The fight with covid-19 is common between people and small to medium businesses all over the world.
According to a research around 45% of small businesses did not have a website.
Nearly 70% were moving to an ecommerce platform and about 41% had the ecommerce website and were doing business over the internet.
With 85% of the product searches on google or amazon, the businesses with online presence and internet marketing were never out of the business.
The lack of knowledge, hesitation or whatever be the reason the small businesses were missing a large amount of profit which other businesses were getting from internet marketing.
So, what is with the term internet marketing?
And, how did it helped the other businesses to grow and make a presence online? Why they were less impacted from the pandemic? What are the ways to do internet marketing?
To uncover these questions let’s get started.
Internet Marketing
It does not change the way internet marketing is working by calling it with a different name.
Yes, it is also known by digital marketing, online marketing, web marketing.
So, what is Internet Marketing?
The Internet Marketing is the way of promoting a business and its products online in order to achieve their end goal.
Search Engine Optimization(SEO), Pay Per Click, Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing are the types of Internet Marketing.
The goal of the business can be to get traffic, leads or sales.
A business often uses the combination of these strategies to create brand awareness, interest or sales of their product or services.
With the use of traditional marketing, small businesses were losing a lot of customers and they are clearly out of the business in this pandemic.
Nowadays, traditional marketing is not used much since the technique it uses is kind of persuasive to buy or consider a product.
A customer should not be forced to do something instead an interest should be created around the product.
Businesses now use content marketing to create an interest among customers around a product or service.
The content provided by business is relevant, informational and have a value. Without these things a content is simply a waste.
By building trust and connection a business is converting its readers to its potential customers.
Why SMBs need Internet Marketing?
Now that you got a brief introduction about Internet Marketing, the next question comes up.
Why do you need it right now?
To have a clear view about that, let’s check some stats to know why it is needed:
- Google nearly has 92.18% market share among the other search engines.
- Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day and 40,000 searches per second on an average.
- About 63% organic search traffic of google was from mobile.
- Facebook was the most searched keyword on google.
- Over 3.6 billion people are on social media and this will become nearly 4.41 billion in 2025.
- Facebook has 2.7 billion, Instagram has 500 million and twitter has 330 million active users.
These stats are from 2019 to the second quarter of 2020.
It is interesting to know that nearly half of world’s population are on social media and google is the most popular search engine among them.
Marketing is effective where you have an opportunity to gain more customers. It is clear that making an online presence will benefit your business for a long term.
And, that’s why small to medium businesses need it.
What benefits do Internet Marketing brings with it?
The stats above are the proof why today businesses need an online presence.
Internet Marketing also bringsbenefits with it. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits:
- Equal opportunity for businesses: Internet Marketing sure provides an equal opportunity to all because anyone can use these strategies to grow and make an online presence.
- It is cost effective: Yes, internet marketing is cost effective because it is not mandatory to have a large budget to start it.
- Quality Leads: Now, customers are approaching businesses through organic way and businesses are retargeting customers by paid marketing. It has now become a two way process.
- Increase in Revenue: According to stats from the web, nearly 79% of SMBs have started to invest in content marketing and 64% of them saw increase in revenue after investing in Internet Marketing.
- Measure your results: Internet Marketing provides handful of tools to do analysis on the marketing campaigns run by SMBs.
- Targeting right audience: By using analytics and insights from marketing businesses now are able to segment their audience very clearly.
Five DIY tips for Small to medium businesses
After getting the benefits about internet marketing, it’s important for SMBs to take some steps towards it.
Here are some DIY(Do it yourself) tips for SMBs to look forward into it:
- Make a mobile optimized website: Making a website is easy with wordpress. The website marks your online presence and it is the first thing which customer interacts with. A mobile optimized website helps you to get more traffic.
- Be Active on social media: As lots of younger audiences are on social media, engaging with them increases the authority and awareness of your business. Make sure to use interesting infographics to grab their attention.
- Start writing content: According to a research the businesses with unique content are seven times more likely to retain their customers. Businesses provide relevant, informational and a high valued content to their readers. Yes, that is what you need to convert a reader to potential customer.
- Use Analytics: By analyzing your marketing efforts you can look forward to strategies to work with.
- Optimize for on-site SEO: Try to optimize your website to get higher rankings. You can get more traffic with better ranking and at the end more potential customers.
Well, now you know about internet marketing. All businesses really need to start internet marketing right now if not doing it.
Thanks for reading. Keep growing!
Written by – Aman Rawat (Intern)