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Starting a promotional products business can be a very smart investment, especially if you’re given full support by your franchisor. However, no business is going to be able to grow, much less stay afloat, without effective marketing. Marketing is necessary to spread awareness of your advertising products business. But instead of relying solely on traditional marketing tactics, like print ads or TV commercials, you should strongly consider implementing a digital marketing strategy.
What Exactly is Digital Marketing?
To understand why you should use digital marketing, you should know what it entails. Basically, digital marketing is the same as online marketing although it also includes mobile phone marketing, display advertising, and marketing on any other digital medium. Digital marketing helps to position your brand as an authoritative voice in your field and uses strategies to help your target audience find you whereas with traditional marketing, you would force your message on them.
Categories Of Digital Marketing
There are seven types of online marketing, or digital marketing. Digital marketing types include search engine optimization, the one everyone is familiar with. However, there are other types of digital marketing as well. Digital marketing also includes search engine marketing, content marketing, social media marketing (including WhatsApp marketing), pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, affiliate marketing and email marketing. These seven types of digital marketing are all valuable. However, it is up to you how you use the various types of online marketing.
Reasons to Use Digital Marketing
The following are some of the reasons why digital marketing can be so beneficial to your promotional products or craft business:
Help Level the Playing Field
Smaller businesses simply don’t have the resources to go head-to-head with the big guys when it comes to traditional marketing. For example, a small or even medium-sized business won’t have the budget to run national commercials on TV. They’ll have to run smaller-budget commercials on certain local channels at certain times instead. However, with digital marketing, the playing field is much more level, even if you do not use a digital agency. This is because digital marketing is incredibly cost effective. A single blog post could attract as big of an audience as a five million dollar online video ad. With the right brand differentiation methods, you can reach your target audience quickly.
Doesn’t Require a Big Budget
Even though the more money you have, the more types of digital marketing you’ll be able to invest in, you can still implement a number of digital marketing strategies for a very small amount of money. For example, setting up a basic website and maintaining a social media presence are both very effective digital marketing strategies that help build brand awareness and brand trust—and that won’t cost an arm and a leg to implement. Once your business begins experiencing growth, you can boost your marketing budget and expand your digital marketing efforts.
Lets You Target Your Audience
One of the drawbacks of traditional advertising—even if you have the budget to run national ads—is that you can’t really target who you want to see your ads. The most you can really do is run a commercial on a TV channel that your target audience most likely watches. You can produce the best radio advertisement as well. However, there’s no guarantee that your target audience will ever see it.
With digital marketing, there are countless ways to reach your target audience, which means you won’t be wasting resources on businesses that couldn’t care less about your promotional products franchise. For example, you can use SEO keywords throughout your content that your target audience might be using to make it easier for them to find you. You can also use PPC (pay per click) advertising on Google as well as countless social channels to deliver specific content to specific segments of your audience.
Interact with Your Audience
With traditional marketing strategies, you’ll have no idea if you’ve reached your viewers, just like you cannot predict the outcomes of trading options. You can only put your message out there and hope for the best. With digital marketing, you can engage directly with your target audience to determine what they want and to actually build a relationship with them.
By interacting with them through social media, email marketing and through the comment sections of your content, you will build more trust in your audience, which is vital to converting leads into not just buyers, but repeat buyers. It also allows you to receive valuable feedback that you can use to adjust your digital marketing efforts to ensure that they are more effective in the future.
Effective Way to Increase Brand Exposure
With traditional marketing, exposure stops at your audience. This is true even for an automotive start up. With digital marketing, your audience can continue to increase your brand exposure by sharing, liking or commenting on your content via social media, thereby exposing it to their own social circles. Other sites can also link to your site or content.
These are some of the ways in which digital marketing can be an extremely effective way to market your promotional products business, no matter how big or small your business is.
Digital Marketing Strategies
When you begin to use digital marketing strategies, there is one important step that everyone should complete if you want them to be more effective than employee advocacy attempts. That is, you need to set a goal for your online marketing. This is separate from your overall marketing objectives. Make sure you identify specific metrics that you would like to achieve with your digital marketing tactics. Then, put these digital marketing objectives down on paper. This is a requirement of any effective digital marketing strategies.
Focus On Optimizing Your Website
In order to reach more consumers and increase your marketing ROI, you need to include SEO in your digital marketing strategy. If you can optimize your site using the top SEO tools, you can show up on search engine result pages. Then, consumers will see your website, click on it and hopefully purchase products and/or services. Start marketing through SEO to boost your sales.
