Managing a business has always been an unpredictable thing—but nothing has ever prepared the world for the COVID-19 pandemic. With around 110 million people being infected by the disease, of which 27.8 million were from the US alone, it is no surprise that economies took a major hit and the world was brought to a standstill.
In the business world, COVID-19 slowed down all activities. For most, it meant lower revenue. And according to Yelp’s Local Economic Impact report, the pandemic led to 97,966 businesses permanently shutting down.
Many businesses both small and large struggled to stay afloat and fight to survive the coronavirus pandemic without closing down. It was a call for the survival of the fittest, where adapting to new business models was the only way to stay alive. In fact, many had to surrender and do the following:
With non-essential brick-and-mortar businesses out of commission for the foreseeable future, finding ways to prepare for long-term growth is a must for businesses.
Restrictions posed by the pandemic, especially in mobility, paved the way for more people switching to an online approach.
More than just cost-cutting, working remotely, and building a website, business owners can turn to digital marketing to weather through the storm. But with so many owners slashing their budgets for marketing, why should they invest in it instead?
With digital marketing, small businesses can apply the same techniques used by industry leaders, even without their huge budgets. Through local SEO, targeted social media ads, and email marketing, you can achieve similar targets as your larger competitors without taking on larger or costlier campaigns.
Digital marketing technology connects you to your individualized audience, allows you to save resources with automated processes, and maximizes your budget through personalized behavioral strategies.
In the months where the world took a pause and stopped moving, many businesses lost a lot of money. So, for most, capitalization and resources are not easily available anymore.
In cutting up the budget, many businesses saw how digital marketing was the better option for being a cost-effective and result-generating strategy. In one study, it was identified that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x as many leads.
Compared to the costly price of TV commercials, billboards, print media, or radio, you can really consider how the price-per-lead decreases when you opt for utilizing a digital marketing strategy. On average, traditional marketing costs $300 to $500 per lead. It is a huge jump from the $25 to $30 per lead cost of going digital.
Moreover, digital marketing helps you get a better understanding of where the money goes and how much you actually spend on each lead through digital marketing tools. You can track and monitor statistics in real-time and generate reports, so you can tweak your strategies and improve as you go.
In traditional marketing, it is hard to measure performance, and in cases where you do, reports are not as specific as you might like. With digital marketing campaigns, you can see whether they saw your material, how long they spent on it, if they liked it, if they shared it with someone, and if it prompted them to do an action.
Aside from this, you get to understand your appeal to different demographics. You’ll see who is interested, what they are like, who spends more, how they found you, and what makes them move to take action.
Digital marketing helps you understand the customer by spending time where they usually are and producing content to drive interaction. Most strategies involve emulating customer behavior and being accessible to communicate with them.
By breaking down barriers, your target audience can engage through comments and shares. On the other side, you can react, respond, and inspire them to subscribe, follow, or buy your product.
Digital marketing helps a company establish a brand reputation, therefore, attracting an audience with similar values and principles. This sheds light on why digital marketing involves a lot of platforms beyond your website. It involves consistently producing content in social media and email newsletters that potential customers will care about.
Businesses should not take this lightly, as social proof and customer feedback on the internet can drive more customers when done right.
Without a doubt, targeted digital marketing for the mobile consumer is where companies should spend their time and attention on. 91% of adults in the United States always have their phones within reach and the average user spends 89% of their time using mobile apps.
Word-of-mouth advertising, which has a very strong influence on consumers, is now amplified by social media use. Overall, what people see when they scroll through the internet, whether in reviews, photos, or influencer marketing, has a huge effect on their purchasing decisions.
Most business owners equate digital marketing with building a website. However, a website cannot survive on its own. Digital marketing is an ecosystem, where platforms interconnect and influence each other to form a cohesive whole.
Finding balance and consistency is what a digital marketing strategy can provide for you. Your website cannot promote itself. There are things you have to do to get the clicks, generate leads, make sales, and cultivate positive word-of-mouth reviews about your company.
To start with, you have to invest in these three things so you can reap incredible results:
Search Engine Optimization should be your best friend if you want to thrive in the digital marketing environment. Imagine how many billion websites there are right now in existence, then think about how Google sifts through all of that to recommend solutions to the user.
That’s why you need to master SEO. It is vital to rank high to get noticed and increase traffic to your site. After all, you need to get people into your shop before selling them your services.
People love gobbling up content, even in this day and age. Admittedly, our attention spans are shorter, but when we catch some quality content that solves our problems, we will consume this media for hours!
But, contrary to what you may think, content marketing goes beyond blogs. Though, blogging is a huge part of it. It can also be infographics, photos, podcasts, and videos that your target audience will see many benefits from.
If you think you don’t have the time for content marketing, don’t worry! You can outsource this service from experts who will keep your website fresh, informational, and authentic to your brand.
Though social media is not something most companies bother with, having one is very important if you want to thrive and get ahead of your competitors. Admittedly, it is challenging to maintain and thinking of likeable, share-worthy posts can be a challenge, but social media can do so much for you:
Digital marketing is an absolute essential, especially if you want to gain back your losses from the pandemic. However, it does take a lot of work. If you don’t have the manpower to focus their attention on this business aspect, you can hire digital marketing experts to do the job for you!
Bliss Drive offers outstanding comprehensive web marketing services to businesses all over the world. We will work on increasing your online exposure, getting more customers, and generating more profit.
Let’s talk about how we can help your company make digital marketing plans. Call us at 949-229-3454 now for a free SEO competition analysis!
Over the last few years, one of the biggest trends in online marketing has been local. Instead of aiming for short tail keywords, businesses have focused on smaller areas, targeting their city for keywords related to products they sell and services they offer.
This is a great strategy for small cities and towns, where prospective customers are more likely to search for city-related geographical keywords than specific neighborhoods.
In big cities like Los Angeles, one of the most effective ways to generate leads, sales and ROI from SEO is to go hyper-local. This level of targeting involves breaking your SEO efforts down into specific neighborhoods and suburbs, instead of city-wide terms.
We’ve implemented hyper-local SEO for many of our clients, always with positive results that, in the majority of cases, exceed those achievable with traditional SEO.
Here are a few reasons why we’re big fans of targeting neighborhoods and hyper-local areas for SEO:
One of the biggest advantages of targeting specific neighborhoods is that it’s extremely easy to implement. For most businesses, all that’s needed to reach the front page for hyper-local search keywords is a short, helpful page that covers the specific topic.
Since competition for hyper-local keywords is so much less intense than for local keywords, you can often rank purely on the strength of your website as a whole, with little or no link building or outreach required.
If you run a service business that operates in a specific area, one of the easiest ways to start a hyper-local SEO campaign is to break the area down into suburbs and sections.
For example, if your business is located in West Los Angeles, you can divide it into sub-cities such as Culver City, Santa Monica and West Hollywood. You can even break it down to target specific neighborhoods, such as Playa del Rey and Venice.
One way to target specific areas is by using ZIP codes. You’d be surprised to learn how many people search for local businesses by adding their ZIP code to a keyword, and how effective a quick mention of a specific ZIP code in your page title can be.
The more specific your targeting is, the smaller your potential audience becomes. However, as your keywords get more and more local, you’ll also find it easier to outrank your competitors for the top spots.
In big cities, hyper-local SEO is a valuable, underutilized source of leads and revenue. Our Los Angeles SEO company specializes in finding and capitalizing on local search opportunities that can help your business drive traffic, leads and sales.
