Today, the survival of small businesses undeniably depends on digital marketing. The Internet can help you attract consumers from all over the world to your brand and introduce your shop or restaurant to people who live in your neighborhood. However, you should know that digital marketing does not respond to the same codes as traditional marketing and that making even a small mistake can have far greater consequences when working online. Leaving a typo on a flyer may deter those who notice it from appealing to you but reversing two letters in the URL of a promotional page can make your page completely invisible online.
Creating an online presence for your brand will give you the potential to be found by thousands, if not millions, of new users, but not all the billions of consumers who surf the internet every day are interested in your products or services. Digital marketing will allow you to reach a much larger audience, but you must succeed in creating targeted campaigns if you do SEO or SEA, otherwise, many visitors you manage to attract to your brand will never become customers.
How to avoid this digital marketing mistake?
Targeting in digital marketing is drastically different from targeting in traditional marketing. SMBs that once marketed locally to thousands of people are now doing so through channels that are seen by billions of people. This difference in scale is particularly important in SEO and SEA where search engines play a key role. SMBs don't just have to think about what their customers want; they also have to think about the words they use to find what they're looking for.
SMBs often make the mistake of choosing keywords that are not targeted enough for their SEO and SEA strategy. When you create a Google Ads campaign with too broad keywords, you may get more clicks, but those clicks don't come from people who are genuinely interested in your products. So, you have little chance that the click turns into a sale, and you lose money. If you exclusively sell mystery novels, for example, there is no point in wanting to rank for the term "book" or "novel", because the majority of Internet users who use these keywords to search are not interested in what you are selling. These keywords will therefore not bring you many conversions even if they generate a lot of clicks.
SMBs need to realize that when they do business online, they are opening their business to a whole new world of research. This creates a lot more possibilities, but it also requires a more focused, data-driven approach to get better results. SMBs need to find their niche and focus on their target audience.
