Digital Marketing Tips for Small Medium Businesses (SMB)

Digital Marketing is the promotion of brands and products through electronic media to represent them globally with the help of the internet.

It is the need of the hour not just for multi-national companies or big enterprises, but also for small and medium businesses (SMB). These SMB still follow the traditional ways to run their operations and marketing because they believe that Digital Marketing is for massive companies with huge revenues and not for them.

The idea of entering into an unknown territory scares the SMB community. They fear for their brand having a bad name, they will not get the ROI if they spend money and they feel that exposing themselves to the internet is not necessary.

They are comfortable in their zone because the business is running and is making adequate money to continue its operations. However, young players in the market are aware of internet’s power and influence. They are either looking to outsource these services or are managing as much as they can on their own. This gives them the competitive advantage over your business which has been present decades.

What should you do to get your business online without spending anything? Follow these steps:

1. Make Your Business Available on Google:

Ideally a business should be available on all search engine platforms, but Google has such dominance in the search engine market that just being present on Google can work well for starters.

If you have a store, mark your business on Google Maps so that potential customers can easily locate you with directions. Simply sign-up on Google and add your business using the Google Business page. Google Business page also helps in crawling your business, the type of service or products your business provides, your working hours along with the exact location with directions for the user.

2. Choose your Social Media Platforms:

There are a lot of Social Media platforms all over the internet and everyone has their own popularity zones.

As an SMB, you must choose and pick the right platforms for your business instead of being present everywhere. If it works for you to be present everywhere, then ideally you should have a presence everywhere, but the key factor is to be active everywhere. The secret to social media success is to run your operations actively. Many businesses have social profiles everywhere and are active on some or none of them. This can be harmful, as someone might post something bad about your business or product or service and it may stay on forever.

So, choose your platforms, be active on them and engage with your target audience to grow your business on online portals.

3. Create a Website:

Creating a website might seem like rocket science to many people, but it is not that tough. Platforms like WordPress, Weebly among many other have made website creation a much simpler task.

A website gives your business an opportunity to display its products, services, ideologies, mission, vision etc. A website is your space to communicate with the rest of the world. However, you need to have a good displayed website as it is the face of your company online. You can learn from plenty of tutorials from YouTube, and individual site FAQs.

4. Be Active & Keep a Check at things:

Being active doesn’t apply to Social Media only, you need to do that all over the internet to ensure that your online reputation is healthy.

Potential customers check your business status plenty of times before even entering your shop. With the help of your website, social media presence, they might know your business inside out before even meeting you. It is vital for a business to have a good reputation in the form of good reviews and testimonials from past and existing customers.

A good review with good products and services can sell your products instantly, and a bad one will push your potential customers away and lead them right to your competitors.

5. Share your Expertise over the Internet:

Since you have been working in your business for a long time and you have an expertise over the domain, sharing your knowledge in the form of blog postings, FAQs, writing on forums, participating in online debates is a great branding activity for you and your business.

People are vocal on the internet. They don’t think twice before sharing their opinion. Therefore, if they like your views, blogs, videos or any other content, they make sure to give their thumbs up and they appreciate it.

With everything going Digital, SMB has to catch up in the race or else they will be left behind.