How Can Midsized Companies Benefit From Digital Marketing?

How Can Midsized Companies Benefit from Digital Marketing?

Companies of all sizes can benefit from digital marketing. Large corporations can hire big departments to address their marketing and digital presence needs. Midsized companies and small businesses frequently do not have this capability. This can put them at a disadvantage, but this problem can be solved leveraging outside resources.

What digital marketing comprises is often misunderstood and over complicated. There is a lot of noise about it in the marketplace. Many companies and individuals present themselves to SMBs to address different aspects of digital marketing. However, digital marketing is about using all the tools in the toolbox, doing it consistently, and meeting customers and prospects where they are, in the digital world.

Digital Marketing boils down to having strategy and tactics for three main things, … three pillars. The three pillars of digital marketing are messaging (having compelling content), the web and social media. If businesses are not addressing these three pillars, they will fail at digital marketing.

In today’s digital economy and online world, digital marketing IS marketing, and the importance of digital marketing cannot be under stated. Today’s customers are online a tremendous amount of the time. Today’s consumers shop on the web and research businesses they want to know more about online. Digital marketing is inseparable from the digital economy, and this is the overriding reason all businesses need digital marketing.

In the remainder of this white paper, we will take a deeper dive into what digital marketing is, why SMB organizations need to leverage it, when they should engage in digital marketing, and how they can go about it.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing helps companies communicate with customers and prospects, increase traffic to their websites, generate inbound leads, and ultimately boost sales. Much of modern life and commerce now takes place digitally, with the explosion of e-commerce being a prime example. If people cannot find your business on the web, your business could be in trouble. Not showing up on the first page of Google search results is a significant competitive disadvantage. If potential customers cannot find your business online, it is akin to not being on the map—or in the phone book (..remember those!). If potential customers visit your site and have a negative impression due to a poorly designed or performing website, or lackluster content, it can be detrimental to your business. You only get one chance to make a first impression, and a company’s website is often that first impression.

2. Social Media:

3.Website:

Having an attractive website with a clear message and branding is just the beginning, however. Business today must pay close attention to SEO(search engine optimization)so that they rank high on user searches. This is done by focusing on key words and promoting them on pages. SEM or search engine marketing or PPC pay per click ad campaigns can also be an excellent way to drive traffic to a web site, so that a business can generate leads that eventually become sales. Key words and Google algorithms are constantly changing and having a paid digital marketing consultant assist a business on SEO is a worthwhile aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Making sure potential customers can find you online is just one more argument for the importance of digital marketing.

4. Email Marketing

An additional digital marketing strategy to drive targeted traffic to a web site to engage with company content is email marketing. Email marketing is best done with short 4and regular emails that have a specific message. Email Marketing Conducting a multistep email campaign is often referred to as drip email campaigns. Sending customers and members of your target audience regular updates about content that you are consistently creating is an excellent example of a drip email campaign. Percentages of conversion with email marketing can be relatively low, but this is expected. We could almost equate email campaigns of today to junk mail or direct mail marketing of yesteryear. Costs are low for email marketing and when a conversion occurs it is typically very well qualified. Having a well thought out and consistent email marketing plan is another aspect of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

5. Conversational Marketing or AI Marketing

The newest aspect of a digital marketing strategy is Conversational Marketing or AI Marketing. The best example of this is bots on a website that will get information for a 5digital visitor. Great care needs to be taken to make bots Conversational Marketing or AI Marketing non obtrusive and super easy to opt out of. Bots on a website can be incredibly useful though. The most common use of online bots is for website navigation or to fetch information for online visitors. Bots on our own website will do the above and also place calls to appropriate Valenta team members on behalf of a digital visitor. Bots can also book appointments for visitors with Valenta Managing Partners. Conversational AI works for both the written and the spoken word and bots can be part of a spoken conversation as well as written ones.

It is hard to have inhouse strengths in all these different aspects of digital marketing. Yet all of them make up a comprehensive digital marketing strategy and plan. Valenta offers a full stack digital marketing approach that addresses all of these areas flexibly and affordably by providing bundles of hours in these various disciplines weekly and monthly. We will get more into this later in our paper.

Why do Midsized Companies need Digital Marketing?

Being found on the web and making a first positive impression with customers and prospects are two of the biggest reasons that we have already mentioned for why all businesses, including SMBs, need digital marketing. But businesses engage in digital marketing for a variety of reasons. The most common ones we have seen are to generate more leads for sales teams, close more deals, improve current customer retention, increase customer satisfaction rates, and finally, to increase brand awareness. Before a company can be profitable, there must be revenue and sales. Every company should be looking to drive topline revenue with an eye on the bottom line. Digital marketing can be a very cost-effective way to improve web traffic, sales, and lead generation. Potential customers who request contact from a business on their website are interested in having a conversation. Having a conversation with a customer who wants to speak with you is much more valuable than speaking to customers who did not ask to speak to you, right?

Regarding web presence and SEO, a business will need to track and improve keyword rankings, organic traffic, time spent on pages, click-through rates, bounce rates, returning visitors, and domain authority ratings to improve its appearance in searches. Google algorithms are changing frequently, and a good digital marketing partner can help optimize your web presence for Google and other search engines. In addition to a web presence, multiple social channels may need to be managed, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Emerging social channels like Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and others are also considerations. In addition to a web presence, email marketing is another channel where a digital marketing strategy can be adopted. There is a lot of emphasis on drip email campaigns these days, and that is because they can be effective. They are effective when the content is good and engaging and when there is value in it for the customer or prospect.

Digital marketing is also about not boiling the ocean. One of the advantages of digital marketing is that with all the data that can be gained, a business can validate customer personas and conduct digital segmentation. A business can also create content that speaks specifically to their target audience—whatever it may be and wherever they are. Finding a niche and speaking to your audience also comes down to creating compelling content that keeps customers (and potential customers) engaged. Some content examples that can help you speak directly to your customers include videos, blogs, infographics, case studies, interviews, e-books, and white papers. A good digital marketing agency can help you create, position, and promote all of these.

The answer to why businesses should engage in digital marketing, however, always comes back to the fact that it is a digital world we live in and that digital marketing is marketing in the 21st century. To ignore it is to not conduct proper marketing. Even if it is not well understood by business owners, it can be implemented comprehensively and cost-effectively. It can be done guerrilla style or with big budgets.