5 Winning Digital Marketing Strategies for SMEs

When a business starts as an enterprise, its prime consideration for success is dependent largely on its marketing strategies formulated to suit the nature of business and products in consideration.

The strategies need to reach the wide spectrum of targeted customers in the specified region. After all, it is the profit concept behind the driving force of any Small and medium business.

Also, it is fundamentally true and known to all of us, that without marketing, nothing sells. You have to do trumpeting about the attractiveness of your businesses in a loud manner, to the very taste of customers listening to you.

There are a variety of proficient strategies for SME available to adopt and implement it with all its niceties. Therefore, one has to be selective and set one's wit to prepare suitable strategies in order to have competitive stratagem and secure customer loyalty.

The market is full of cut throat competitions for SMEs, posing as great hurdles in their way of marketing whether it is physical or digital marketing.

Hence, your manoeuvrability has to be very deft and carefully planned. And the most of all, make sure to not beat around the bush when the customer expects a more direct response.

These winning strategies are sure to affect the survival of a small and medium firm in the market.

The image shows smart marketing trends for SMEs:

Image source: smartinsights.com

Now let us dissect the given situation step by step.

1. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a synonym for Internet Marketing. By virtue of being connected all the time through Internet, it is also considered as Online Marketing or Web Marketing.

You are not only connected across same region but also across the continents, opening up highways to every nook and corners of the world with quicker reach.

Thus, one of the initial steps for small and medium enterprises can be to engage audience through different social media platforms. The different modes of Digital platforms are Computers, Mobile Phones, tablets etc that can be easily targeted to create quality content for each of them.

For example, consider a shopping app designed to run your business over mobile phones. This way your customers will have easy access to your store along with enjoying a comfortable experience.  

Advertise on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Whatsapp among others to reach out to a larger audience.

2. Different digital channels and mixed platform as a winning strategy

To have effective winning strategies prepared, SMEs need the evolvement of staff, from the management team to junior level who are directly responsible for the marketing of products, concepts or solutions. They should effectively prepare a different business model for their products.

We should be ready with an analytical report on the status of digital marketing. And hence accordingly, comprehensive winning strategies can be adopted, with a view to start a vigorous marketing campaign.

Using a variety of digital marketing techniques such as social media, PR,  search and online digital hubs is considered much impressive in the eyes of customers rather than sticking to just one single platform. Customers these days do not make decisions based on seeing just one advent on a single platform.

So, in order to let your presence and intent felt all across the digital media and channels, a simplest breakdown of marketing is realistic and essential because instead of making a purchase in haste, the customers en route from awareness to validation.

Your business should also give a perception as something suitable is available for each of the customers. This great strategy should be in place, utilizing channels of digital marketing for its best effect.

And at the top of it, budgetary sufficiency should be complemented for the demanding expenses, for the success of campaign.

3. Video

Video can be a great way to market your product. It is all because of the properties of video-they are attractive and catchy, quickly engaging and convey the message in no time. The trick is to create a content that people actually want to share.

And growing popularity of video can be understood from the fact that Youtube is the second largest search engine after Google.

Now in this era of new possibilities, the people are flooded with information giving them a sense of empowerment. As a result of it, people are becoming more and more demanding from the companies, eager to reciprocate, with a gesture to establishing a lasting relationship. Instead of making a long advertisement that turns out to be boring, focus on the authentic content.

Communicate the fact that your brand has a heart and soul, which will eventually become relatable to the customer.

Image sources: edigitalhub.com

4. Influencer marketing

The prospective customers are smarter now. They hunt the products to know about their fair prices being offered from various vendors in the market.

We know that the customers have comparative advantages in the world of digital marketing by selecting from a wide range of options available to them. Customers want to know about your product from the sources they already trust. Accomplishing this task is what forms the basis of influencer marketing.

With the growth of cynicism, people prefer trusting their peers and authentic voices. Influencer marketing can be paid as well as unpaid. For SMEs, an unpaid strategy would be befitting, considering their budget constraint.

Famous Vlogger (Video Blogger) Zoella now commands a significant amount of money to review a product as it already has a large customer base. 

So spread the word as wide as possible. You can also launch refer and win campaigns that will encourage people to popularize your brand to their peers and contacts. Blogger outreach can be your friend to improve your efforts.

Thus, we should prioritize the limited range products on the highest value basis for the ease of focus for a smart campaign to take effect. A collection of relevant data will help place things together in defined segment.

5. Moment Marketing

Moment marketing is one of the most popular ways of getting your content viral. Remember how brands like Amul jump in to advertise their products with trendy election topics?

Similarly, when a puddle in northeast went viral, #DrummondPuddleWatch trended all over the world. This compelled fast food giants such as Dominos to advertise by tweeting ‘delivering to a puddle near you’.

So, advertising in the heat of the moment is the new trend. Consider that you just launched a drug for the cure of heart diseases in the market. You can launch an awareness campaign on International Heart day on social media to catch everyone’s attention.

Image source: spheremedia.mu

While working through these modalities of strategy, it is essential to have a dynamic approach towards identifying challenging problems.

We’ve seen a lot of companies saying, “Well, we don’t have the budget to do that many variations of a web landing page.” Or “We don’t really see how we can get approvals that fast through compliance, and through our legal folks.”

It is just an attitudinal problem of leadership and so obstacles should be removed cohesively with a fresh learned approach.

The best approach should be through small-scale pilots. Fix a target of a specific segment of customers. Provide them with options of variants of products in a limited viable geography of area.

This should be your initial research based approach towards formulating a digital marketing strategy. And the objective of research should be based on understanding on the posing questions like What are the challenges?

What are the policies you’ll be up against? What are the processes? What data do you, and don’t you, have?

First, fix these aspects and proceed further scaling more broadly. It should be clearly understood in totality that each of these activities has different roles with the same journey of achieving the same objective and target.