Is Your Business Harnessing Digital Marketing Trends to Create a 21st Century Marketing Strategy?

The growth of the internet and digital media has opened up a vast landscape for businesses and brands. Small businesses in particular, have ever-increasing access to low or no-cost marketing tools that can play a part in helping them reach their marketing goals.

This “Digital Marketing” strategic market trend while complex, can level the playing field for small, local players to directly compete with global brands with the right marketing strategy. Businesses now have mobile marketing, e-commerce, social media, search engine marketing, content marketing, and email marketing all at their fingertips. While it can be difficult to learn and properly utilize all the potential sources of leads, the digital marketing space is growing for a reason. You might not want to delve into 21st century marketing strategies like social media marketing and Google Adwords PPC management, but you can bet your competitors will.

Unfortunately, the majority of small businesses still haven’t learned how to fully integrate the digital universe into their greater marketing strategy. Since there are so many decisions to make, small business owners should select marketing strategies and techniques that will fit their budget and help to achieve marketing goals.

The onset of digital marketing has allowed brands and companies to serve their customers when, where, how, and what they want in real-time. But not only is online marketing a great facilitator of transactions, it is also a great relationship builder between brands and customers, as well as an extensive forum where customers can communicate with fellow customers or the brand itself. Coxblue.com reports that 95% of Millennial shoppers expect businesses to have a presence on Facebook and 89% of shoppers do online research before purchasing an item, and this statistic is for in-store purchases, not online.

Organizations are beginning to realize the importance of careful online reputation management, as well as social media marketing and pay per click search advertising and thus, more funding is being directed towards digital marketing services like these. Take Search Engine Marketing (SEM) for example; SEM is expected to amount to $33 billion in 2016 and $45.4 billion in 2019, up from $27.9 in 2014. Why such an increase? When users search on their mobile devices for local business information, they typically intend to make a purchase. Businesses realize the importance of being not only the 1st business they find but also making sure what they find is catered to their query, useful, easy to navigate, and is backed up by information from other sources, including positive customer reviews on a variety of websites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook.

Google’s search engine listings are extremely competitive digital spaces. In fact in 2015, one in every five small-to-midsized companies purchased Google AdWords or other Google advertising products. The first ad position on Google has a click through rate of 7.94% and businesses that utilize PPC advertising understand the difference between #1 and any other ad position. Google makes about 97% of their overall revenue from Google Adwords. Many businesses are drawn to Google since it is held in such high praise as the most popular and widely used search engine. Specifically, Google is responsible for 89% of all internet searches, and the search engine processes an average of over 40,000 search queries each second. This translates to over 3.5 billion worldwide searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year.

[Recent post: New Google My Business Feature: Google Posts]

Google isn’t the only winning party here, however. The businesses that employ Google AdWords realize earnings of about $3 for every $1.60 they spend. When compared to social media, the favorable positions that these companies enjoy results in 300% more website traffic. However, it’s not enough to simply be placed high on search, your articles and content must be of quality such to entice clicks and engagement. In this context, more, relevant content is simply better, as the top 10 results for any keyword on Google are occupied by articles of at least 2,000 words in length.

Online Marketing Isn’t Complete Without Carefully Managed Social Media Accounts

While search engine marketing allows relevant users to find you, social media is the vehicle for brands to build and establish a relationship with their audience via strategic content marketing strategy. With 83% of Americans owning a social media account, and businesses expected to increase spending on social media marketing to $17.3 billion by 2019, social media is the prime marketing tactic for content marketing, social advertising, and customer engagement. Today, 72% of consumers expect to hear back within one hour when they make a complaint to a brand using Twitter and failure to address your customer’s online complaints can get bad quickly, with numerous outlets happy to publicly post their grievances for other potential customers to see. Using social media the right way and engaging with your customers can be a major benefit to your business, and at the same time, failure to do so can be a major detriment to your business. As it stands today, only 13% of small businesses use social media for communication with customers but that number will grow quickly as more customers take their interactions with businesses into the digital world.

Find more interesting online marketing statistics for small businesses by visiting digital.com.

Launch your business into the exciting world of Digital Marketing with the SEO PROs at KO Websites

The Digital Marketing industry is one that is complex, exciting, and ever-changing. For the typical business owner, taking on all of the area components of Digital Marketing by oneself or with a select team can be very daunting. Luckily, SEOPRO is here to assist, manage, and guide your business into the future by offering a full range of industry-leading Digital Marketing services. We specialize in Organic SEO, Social Media Marketing Adwords Advertising, Video Production & Marketing, and Reputation Management. In fact, SEOPRO’s team leads the San Francisco Bay Area with an extensive 20 year experience portfolio. We have launched revolutionary websites and have grown businesses to the joy of countless business owners.

We understand that keeping up with the dynamic trends in business and technology can be exhausting. Thus, SEOPRO will professionally manage all of your website objectives, while assisting in any digital marketing area you need. If you are interested in getting started, contact our office by calling (510) 276-9904 or visiting us online at www.seopro.pro. We can’t wait to discuss your business’ goals with you, and are even more excited to make them a reality!