How Will Digital Marketing Help Your SME? – All Your Questions Answered

Almost all businesses have been adversely affected due to COVID-19 pandemic, but small and mid-sized businesses are disproportionately bearing the brunt of this crisis. 

Synclarity hosted a unique Q&A webinar to help small businesses leverage digital marketing to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and thrive in these challenging times. Here are a few highlights from the webinar by Tejas Chaudhari, Chief Digital Evangelist at Quantastic. Tejas is a Full Stack Growth Marketer and Agency Leader.

Tejas loves to help businesses strategize their digital marketing strategies from Media planning to Campaign ideas to Lead generation.

Let’s see what the webinar was all about.

What questions were answered by the Digital Marketing Expert Tejas Chaudhari? 

• Digital Marketing During and Post Lockdown

The very first question of the webinar was “What was the role of Digital Marketing during and after the lockdown?”

Tejas believes that people tend to rely more on digital media channels for their news and updates. Thus, it is the perfect time to get the business on digital space or get involved in writing content for these sites. The brands have reoriented their marketing objectives amid shifts in customer preferences.

Digital marketing campaigns will need help reopen certain physical stores that were closed during the lockdown. There are several considerations that come into play here that we should consider: updated details about Google My Business, communication strategy on hygienic and safety steps, allocation of budgets according to their position and marketing campaign planning.

• Digital Marketing in Unlock Phase

Attendees also asked “What will be the effect of Digital Marketing in the unlock stage?”

According to Tejas, with the help of digital marketing, customer retention cost has reduced on social media platforms. 

The key advantage of digital marketing is to maintain the visibility of small businesses as well as boost new earning opportunities through the pandemic. If consumers know a company has an Instagram presence, they may not be aware of the various ways this company can support them during this time. Thus, during the lockdown, brands with a great digital presence can reap out the benefits of telling their brand stories.

In the unlock phase, this becomes beneficial for the businesses as customers are already aware of the brand core value. This reduces the time and cost to turn the engagement into prospective customers.

• Importance of Digital Marketing for SMEs

Now comes the most important part of the webinar, where people asked “Why is digital marketing important for SMEs?”

Digital marketing has transformed the ways to reach out to the customers. One of the major elements of digital marketing is “Content”.

Tejas says, “Content Creation is an effective and budget friendly way.” 

Content marketing makes it possible for brands to become storytellers and provide valuable information especially in times of crisis. Customers will be searching for content that will entertain, encourage, educate and inform.

The second important element Tejas discussed was – “Live Streaming”. 

Creativity can go a long way. With live streaming, one can try out different styles to engage their audience. The streaming type is not the only thing that can make you creative, the stream itself can be different. It is one of the cost effective ways of digital marketing.

• Strategies To Revive Business Post Lockdown

People asked a question on “What strategies should they adopt to revive their business?”

As a small business owner, you can bite more than you can chew if you think you can work hard and restore your business easily with more effort once the lockdown is over.

Tejas explained a few strategies for reviving a business. One of them was to send free consultations to your prospects/clients. It can be a great way to be empathetic with your customers. 

You may already provide your customers with telephone and email support, but now is the time to increase the efficiency of your customer service and ensure that your customers can reach out to you from anywhere. 

Secondly, digital marketing lets you come in and research the actions of your customers directly. This can therefore help to form a clear picture of what’s working with your audience. In addition, this helps you to narrow down the target market. Now you can opt to promote your ad among users who are more interested in your niche. 

• Buyer Persona 

Attendees asked the question ”What all factors should be considered while creating the buyer persona?”

Tejas gave a simple answer to it. First thing every business must do before creating the buyer persona is to find out “Who will get benefits from the business?” 

The best way to get started with the buyer persona is – Research. The strongest buyer persona is focused on market research and insights you obtain from your current customer base. 

Developing buyer personas at the most basic level helps you to create content and advertising that appeals to your target audience. It also helps you to aim or customize your marketing to specific segments of your audience.

• Tips to Leverage Different Marketing Channels 

There were people from different sectors of the market who attended this webinar. They were curious to know, “Which social media platform is best suited for their business?”

Tejas himself uses all the platforms to get the best out of all. You can choose any of the media for your business. The only thing to be kept in mind is what content you will be posting on that.

He also specified some of the platforms for different businesses. 

• Pinterest 

Pinterest fit in the needs of Architecture. It has become an image search and collection platform, with its database only becoming stronger and larger whenever someone pins an image.

• Instagram

For food related businesses, Instagram Feed and Stories work well. Make use of appropriate hashtags to target your audience.

• Google My Business(GMB)

GMB works with your company’s website to provide customers with access to the information they want to find. Local guides by Google are meant to show all the details customers need to narrow down their search and determine whether a business can meet their needs.

• WhatsApp

WhatsApp Business App is designed in accordance with the small business owner. WhatsApp message templates and catalogs are different message formats that businesses use to deliver messages to individuals that have opted for messages. You can save and reuse frequently sent messages, and use those quick replies to respond more effectively to popular questions.

• Build/Revamp a Website

It is high time to go digital looking at the current scenarios. Attendees asked “How to build or revamp a website for their business?”

Tejas believes that Going digital can bring your business a lot of fortune. With a website, one can even explore your company in any part of the world.

He specifies some quick website launch platforms – Wix, Weebly

One can use any theme relevant to their business from these tools. 

The second thing on which he emphasized was “structure of the website”. A strong layout of the site improves user experience. If a website is attractive to users, then it’s appealing to search engines too.  When the homepage of a website is connected to significant subpages, crawlers can easily crawl around the site.

• SEO Tips

The next question by the attendees was “ What are the SEO tips to be leveraged for SMEs?”

Tejas put a light on a few of the SEO tips:

• One of the most successful ways of improving local SEO is to ensure that your company’s listing information is accessible and consistent through a variety of third party outlets. These pages are continuously searched by Google and other search engines to create a better understanding of the local web and your business.
• A well-crafted content marketing plan emphasizes writing blog posts that educate and engage your target audience based on a particular keyword.
• It’s a perfect SEO tactic to focus on the long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords get fewer search traffic, but because they are more descriptive, they will typically have a higher conversion value.

• ROI Measurement

The most important part for any business owner is ROI. The question is “How to Measure and Improve Your Digital Marketing ROI?”

The above mentioned metrics cannot give you a clear picture of how much time, money, and effort you put into your brand’s digital marketing.

Tejas says – Not all campaigns have a conversion goal!

Many promotions are for awareness building. While others try to get the customers into the marketing funnel. When your marketing strategies are targeted at converting, then conversion metrics will tell you how well you are accomplishing this objective. The best way to get your answer is through Google Analytics.

• Videos – Powerful Way for Engagement

During the webinar, many people have asked “How to use video marketing for their business?”

Tejas started his answer with a fact, “The average video consumption before COVID-19 was 25 Minutes, but now it has increased to 30 Minutes.”

Video is a flexible and immersive type of content that not only gives you a real-life image of what’s going on; but it’s easy to share across multiple platforms. 

Video is the most effective way of sharing amazing stories about the brands. It’ll be the stories of people using your product or service to solve their problems. Tools like Renderforest can be used for quick video creation. 

Conclusion

It’s time to design a roadmap that analyzes the impact of the crisis within your digital marketing plan. With responsible budgeting, SEO and digital marketing are set to play the leading role for SMEs.

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