As per research, 66 percent of SME owners are personally responsible for overseeing three or more areas of their organization’s activities, including marketing. While staying ahead in your business may appear to be a difficult task. However, by applying the power of digital technology in the right way, you’ll be able to increase brand awareness, also accelerating your business growth.
As digital technologies progress, there are more platforms, mediums, and touchpoints than ever before, providing opportunities to connect with your target audience on a personal level and also increasing your complexity. Let’s look at few ways to streamline:
1. Marketing Efforts should be focused in a specific direction for achieving the relevant target
When you’re running a busy small business, time is always of the essence. The foundation of your digital marketing success will be your ability to select the marketing channels that will have the greatest impact.
For example, instead of spreading your efforts across multiple social media platforms, third-party eCommerce sites, and landing pages, you could focus on your email marketing communications and your Instagram channel, in addition to your website.
Because digital technology is dynamic, these options may change over time, and as your business grows, so will your ability to broaden your marketing efforts. However, by focusing your efforts on two to three core marketing channels at first, you will be able to generate a focused buzz, and new prospects for your brand.
2. Well defined Social Strategy and alignment with overall Business strategy
95% of adults between 18 to 34 are likely to follow and interact with a brand on social media. Furthermore, 73% of marketers say social media marketing has been an extremely effective part of their business strategy.
Sharing posts using a calendar tool to get likes and comments is not a well-defined social strategy. Each platform has a unique persona and the audience is different on each. So effectively the message should also be customized as per the platform. Despite the clear cut of each platform’s nature, roughly half of today’s SMEs aren’t taking advantage of the segmentation.
In order to get the most out of your company’s social media marketing efforts, you should take your time deciding on one platform to focus the majority of your efforts.
Once you’ve set up or optimized your social media accounts (selected eye-catching profile images, verified that all links are working, creating relevant, punchy bio copy, etc.), you should begin building awareness by ‘listening to your target audience’s conversations on that platform, participating in dialogues where appropriate, and using this data to create engaging relevant content.
3. Optimize your Email Marketing Efforts
While many people believe that email marketing is a dying art, this couldn’t be the truth. Email, when used effectively, can engage and influence consumers in a big way, making it a valuable asset to any aspiring SME.
In fact, 73 percent of millennials prefer email communications from businesses.
Also, 99 percent of people check their email every day. Having said that, there is a lot of room for connecting with your audience through email communications.
To build a successful email marketing strategy for your business, you will need to consider the following elements:
- Understand your audience.
- Plan your goals and campaigns.
- Choose the right email marketing tools and software.
- Create engaging, relevant and value-driven content for your audience.
- Monitor, track and measure your results.
Emails are also used in setting up targeted ad campaigns as discussed later in the article. Know more about our email funnel generation process to increase your database.
4. Partnerships and Tie-Ups with Small Scale Influencers or supporting MSMEs
Partnering for joint webinars with complementing MSMEs or Influencer marketing are very effective ways for you to broaden your commercial reach and grow your audience. Typically, this is accomplished through the use of cross-promotion or paid association.
With rising fakes in influencer marketing, the SMEs should be focused and concerned only where the real value lies for them, mostly from our understanding, sourcing small-scale influencers in your industry or niche. At present, 94% of marketers believe that transparency and authenticity are key factors of influencer marketing success.
Perhaps, by working to forge relationships with these MSMEs and smaller-scale digital influencers in your niche, you stand to cut through the noise and connect with prospects that are likely to be highly engaged in what you have to offer or what you have to say.
5. Embrace Paid Advertising (with a balanced approach)
Another business-boosting avenue you can take as an SME is paid advertising. By embracing the potential of a balanced pay-per-click (PPC) strategy through Google, Facebook, and the recently updated, Amazon Ads platform, you’ll be able to connect with a wider online audience.
Studies suggest that 75% of people that click on paid ads confirm that search ads make it easier to find relevant information. Based on that notion, a well-targeted paid ad has the power to encourage a healthy level of conversions.
There are a variety of paid advertising options available, but Google’s paid advertising platform may be the most effective for increasing your search engine visibility. At this point we would also like to highlight that paid ads (performance marketing) have their disadvantages as well, the foremost being not able to build a brand.
A lot of marketers make the mistake of relying just on performance marketing to generate leads and acquire customers to meet the targets. In the long run, a brand also needs to be set up in parallel so that the customer acquisition cost (CAC) goes down over a period of time. Running a branding and awareness campaign should also be part of the ad spending budget. Discuss more about the golden ratio for your business’s ad spend with us.
Image Source: Inc4Plus
Finally, as per the figure, you can observe that the top-funded startup sectors in 2021 are mostly related to companies using digital technology as the primary part of their business. Observing this trend we can easily say that this paves a way for all MSME businesses to focus on the implementation of the above points in the correct way. For more guidance connect with us at info@technocratiq.com
Conclusion
The possibilities for creating engaging, inspiring marketing campaigns are limitless in the digital age. Take the guidance and devote time to connect on a personal level with your prospects, focus your efforts, and take a strategic approach to your business activities.
TIQ aims for you to grow your market online. For questions or to get started with digital marketing services, drop us an email at info@technocratiq.com or call +91 798 25 34 881.
