Some of the world’s largest businesses put a substantial amount of effort into marketing their brand online. It’s safe to say that these businesses choose to invest in internet marketing because the ROI makes it worthwhile. But if your business operates locally in Chattanooga, you might be wondering if copying fortune 500 companies in your own marketing strategy will actually still work. The short answer is absolutely.
You don’t have to be a household name globally, or even locally, to make the most out of internet marketing. Regardless of the size of your business, there are many advantages to marketing it online.
Market To The Right Audience
With search engine marketing (SEM) and (SEO), you won’t be marketing to people who are trying to listen to their favorite radio station or reading the local newspaper. Instead, your efforts will be aimed at attracting people who are already searching the internet for what you offer. This makes the ROI of internet marketing better because the conversion rate will be much higher.
For those who don’t know, SEM is a form of advertising where you pay to have ads for your business displayed in the results of relevant searches, while SEO is about following tactics that will make your website rank high in searches without paying for ads.
Cost Effective
Because you’re focusing your marketing on people who are more likely to use your product or service, the cost of internet marketing is often lower compared to other types. Instead of wasting precious resources to blurt out your message to anyone who’s willing to listen, the audience you can reach with internet marketing will be one that want to listen. This increases the chances of generating leads from your marketing, and the cost per customer gained is likely to be much lower.
Extend Your Reach
If you don’t make use of internet marketing, there’s a good chance that you’re marketing your local business to local people. For the most part, that seems to make sense. But when you really think about it, you might be losing out because you can’t reach a wider audience. People visiting Chattanooga from other parts of the country might be searching for exactly what you offer, and someone who isn’t a local will usually search the internet to easily find local businesses, if you aren’t listed, they won’t even consider you.
It should be said, however, that the internet has become the go-to way for many people to find businesses that can cater to their needs, meaning you’re probably even losing out on local customers.
Time Is Your Friend, Not Your Enemy
Other forms of marketing can take much longer to get started with and build momentum, but internet marketing can gain results fast without requiring a large amount of effort on your behalf. If you do it right, internet marketing is likely to just get more and more effective the longer you do it, and things you invested in more than a year ago (like a professional website design, for instance) won’t become outdated as soon as your marketing campaign dies off. Instead of constantly paying for short-lived ads, you can pay for something once and keep using it for years to come. This is because you won’t just be investing large amounts to run marketing campaigns, but in an online presence that is steady and has the potential to keep generating leads for your business constantly, even when you aren’t spending as much anymore.
Communicate With Your Audience
Internet marketing can open many doors for you to communicate with your customers more effectively. Because of this, internet marketing is much more personal than other forms of marketing where you’re talking at your audience and not to them.
Another benefit of this improved communication is that people can easily contact your business outside normal business hours, allowing you to get back to them as soon as possible when it’s most convenient to you. Not only is this more comfortable for you, it also benefits customers who be might working during your office hours.
There are many types of online marketing strategies that you can try for your local business. Getting your own website and setting up social media accounts is a good place to start. You can also start a blog if you want to improve the SEO of your website.
If you think you’ll be able to keep up the pace, you could try doing your own internet marketing. Learning will take quite a bit of time and it can seem overwhelming at first, but it will become easier the more you work with it. However, you probably won’t get very good results from very early on if you’re trying to market your business yourself and it will be very time consuming. Eventually, you might even have to hire a staff member specifically to do your internet marketing, which might not be something you can realistically do.
But you don’t have to throw in the towel just yet. Internet marketing can be both easy and cost effective if you hire a professional internet marketing company to help you. By hiring professionals to help you with your internet marketing strategy, you’ll be saving yourself a lot of time and effort while gaining better results.
At Serious SEM, we’ve helped many small to medium businesses in Tennessee achieve internet marketing success and build their online presence.