Why Digital Marketing for Startups Is Essential

Affiliate Marketing Can Be Hard

Our July Member of the Month weighs in on the importance of digital marketing.

David Reimherr is the founder of Magnificent Marketing and is our Member of the Month.

The business.com community is a place where business owners and professionals come together to learn from each other. Those looking for advice can solicit it from their peers, while others are able to share their extensive expertise with those who need it. 

It’s that peer-to-peer give-and-take that makes the community such a valuable part of business.com. Business.com has more than 190,000 members from around the globe. The community thrives because of our members’ eagerness to drive conversations, whether through asking questions, answering questions or contributing articles. Reaching your business goals has never been easier with the help of Socialgreg. Check out their wide range social media services and get a stronger digital presence.

Each month we spotlight one of our community members for their contributions. This month we are recognizing David Reimherr, founder of Magnificent Marketing. 

Digital marketing advice for SMBs

Reimherr contributes to the business.com community in several ways. Specifically, he shares his digital marketing expertise by answering questions from other community members and submitting articles via business.com’s contributing author program. 

One question Reimherr weighed in on was how much a business should pay for online advertising. This is a common question many new business owners struggle with. Reimherr told the community member there isn’t really a set dollar amount that businesses should expect to pay. Instead, he suggests experimenting with targeting to see where they get the best bang for their buck. 

“A couple pointers I can give you is to use PPC for less-engaged audiences and use CPM for higher-engaged audiences (i.e., Website Custom Audiences or Facebook fans, etc…),” Reimherr wrote. “The idea is that the higher-engaged audiences will be more likely to click, so you should get more clicks this way and are only paying the CPM price.” 

Another community member sought advice on how one should convert people who receive a marketing email but aren’t interested in the services being promoted into potential customers. Reimherr advised the community members to put those people into the top of the funnel and market to them using good and helpful content that is of interest to them. 

“Eventually trust will be built, and you won’t risk completely dropping off their radar or bugging them at a time where they might start to really run from you (i.e., if you had too hard of a sales push at this time),” Reimherr wrote. “So keep them in your monthly email list where you are distributing your content and also have them as part of your social outreach with your custom audiences.” 

In addition to sharing digital media advice, Reimherr has proffered productivity tips. When someone in the community asked about everyone’s top productivity hack, Reimherr suggested cutting back on how often you and your team check emails each day.  It is unproductive to constantly be looking at and replying to emails, as it prevents you from accomplishing everything you want to accomplish as efficiently as you would like to, he wrote. 

“It is much more efficient to accomplish and group like tasks, so just put your headphones on and knock those emails out all at once a couple times a day,” said Reimherr. “It’s a hard habit to crack, and even harder to get your team to buy in, but once they do, they will thank you, because it is a game-changer.” 

Bio 

  • Name: David Reimherr
  • Business: Magnificent Marketing
  • How long in business: 4 years
  • Location: Austin, Texas
  • How long community member: 4 years
  • Expert areas: Social media advertising (e-commerce, lead gen) and content marketing 

Q&A 

Q: What attracted you to the digital marketing industry? 

A: It happened organically for me. Ironically, I got into the digital marketing industry due to my association with a magazine printing company, which, of course, is more in the traditional media side. But as I was putting together our sales and marketing plans, I naturally gravitated toward a content marketing and social media approach because that is where my audience lived.  From there, we got into many various aspects of digital marketing, and I found it absolutely fascinating and challenging. 

Q: Why is digital marketing essential for startup growth? 

A: Digital marketing is so essential because for the majority of businesses, it’s not only the fastest way to success, it’s paramount to success. Even for companies that garner most of their business from other outlets, such as trade shows or cold calling, you can always enhance your efforts by adding on a digital strategy. This is only going to continue to be the case as we move forward. This is simply due to how the world has and continues to evolve. 

Q: How can you build a digital marketing strategy? 

A: This question can result in 100 different answers depending on your unique situation, but I will give some input on where to start and focus. You first must identify your goals. This sounds simple, but it is often overlooked or is very vague. You need to know what success looks like in order to achieve it.  

From there, you need to learn as much as possible about your customers. Questions you need to answer include the following: 

  • What is important to your customers?
  • What are their hot buttons?
  • Where do they ‘live’ online? 
  • What makes them tick?
  • What are they interested in that is in and around your product or service?
  • How do they buy? 
  • Do they search for your services? 
  • How much do they need to get educated about your product or service?
  • What is their natural buying journey? 

You get the point. There is a lot to figure out.  But once you have all of this info, you can start to figure out what is needed in order to get their attention (branding/awareness), where and how you want to lead them to purchase (funnel), and what are you going to do to make them lifelong customers and raving fans (customer cultivation). 

There are hundreds of different things you can do for each part, so I leave that up to each marketing manager to figure out. But, hopefully, this gives some insight on where to start. 

Q: What are the benefits of hiring a digital marketing firm versus handling it in-house? 

A: The main benefits of hiring a digital marketing firm are that you get multiple skill sets in one place that you may not be able to staff, and you also should be able to pay for these at a discount versus paying the salaries and trying to find enough work for everyone to do to justify full-time positions. 

You also have access to people who specialize in certain activities. For us, it’s social media advertising expertise and content strategy, and I can’t even guess at this point the amount of hours of training and practice our staff now has. 

Another benefit is that you are protected from investing a ton of time, resources and education on a specialized skill set. If that person leaves your company, all that time (and resources) goes down the drain. Of course, if you handle all your activities in-house and truly have the same expertise, and are able to keep them busy, there are benefits to keeping everything internal. 

Q: Why did you join the business.com community?

A: I have been lucky to have a mindset to always be learning from others who have experiences and expertise to share. I also love to give back the best I can, and what better place to do this for my business education than business.com? 

Q: What do you enjoy most about being a part of the business.com community? 

A: Not wanting to be redundant here, but it’s about education and sharing. 

Q: How do you decide what to write about when contributing an article? 

A: The biggest considerations are always “will this be helpful?” and “do we know what we are talking about enough to help others?” 

Q: What makes you want to answer other community members’ questions? 

A: Reciprocity. I have been helped by so many beautiful people that I feel compelled to return the favor. 

Q: What is the best professional advice you have received? 

A: To focus. Focus on a niche market or a specific offering. You can’t be all things to all people. Also, when you focus, you get so much better and bring such a higher value proposition to the world. I only wish that I would have taken this advice from Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Davis, Marcus Sheridan and Gini Dietrich when they gave it to me five years ago, but I am listening now. 

Q: What is the biggest professional mistake you have made, and how did you overcome it? 

A: See above. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the advice from these amazing entrepreneurs when they each spoke about the importance of focus. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure what to focus on at the beginning. But after having righted the ship and allowing our team to focus, it’s been amazing to see the rapid growth in their education and our value proposition. 

I just wish I would’ve done so from the get-go, but this must have been necessary to my overall journey. So I try to take all the what-ifs in stride.   

Join the business.com community

At business.com, we understand the stress of running a business. You are so bombarded with advice on the importance of marketing, improving your website or training employees that you can barely focus on day-to-day operations. 

Our community was created to help you cut through the clutter of information, connect with other small business owners and share advice to overcome common business challenges.

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