Digital Marketing for small businesses
If you simply go by their definition, MSMEs are micro, small and medium enterprises depending upon their turnover. If you ask any business owner though, they would tell you that some issues are common across businesses irrespective of their size. One such challenge is to build brand awareness, obtain quality leads and maintain a good reputation. All of this can be achieved if a business has an effective online presence.
With the increase in smartphone usage and widespread availability of internet connectivity, everything that we want to know about is at our fingertips (literally). Modern consumers expect their B2B/B2C transactions to follow the same (or similar) workflow as their interaction with brands for their personal requirements.
Today, we will look at 10 reasons why digital marketing is important for MSMEs (B2B & B2C).
1. Wider global reach
Establishing your company presence across all geographic locations through traditional marketing strategies is a difficult and time-consuming process. With suitable digital marketing plans for MSME, you can easily expand your business worldwide without any geographical barriers. Digital marketing campaigns can be set up quickly and efficiently, are extremely flexible, and enable you to easily target your potential audience.
2. Cost-effective
If you are an owner of a small or medium-sized business, you must be familiar with working on a tight budget and with minimum resources. Under such circumstances, digital marketing is the best way to reach a wider audience. Businesses operating under a tight budget prefer using digital marketing. MSMEs can get the best strategic planning and marketing help to target their potential customers with a limited budget.
3. Increased ROI
Micro, small, and medium enterprises often have limited resources. Successful digital marketing programs can help an MSME in increasing their brand value and revenue. Digital marketing gives a higher return on investment compared to other traditional marketing avenues.
4. Real-time analytics
Digital marketing helps you to scale awareness about your business and obtain the details of the conversions. This provides crucial details about sales, subscribers, leads, and conversion based on the nature of your promotion and allows you to tweak your strategies for maximum impact and ROI.
5. Reach targeted customers
With digital marketing, you can advertise and promote your brand and products only to the people who are your potential audience. Thus, you don't end up wasting your budget on junk leads or uninterested customers.
6. Effective social media presence
With modern forms of advertisement, everything is getting digitised. Digital marketing keeps your brand visible and relevant on all social media platforms. It is the best way to engage with global customers and potential clients.
7. Brand building and gaining credibility
Customers do not always care about the price when it comes to trust and quality. Once a brand wins the trust of its customers, it can stand strong against all its competitors. Digital marketing strategies help brands build a positive online reputation and trust.
8. Lead generation
Digital marketing creates a consistent stream of traffic that can be converted into leads. It continuously works to develop strategies that result in the most conversions and sales. The more traffic you generate, the faster you can earn a return on your investment.
9. Online reputation management
Digital marketing is being increasingly used to reach out to a global audience. With well-specified requirements and resources, you can create a positive and realistic image of the brand and build a good reputation for the company by means of regular interactions with the customers.
10. Long-term relationships between customers and businesses
Clients are taken through the marketing funnel, starting with brand awareness and interest to desire and subsequent actions. It makes the customer stay with the brand in the long term. An effective digital marketing campaign helps the brand to retain its potential customers.
MSMEs contribute about 50% of India’s total annual exports and 45% of its total industrial employment. The only challenge they face when competing with MNCs is the scale of operations. MSMEs have been recently adopting digital marketing on a larger scale to challenge the monopoly of the MNCs. This phenomenon has been accelerated by the pandemic. This adoption is only expected to increase in the future. When it comes to marking their global presence effectively, digital marketing is the way to go for MSMEs.