What is Digital Marketing for an SME-Digital Presence?

What is Digital Marketing for an SME-Digital Presence?

The need for Digital Marketing

The background

SME’s have often complained that the playing field in business has them at a disadvantage compared to the bigger players. However, this has changed dramatically with the arrival of digital marketing. The approach to leverage digital marketing has led to many startups becoming unicorns.

Done right, any SME can scale effectively with marketing options that can be budgeted, targeted and tweaked with far more accuracy than traditional marketing techniques.

Digital marketing means using the internet or digital technologies to create, communicate and deliver value to your target market at a profit.

SMEs or MSMEs contribute to one third of our national GDP. It is vital that they understand and leverage this option of marketing apart from traditional offline modes. As per Statista, digital marketing was 30% of all marketing spend and rapidly growing for all types of businesses.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Top benefits of Digital Marketing for an SME:

• Can generate higher Return on Investment (ROI) than traditional marketing as campaigns can be tweaked even while they are running. Return on Investment is a way to track the benefits of any project by measuring the benefits with respect to the cost.
• It is easy to run experiments like A/B testing before you scale ad spend. A/B testing is a method in which you test multiple options of a strategy to check which works the best so that you can adopt the effective options and pause or stop the ineffective ones.
• Able to target buyers by behavior on search or other digital platforms. Most social platforms allow targeting users by the way they interact or behave on the platform. Google and Bing are key search engines that allow us to reach users based on what they are searching for.
• Conversion rate is higher than traditional marketing and at a lower cost because it is possible to reach specific buyer types or leads and very little of the outreach is a blind media outreach.
• The required ad campaign budgets are low compared to other forms of advertising form with around Rs 100 /day as a starting point with the ability to stop or pause campaigns in real time. With some digital skills, there is a possibility that an SME can manage all this themselves
• You can target geographies anywhere on the globe and most regions till the granularity of a pin code
• Marketing outreach that works while you are passive. It is like a digital version of yourself that works even while you rest
• All platforms have a high level of automation that need familiarity provided with training. They offer similar capabilities to all players from solopreneurs to the larger players
• It is a level playing field with all including the larger players so the only difference is the competence in using them and budgets.

A digital presence is a necessary first step in digital marketing

A Website

A website is like a digital visiting card and detailed brochure about your services hosted on the internet. Since most searches happen on smartphone, it makes sense to create a responsive website that loads well on a smartphone too.

There are many services that offer free domains and hosting with ready-made template websites like WordPress, WIX etc but we would advise against it. It looks unprofessional and it makes more sense to incur a cost of a unique domain name and a hosting. You can still use a ready-made template software to build on your own digital real estate. A lot of the options are free themes that are easy drag and drop. In fact, some domain and hosting packages have the option of prebuilt ready-made template software with it with easy drag and drop functionalities to build your website.

Typically, a four to five pages simple ready-made template website will cost you around a few thousand rupees using existing free themes in the platform if you engage a developer. There are paid themes too that come at an extra price. We would advise against building a custom theme from scratch as there is a lot of work that would be required to make it responsive. This would hike up developer costs and it would be required continually making it an option only for those with deep pockets.

Organic Social Media Presence

The next step is setting up a social media presence with most of us spending a lot of times on social media applications. The absolute musts for any business are a Facebook page, a Twitter handle, a LinkedIn company page and a LinkedIn profile for each team member. Additionally, with video being the hottest content medium that is growing as we speak-YouTube presence is also a must.

Ecommerce or B2C businesses must also be on Instagram which is still organic to an extent if the hash tagging is done right.B2B would be well advised to focus on Twitter and LinkedIn whereas as B2C would work well to focus on Facebook Paid Options and Instagram.

YouTube Shorts, Reels and Short Videos on Instagram and Facebook are good ways to connect with the newer generation of consumers who have shorter attention spans. These platforms are still evolving and therefore have good potential for reach as the platform does not limit reach organically currently compared to its other options.

You will find that the number of impressions and reach on most social profiles is limited but the presence still serves as guideposts for the authenticity for your business. When a prospect encounters your digital assets, he/she will research your activity on social platforms before they consider the next step of engaging with your business.

Another great tool to use is the Google Business Profile earlier called Google My Business. It is a free service that shows your business in results on Google Search and Maps. It allows reviews and suggests your business to local customers with the option to book services and interact with customers. This is also enabled for local SEO and your profile shows up in local searches like-mobile shops near me etc.