Digital marketing can often be challenging to SMB’s because it’s so foreign to most of us. Traditional advertising is easy to understand because we grew up seeing TV ads, hearing radio ads and looking at huge banners of the highway.
But digital marketing is an intricate and often complex process that is unique to each business. Unfortunately, it’s also the most important concept for small businesses to grasps because it can completely transform their business and at a small cost compared to traditional marketing.
The internet is the future, we all know that, so, it’s important that SMB’s can overcome the challenges that have plagued their digital marketing attempts in the past. One of the best ways to do that is to hire an agency like us that can work with you to achieve your goals.
Having a Sufficient Budget
Firstly, you must be realistic about the budget that is going to be required to achieve anything substantial online. While digital marketing is often much cheaper than traditional advertising, it’s not free.
You need to be able to bring a reasonable budget to the table so that you can achieve noticeable results within a short timeline. In most cases, this is going to require at least 4-figures per month to give us room to work with you.
We understand that every business wants to save money so that they can generate profit, but it’s also important that you invest properly in the activities that will bring in revenue.
Commitment
In the same vein, committing to digital marketing is critical if you want to achieve anything beneficial. You can’t-do online marketing for just a few months and expect to see huge results, the online world moves slowly, and that means that we have to be patient and continue to invest.
For most businesses, it’s best to commit to at least 12-months of investing in your online marketing. By this point we would expect that most businesses will see a noticeable uptick in their traffic, bringing in more people to your digital store.
The great part about digital marketing is that it follows the snowball principle, once you’ve rolled the snowball up the hill, you can let it go, and it will pick up speed and size.
This is very often the case in digital marketing, you must first invest for months upon end and see only incremental benefits, but eventually, it reaches the tipping point and begins to grow quickly.
Understanding Traffic Generation
While most of us can easily grasp the concept of handing out flyers or putting up banner ads, it’s harder to understand how to generate traffic using SEO or PPC. Digital marketing has some level of knowledge barrier, meaning only those who understand it can reap its benefits.
Most business owners have no desire to learn everything about digital marketing, nor do they have the spare time to do that. Fortunately, this is one of the easiest challenges to overcome because you can do so by hiring an agency that has already accumulated this knowledge.
Creating Content
Blogging and creating content is an excellent way to bring in more traffic to your website. Each of those pieces of content has the potential to be shared on social media and relevant websites, either by you or your audience.
As well as that, Google and other search engines will index that content, and it may go on to rank for keywords that will bring in targeted traffic to your website.
Creating content isn’t overly difficult, but it can be complex. We can all string words together into a sentence but creating something cohesive that people will enjoy reading is a skill that very few people have.
If you’re faced with this challenge, then you can either choose to develop your writing ability, or you can hire freelancers writers and content creators to craft articles for your business.
Dealing With Technical Challenges
Finally, and possibly the most difficult challenge of all is the technical aspect of owning a digital business. Very few business owners have any idea of how their website was created or hosted, all they know is that it exists somewhere on the web and that people can access it.
That’s not a huge problem, but it can become an issue if that business owner decides to try and purse digital marketing by themselves. At some point, you will likely have to set up an email opt-in, a form or even a landing page.
Doing any of these without technical expertise is more likely to end up giving you a headache and a broken web page than it is a functioning form. Fortunately, we have staff on-hand who are extremely tech savvy and can whip up those technical pages in a few short hours.