharing is much easier than sharing content in the real world. It’s not bound by geographic limits, income levels, ethnicity, age, or gender. Social media platforms and digital communication tools like email, WhatsApp, and Zoom have managed to weave in billions of people into one global community. Today, social media alone claims nearly 50% of the world population. This has enabled brands to reach an audience of massive scale with incredible speed.
And this unlimited potential for digital sharing and the ability to go viral could help amplify the effects of what you spend. It could instantly multiply your marketing ROI so you can get much more done from your limited marketing budget.
4. Lower resource costs make marketing far more affordable for small businesses
Digital marketing requires fewer resources compared to traditional marketing activities. Today, developing and running a Facebook campaign can be done within minutes. It demands less financial, material and people resources compared to running a campaign on TV or radio.
There are also various digital tools that can help further reduce your resource needs and significantly cut down costs. For example, you can automate certain functions like scheduling social media posts. And campaign analytic tools can provide in-depth data, so you can analyze the outcomes of your marketing activities in real time. From simplified reporting mechanisms to user-friendly dashboards, all these will help you run your digital marketing campaigns with minimal resources. This makes it far more affordable, especially for small businesses.
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