Web Presence
Digital marketing is the current business buzz word and its’ importance is not doubted. Traditional advertising and marketing are costly and can be compared to the use of a blunt instrument beating on the consumer market when ads aren’t targeted.
Digital marketing is much more encompassing than simply having a website. Digital marketing —targeted web ads, promoted social post, affiliate marketing been a game changer for many SMBs (small medium businesses) and their move to the digital world.
The belief is that brick-and-mortar locations are expensive, though if the rental cost is contextualised we see that the shop fit-out is the essential the website’s design (web development and design can easily run into the thousands) even with cheap templates and platforms like Wordpress’s CMS (content management system) the plug and play style functionality may not work as seamlessly as the business owner first thought with hidden cost adding up to the overall setup of the website.
The expenses don’t end with the establishment of a website and owners who have invested thousands of dollars into their website are soon to realise there may be little or no web traffic flowing through to the site. A quick online search will recommend digital marketing consultants and paid CPC (cost per click) schemes that in fairness can yield significant volume of web traffic and eventual sales.
A quick comparison with a physical retail location is that foot traffic has already been built into rental expense, in a less targeted way — in that paid clicks are bringing users’ who are searching for particular keywords given a set number of user attributes e.g. location, age, gender and interest. Whilst foot traffic is counted literally as people in the vicinity passing by the premises.
Hiring digital marketing consulting agencies often require a monthly management fee plus ad budget and a host of add-on web services that can easily accumulate to a hefty MRR (monthly reoccurring revenue). An ecommerce business must lean on digital marketing strategies, otherwise the business could find it in a difficult position to reach it’s target audience to market it’s products and services. A business that rely predominantly on its’ physical location as a POS (point of sale) would be wiser to take it’s web presence as simply that, presence, so that over time it’s search results can be indexed by the search engine and also provide a point of reference the increasingly digital dependent consumers to look up information about the business such as menu, catalogue range, opening hours and price points.
