How does digital marketing help small businesses grow?

The advent of digital technologies and extensive rise in social media usage have radically transformed almost all the aspects of our lives- the way we communicate, market, shop, socialise- whatever you name it! With the changing business trends, marketing methods have long evolved too. Modern technologies have brought the world closer and more accessible. Customers are now well informed, more interactive, more demanding and rather more intolerant. They are now happy to indulge in constant brands engagements and actively look out for brands, products or services they are looking for, online before even making a purchase. In-fact, 97% consumers conduct online research before purchasing products and services.

Why is Digital Marketing important for MSMEs and SMBs?

Digital Marketing is all about reaching your customers wherever they are, communicating with them about your businesses in their language or terms and persuading them to convert with full satisfaction. While you might still be relying on traditional marketing methods to spill some magic, digital marketing must have already paved so many businesses around you. Similarly, when customers face any challenges with your services, digital channels allow you to interact with them, understand their issues and resolve them as quickly as you can to maintain a positive sentiment for your business. There are so many methods, platforms and tools developed to cater this exponentially-growing, competitive digital market.

What can MSMEs or SMBs do improve their online presence?

The internet provides loads of opportunities for small businesses to find new customers or connect with customers across the globe. They can even use Internet to understand and compare their competitors, check out with latest trends, and grow geographically. Small business has as many opportunities as its bigger competitors, when it comes to digital marketing. SMEs can tap immense potential of the web to improve their business performance.

• Define your Goals:

It is extremely important to have clear objectives that you want to accomplish through your marketing. Defining critical goals with strong KPIs(Key Performance Indicators) allows you to measure the success of your marketing methods.

Many Digital marketing campaigns fail due to lack of focus on campaign goals and objective metrics (KPIs). Marketing strategies are designed to achieve short-term and long-term business goals and ultimately enhance the business.

A good strategy isn’t just trying to do all at once but carefully trying different options to see what works.

• Connect with your customers:

Reaching out the prominent customers and connecting your business’ value to the right customer base are the most critical goals for any business. You find out where your customers are and match your business to them. Once you connect with them & know what they like and dislike, you can accordingly, design your marketing strategies.

Always keep in touch with your old customers, engage them with your services via email or phone. Knowing their behaviour and interests, you can target other look-alike audience online and go next with your strategic development. Think about the outcomes that your customers desire. Always design your campaigns thinking about your target customers in mind.

• Build your Social Media presence:

In US, 96% of SMBs are using social media to promote their businesses. Social platforms such as Facebook have introduced several helpful features like Ads Manager, Ad campaigns with specific goals, look-alike and customised audiences, language selections, budget optimisation, and multi-city targeting to name a few. This relatively inexpensive way of marketing has helped many small businesses connect with millions of customers.

Because of Google and Facebook, the cost of advertising as compared to TV, radio or print media, is drastically low. One can now receive great intel on how those ads perform, meaning that bad performing ads can be replaced or updated.

• Get Visible in Search Engines:

After having a great website designed, you have to ensure that you constantly receive traffic there. Since people use search engines to find products both online and offline, it is important that your company bids in search results for words that relate to what you are selling.

PPC ads put your business directly in front of consumers when they’re searching the web. Your content & information relevance along with several other factor decide its ranking & placement.

Location-based marketing can help you attract more customers by getting your business in front of consumers when they are most interested in purchasing your products or services

• Use Automated Tools:

Digital transformation is about deploying the latest technologies to ease the processes a business undertakes, improve and expand services and products it provides and rethink every outcome it seeks to achieve. Using several web-based tools such as G-suite tools or MailChimp has helped several small and medium scale businesses ease their processes.

Analysing your campaign results and repeatedly aligning them with your defined goals is extremely essential. Though large businesses have dedicated research teams & data-scientists to constantly analyse campaigns and figure out trends, small businesses can use the variety of inexpensive web-based tools wisely to gather the same information.

To Sum Up

Implementing these basic steps on a continued basis & evolving steadily will help your business grow radically. Learning these skills is very easy. By regularly investing time in learning, you can gain the basic knowledge to start your online marketing efforts.

You can also partner with us, as we are experts in creating innovative marketing strategies for all types of businesses.

Agencies like ours have experts with extensive knowledge and skills to turn your vision into a reality.

If you would like a free digital consultation from us, click here!