What A Small Business Owner Must Know About Digital Marketing To Stay In Business And Avoid Invisibility On The Internet
And How To Help Customers To Find Your Business So That They Can Buy Products And Services From You!
I define digital marketing as “Anything and everything that you do online to generate brand recognition and high demand for your products and services.”
The above definition of digital marketing is what I call my positive description of the word, the one that you want to hear about, but not necessarily the one that will have the most impact when you are thinking in terms of taking action.
My down to earth definition is “Digital marketing is online strategies to get customers that if neglected can be the doom of any business, especially brick and mortar businesses that highly depend on traffic walking through their doors.”
I don’t know of any business owner that opens a business and invests their hard-earned money to fail; do you?
Then, why is it that so many businesses don’t do the minimum and most necessary actions to have a strong digital presence?
I assume that the reason is that most business owners are good at what they do and focus on running their businesses by sticking to what they know and being conservative about the things that they don’t know much about for fear to make mistakes or invest money in something that won’t get results.
Maybe I know this because I own a business as well. My resources are limited, and when I make a mistake, if it involves money, it takes away from other things that I need to do.
We all know that fear is some sort of protection mechanism that exists to avoid pain and so on, but in business, it can be fatal when it leads to inaction and neglect of things that are essential to creating a thriving business.
Fear is the result of unknowns. You’re afraid of the things that you can’t control, but when you have the facts about something that causes you to fear, it loses its power.
So, what are the facts about digital marketing?
Knowledge about businesses used to be more centralized; education, in general, was centralized.
Before the internet, if you wanted to find a business, you had two main ways to do it:
a) Grab the big heavy old Yellow Pages and look for a category of business or the business name if somehow you knew it.
b) The other way was to get recommendations from other people.
Then, the internet came along, and having a website became the thing to do. Your website was the center of the universe, the place where people discovered all they needed to know about a business.
Soon after, almost every single business had a website. It became unpractical to jump from site to site trying to find information about the products and services that you were looking to purchase.
To add a little complexity to the matter, if you wanted to have your website stand out, you had to fight for first-page placement in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. or the chances of someone discovering your business were dim.
At this point, as a small business owner, you were forced to spend money on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or ads, such as Google Ads. Maybe you got positive results, or perhaps you didn’t, which creates distrust — Yes, the unknown factor kicked in.
Lucky for you, search engines like Google have a primary goal in mind.
The goal is to provide users (The person searching for something) with the best possible answer to their query (The question they type on their search box).
At this point, relevancy became a critical factor for search engines.
Imagine if you type in the search box “What’s the best place to adopt a dog” and the search engine sends you to a cat shelter. — Indeed, that would cause great user dissatisfaction. When people are not happy with something, they stop using it.
Companies such as Google are driven by traffic because the more people use their service, the higher the number of individuals that get to see ads — Their primary source of money.
Relevancy being king and all if someone is looking for a “plumber nearby,” what is more relevant a specific plumber or a list of all plumbers located within a defined miles ratio?
The list became more relevant, one place to find all your potential answers without having to jump from site to site.
You may have noticed when searching for a business that is common to see in search results Google Maps results, Yelp, and other listings and apps (known in the digital marketing work as publishers), before individual business’ websites.
Search engines consider these publishers as a more relevant answer and, therefore, favor them by displaying their information on top.
If your website is also extremely relevant to the search, then it would be displayed next.
What this means for you is that you can’t count on your website as the only source to attract customers to your business.
Knowledge about brands (businesses) was centralized, now is decentralized.
What does it mean by decentralization?
There are hundreds of places that people use to find information about businesses, such as search engines, directories, business listings, maps, GPS systems, apps, and voice-activated devices.
Your potential customers will probably use more than one method to find you. If they’re driving in their car, they’re most likely to use their car’s GPS or maybe ask Siri or Google. When they are on the go, they’ll seek information on their phone; if he or she wants to order food, they might use an app like DoorDash or Grubhub.
The bottom line, because knowledge about businesses is decentralized, your potential customers hang in different places during the day, and for you to reach them, your business must have a presence in all these platforms.
Your brand must become an EVERYWHERE brand.
And that is what it means to have a strong digital presence!
Imagine if money was not an issue, and you get the opportunity to choose between having one billboard or one hundred billboards, all displayed prominently in high traffic streets nearby; how many would you choose?
You would choose a hundred, but we all know that it is practically impossible for a small business owner to afford something of that magnitude.
What’s great about digital marketing solutions is that it is way more affordable and something that all small business owners can do without breaking the bank.
In summary:
1) You can’t afford to neglect to do some digital marketing for your business to succeed.
2) For your business to come up in search, it must provide information that is relevant to the user’s intent.
3) Your potential customers live within hundreds of platforms, and you must have a presence on as many as you can.
4) Be an EVERYWHERE brand or a NOWHERE TO BE FOUND one.
Sebastian Alongi
Prodigio Digital Marketing
Download My Free Book: How To Get Your Business Found