The average person spends 6 hours and 42 minutes online each day. That speaks volumes on how important it is for businesses to show up online through digital marketing. But what is digital marketing? Arguably the most important form of marketing of our time.
What is meant by digital marketing?
Digital marketing stands for all marketing activities happening over the internet on digital platforms and devices. It’s an umbrella term for all marketing taking place online.
Digital marketing includes:
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- Email marketing
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- Search engine marketing
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- Mobile applications and games
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- Podcasts
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- and more.
Besides the many platforms, digital marketing includes many strategies. Think anything from content marketing and PPC campaigns to giveaways and influencer marketing. Furthermore, we can roughly divide digital media into three categories.
The three types of digital media
The three different digital marketing media types: paid, owned and earned.
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- Owned media:Â online business assets that you control, such as your website or your social media accounts.
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- Paid media:Â online advertising and promotion of your content to boost traffic to your owned media.
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- Earned media: your customers recommending your business online, i.e. “online word of mouth”. This could be social media posts, comments, reviews or blog posts.
Advantages of digital marketing
The advantage of digital marketing for business is the acquisition of new traffic, leads and sales. At its core, it helps businesses reach prospective customers online. By attracting traffic to your website, the goal is to then persuade people to buy products or book in for services.
Most consumers these days go to the internet first when looking for products or services. Not doing digital marketing means missing out on all that interest. Digital marketing is crucial for any business to stay in the competition.
Small business digital marketing
At first, it might seem like the internet is the playground of large corporations who have big budgets to spend on digital marketing. In reality, small businesses are one of the biggest beneficiaries of digital marketing! Digital marketing is much more affordable than traditional marketing in newspapers, TV or radio. What’s more, the data gathered online helps small businesses fine-tune their strategies. This, in turn, helps them spend their money wiser and reach more of their ideal customers.
The best digital marketing tactics for small business will depend on the industry and the target market of each business. For local businesses, the use of search engine marketing, principally SEO and Google Ads, is especially important to attract local search traffic.
Some interesting stats on the power of search for small business digital marketing:
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- 46% of all Google searches are looking for local information
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- 97% of users searched online to find a local business
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- 72% of consumers who use search to find a local business end up visiting a store within five miles
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To succeed at attracting and converting traffic from search engines, it all comes back to having a conversion-optimised website. You should also have an active and up-to-date Google My Business listing.
We hope this article has helped clarify what digital marketing is for small business. At Gordon Digital, we specialise in helping small businesses succeed online. Are you left with more questions, such as what digital marketing platforms and strategies to use? Contact our team for a free digital strategy consultation.
