Digital Marketing-14 Things Every Small Business Owner Needs to Know

1. Digital marketing is the use of new media-such as the internet, video, mobile phones, laptops, iphones, android phones, iPads, rss feeds, social media sites, web 2.0 sites, blogs, podcasts, email etc.- to market your business.

2. The wide, and growing, range of these marketing options can be overwhelming and confusing for many small business owners.

3. The proliferation of “experts” in social media marketing, search engine optimisation, video marketing, mobile marketing, and so on has added to this confusion.

4. Any similarity between digital marketing and traditional advertising is purely unintentional and coincidental.

5. Digital marketing offers the small business owner a fantastic opportunity to engage in direct marketing at a fraction of the cost required in the recent past.

6. “Direct marketing” is a phrase coined by Lester Wundermann in a speech in MIT, in Boston in 1967. He later stated that he wished he had called it “personal advertising” which gives you an indication of the power of direct marketing which involves targeting your potential customer directly. Contrast this personal approach with an advertising campaign on the tv, radio, newspapers, magazines for dog food which will interrupt non dog owners as well as dog owners indiscriminately.

7. Digital marketing is truly great news for small business owners because with shrewd, guerrilla marketing type strategies and tactics and clever use of the best digital channels for their particular business they can get a disproportionate return on their efforts. Up to 15 years ago they had no chance of competing with the ad spend budgets of bigger and richer competitors.

8. It took Coke 50 years to build a global brand with traditional advertising on tv, radio, newspapers and magazines.

9. It took Google 2 years to become a global brand with no advertising spend. Yahoo needed 3 years and YouTube did it in 1.

10. Have you ever seen an advertisement for Facebook, Amazon, Ebay, Google, Twitter, Pinterest or YouTube on tv, radio, newspapers or magazines?

11. Twitter launched in 2006 and has roughly 500 million active users.

12. Facebook is rumoured to have 25% of its servers dedicated to the phrase “lol”.

13. Pinterest launched in beta in 2010 and was listed in Time magazine’s list of “50 Best Websites in 2011″. In January 2012 it had 12 million users and worked out of a small apartment up to 2011.

14. Digital marketing changes everything from the perspective of marketing your business.