As the owner of a new business, you're constantly searching for ways to increase your brand reach and ensure your company remains relevant in the market. You've got to use the resources available to you if you're going to be effective. Not using social media to improve customer engagement is like putting a doorstop in front of the door to your business. You're limiting your business to keep growing and, what's worse, you may not even realize it until it's too late.

While you can easily manage a small account on your own — at first, at least — as your enterprise grows, so will the need for multiple channels. And the more work you do, the less time you'll have to do it (or to do the rest of your work). For a business to manage its social media marketing effectively, it has to maintain engagement in a practical, sustainable manner.

This is where an in-house or outsourced expert can come in. Besides understanding how your enterprise is perceived by target audiences, experts should work to simplify logistics and harness a company's advertising potential. More importantly, they should take this work away from their managers and the rest of the company.

The end result of a dedicated social media team? When done well, better visibility, more chances of trending and associated increases in revenue. But is it time to hire a social media manager? Let's take a closer look at when you might want to consider hiring help.

A good strategy can help a company attract new customers, communicate with them, and collect important data.

In today’s business landscape, digital marketing is an essential aspect of any marketing plan. Digital marketing helps businesses attract and target new customers and leads, communicate with target audiences, and collect data on customer behavior and campaign performance. A digital marketing strategy usually encompasses multiple channels, like a website, social media, email, digital advertising, and online search.

Key Takeaways

✔Digital marketing can help businesses increase their online visibility, build brand awareness, and reach a larger audience than traditional marketing channels like print, TV, or radio might be able to.

✔Critically, it also allows for targeted audience reach, enabling businesses to tailor their messaging and marketing efforts to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors.

✔Digital marketing can be more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods.

It’s important to track, measure, and analyze key metrics to assess the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions.

✔The Good Impressions program is an initiative established by Investopedia’s parent company, Dotdash Meredith, to award minority and LGBTQIA-owned small businesses with digital marketing consultation packages.

With the sheer number of available channels and tactics, small business owners may find it overwhelming to navigate the digital marketing landscape, especially if they don’t have a marketing background or the resources to experiment with different strategies. The wealth and social gap between white-owned businesses and minority-owned businesses can further exacerbate these issues.

Investopedia’s parent company, Dotdash Meredith, established Good Impressions, a pro bono media and marketing consultation program that awards minority- and LGBTQIA-owned small businesses with digital marketing consultation packages. The impact that the program and digital marketing had on some of these businesses is highlighted below.

Benefits of Digital Marketing for a Business

A strong digital marketing campaign can help a business in numerous ways. Digital marketing can be impactful regardless of whether a business is based at a brick-and-mortar location, operates on a hybrid model, or is conducted primarily through an e-commerce store.

According to research by Clutch, 45% of consumers are likely to visit a business’s physical location after searching for it online, and 76% of consumers will search for a company’s website before visiting their physical location.

 Meanwhile, eMarketer’s forecast for 2024 predicts that online shopping will comprise 20.1% of all global retail sales, up from 18.8% in 2021.

Increased Online Visibility

A good digital marketing strategy can help businesses increase their online visibility by sharing content with a wider audience than they might reach through traditional channels. A search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can also make it easier for customers to discover a business’s website or content online.

For example, Harshit Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Madhu Chocolate, says, “The Good Impressions program helped drive a lot of brand awareness for us. We got the opportunity to be featured in Food & Wine and Real Simple, and saw a huge bump in website traffic following the two articles.”

Cost-Effective Channels

Digital channels like websites, social media, email, and blogs tend to be more cost-effective to operate and advertise on than traditional marketing methods, such as print, TV, and radio. When it comes to creating marketing content or running communications, many tools are free or offered for a small monthly subscription fee, making them well-suited to small business budgets.

Targeted Audience Reach

Digital marketing tools offer a wealth of data to businesses aiming to target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. By gathering customer data through various channels, businesses can effectively segment their audiences and tailor marketing strategies to engage these specific customer niches. For example, many email and advertising tools allow for audience segmentation and provide insights that help create customized campaigns that resonate with targeted groups.

Building Brand Awareness and Loyalty

Businesses can also use digital marketing to build brand awareness and establish or maintain a positive reputation. Cultivating an online presence that reflects your brand personality and company culture can help create affinity and connection with both new and existing customers.

Rahama Wright, founder of Shea Yeleen, is one of the business owners who won a Good Impressions digital marketing consultation package. Speaking of the impact it had on her business, she says, “Being featured in InStyle and on the Parents’ social media accounts gave our brand tons of visibility and exposure. Those placements, as well as some digital banner ads, secured us around 1.2 million impressions, which was a huge awareness lift.”

Lead Generation and Conversion

A digital marketing strategy can help businesses generate leads and convert them into customers using avenues like email marketing, social media advertising, and content marketing. By offering multiple touchpoints and communicating with customers through their different stages of interaction with the company, a business aims to persuade a customer to complete a desired action, whether it’s booking a demo or consultation, signing up for a trial, or completing a sale.

Adapting to Changing Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior is constantly changing—and so is digital marketing. By tracking key performance indicators, or KPIs, and other core metrics, many digital marketing tools allow for trend analysis or even prediction. This enables businesses to evolve their strategies in tandem with their audiences’ preferences. 

Track Results Accurately

Digital marketing can help businesses leverage the sheer quantity of online data regarding customer demographics and behavior. For example, a business can see who’s clicking on its ads, visiting its website, and following and engaging with it on social media. In turn, this data can offer insights and feedback on your online presence and campaigns, shaping decisions about future strategy.

All of this takes resources that small businesses may not have. “Without the Good Impressions program, we wouldn’t have been able to afford any of these campaigns," Wright says, "and they allowed us to see what could work in terms of future marketing investments. Moving forward, we now have something to show content creators to demonstrate where we’ve had success and where it makes sense to input time and energy.”

Stay Ahead of Competitor

Digital marketing not only provides much-needed visibility on customer behavior; it also offers a rich landscape of information on industry and market trends. Businesses that stay up to date with digital marketing best practices for their industry, like local SEO, can often create a competitive advantage for themselves in relation to competitors who aren’t as savvy.

Digital Marketing Institute. "Local SEO for Beginners.