How Digital Marketing is Helping E-commerce Startups to control marketing spends

The trend today is of digitization, not only in terms of marketing, but for all major activities. Digital media is relentlessly taking over the traditional forms of media be it for news, marketing or entertainment. The focus on digital marketing has turned out to be very beneficial for emerging startups that are usually short of funds and always prefer cheaper and modern ways of advertising. Digital marketing has advanced a great deal over the years, although a major part of it constitutes social media that is not what digital marketing is limited to. It includes various other aspects like SEO, email marketing, etc. The importance of digital marketing is being understood by not just startups, but also by established players in the market. However, startups, mainly e-commerce, continue to be the ones who have benefited a great deal by digital marketing. The common ways using which the startups have controlled their marketing spends, through digital marketing are:

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1. Organic Growth: Expanding the audiences of a product or service using social media is more organic than expanding through traditional media. Once you have created your profile on a social media platform, your challenge is to target the right audience. Once that is done, you will grow automatically by reaching out to targeted people and interest groups. Although you can always run some initial campaigns to get more traffic, and a few paid likes, this would still be a lot cheaper than advertising in a newspaper or on television. However the best part comes from Organic growth as more and more people interact with your social handles and digital presence. Over time the organic reach can grow substantially and this can help start ups reduce their marketing spend to great extent. Check out how IndiaShopps.com has done the FB campaign with mix of Organic & paid clicks.

2. Self Created Content: If an e-commerce startup is making use of digital marketing, they would be creating content on their own, instead of hiring advertisers for creating content for them. Unlike traditional marketing, content in digital marketing can be created by the owners or in-house teams, and is more heartfelt. Although they can also opt for content writing or SEO services, it would continue to be cheaper than traditional advertising. This helps to save a lot of money, which would otherwise be spent on hiring advertisers for content creation.

3. Cheaper Expansion: If a startup is successfully running on one single social media platform, they can establish themselves on another platform as well, without spending a single penny. In digital marketing you can go on having blogs, vlogs, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, etc, at no cost at all. Whereas in traditional forms of marketing you would have to shell lot more money to reach more people. If a newspaper advertisement is not enough, you would not only have to proceed towards radio or T.V broadcasts, but also towards outdoor media and radio channels. E-commerce startups began with having their own websites, and later had their own apps, after their websites became a big success.

4. Inexpensive Consistency: While marketing on digital platforms, you can go on market your product every day, on one platform or the other, and it still won’t cost you anything, but in traditional marketing, you do not have this freedom. If you are advertising by means of traditional methods, you would have to pay every time you want to advertise, thus you cannot have consistent promotions as that would cost a lot. In digital marketing you can go on promoting consistently on your page or channel, without selling a single buck. However if you opt for Google ad sense, then you would have to pay for promotions. Pure advertisements are paid all over, be it digital or traditional.

5. Cost-less Engagement: When marketing digitally, you know who your engaged audience, but in traditional marketing, you will never know who saw the advertisement, liked it, talked about it, etc. This helps startups to retain their followers, probably by rewarding them, or sharing more relevant content with them. If you know the interest of your followers and what they are looking for, you can always choose to reward them in some way. One of the most common ways used by e- commerce portals are rewards like cash backs or great discounts.

So if you running on real tight budgets and marketing is taking toll because of that. Then just consider Digital Marketing in place of traditional.