Digital Marketing for Start ups and Small – Medium Business – Top 10 Benefits 2019

In the growing digital era, we all rely on an online medium for information and have had a profound impact on everyone’s life, thus startups and small organizations striving to gain an online presence to cater wider audience through digital marketing. Now a day’s businesses are aware of the fact and therefore leveraging the popularity of these platforms to promote their services and products.

Digital Marketing is an act of connecting with customers and convinces them to buy their products or services. It increases their visibility globally and gives them new leads in the market. It relates to customers in a practical way irrespective of place and time and helps in getting more significant insight into their preferences. Digital marketing helps startups and small organizations to compete at a large platform. Digital Marketing also adjusts to the customized needs of each business. A well planned digital marketing strategy can lead any startups and small scale organization to the new heights. Digital marketing has become a prerequisite for small business. Digital marketing opens choices for its customers. Let’s discuss the benefits in details.

Brand’s identity is the message that a customer receives from any service or product. It is the first impression that creates on the customer mind. It can be the name, logo, color or any component related to that product. Business keeps this fact while branding their product, so the image lasts long for the customer while making purchases. Digital marketing helps in promoting the brand to a broader audience. Promoting medium includes social sites, emails or via advertisement videos. It sets guidelines and consistency for the product. Consistency in brand’s identity projects the culture that surrounds the product. The purpose of the branding is the clarity of what being offered whether it is an image, product or person. It describes the expected results of the product. Branding builds a market reputation of the product, as only the quality of the product matters. Thus, a well planned and strategic online marketing plays a vital role. Establish a clean, clear and concise branding that displays the desired message does not have to be complicated. Effective marketing allows you to charge more (Let us take the example of some brands like Bose, Apple branding of these products make them different from usual products and quality of these products maintain that brand).

A weak strategy or poor product quality can weaken the product’s reputation. Business should keep some points in mind while branding, “what they are," “what they are selling," “what are the core values," “what makes them different," “know the audience." Only keeping this necessary information in mind a business can generate a perfect strategy for digital marketing. Digital marketing reflects the reputation of the product that affects customers mind and increases the probability of the sale. It shows how a particular product is better from the other and increases their value in the market. A business brand is a promise that you make to their customers while branding them. The more business refines their brand identity, the more they can provide the insight of their products they are selling. Thus, digital marketing creates an impact on any product purchase highlighting their brand.

Any business gets success when the customer tends to understand what is offered. Unfortunately, some business fails to provide clarity and motive of their products. A customer visiting the business website does not achieve the goal that the business intended them to achieve. Conversion not only refers to making a purchase, but it can also be emailed signup, creation of an account, completing a survey or downloading an app. Completion of the conversion is the final success to the business. CRO is the way of optimizing a business site to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete that specified task thus increasing their leads. Customer behavior is becoming more complex and unpredictable. Getting insight into customer needs is vital. 

Startups and Small Organizations conduct many surveys either offline or online to get customer views over products (what customer wants?). Once data gathers and being analyzed to get a clear picture, and a strategy is placed for implementation. Optimization is a repetitive process to improve results no matter how much you have revised the strategy. CRO is not to manipulate visitors for conversion. It’s to ease their journey through your website until visitors have achieved their desired outcome.  Optimization leads to success if implemented with a well-planned strategy. Constant testing of a website may not lead to a possible outcome, but it will lead to an improved customer journey. It helps to understand the customer better and increases customer relationship lifetime value. Customer perception is business’s reality. It converts website visitors to permanent customers.

CRO tends to increase customer sales, but engagement maintains that conversion for a longer time. Customer engagement places valuable emphasis on the creation of their relationship and encourages both parties to see mutual advantage in that relationship. an organization can leverage its email and social media efforts in countless ways to bolster engagement and increase brand loyalty. As today’s customer is proactive, always available and always online and their opinions matters a lot for a brand. The success of sales activity depends on the company’s ability to anticipate and respond to their customers need. Managing customer’s journey is paramount to win new business, keep them engaged and to motivate them to buy again and again. Many organizations adapt a different strategy to nurture the host-to-customer relationship. This may include welcome emails, influencing customers with various offers and schemes, greeting them for connecting. Optimizing emails for mobile users is critical to customer engagement. Having an ongoing conversation with your customer means knowing what behavioral triggers and customer actions lead to increased engagement. Best marketing teams focus on improving the lines of communication with their customers. Some startups and small businesses engage teams for online real-time chat for understanding customer requirement or feedback after sales, helps to build trust between both parties. How startups and small businesses engages customers is the key to leading business.

A budget of any startups or small businesses mainly depends on the approach they implement as they generate cost in many areas of a company’s activity. Different marketing strategy requires smaller or larger budgets to put into practice. It also depends on how a company approaches the market. The key is to find that strategic element that gives the company the best result at the lowest possible cost. Firstly these startups and small business company need to understand if they are approaching the right audience. If they are following uninterested customers, then it will be a waste of time and their assets. A planned and effective marketing strategy is to know how to promote the highlights of their products without spending much. They need to identify desirable product characteristics to eliminate costly features that the customer doesn’t value. In case if the company is cutting down the marketing budget, then they need to replace with other options to remain connected to their valuable customers. A company can adapt word-of-mouth referral for this they need to maintain a strong trust among customers. Getting connected to large networking groups also benefits their business in a myriad of ways. Inefficient production practices add to manufacturing budgets without adding any value. The company should focus more on quality as compared to quantity as better written content will generate more leads and provide clarity without raising the budget for the content. Any startups and small businesses need to prioritize its spending in which domain they should put money to enhance sales. Selecting a domain depends on what kind of startup it is for example if a company is selling a phone it should spend on ads that highlight its feature and have a profound impact on customers.

If the question arises “how is your marketing working?” refers to if a company is making the profit out of their marketing. It means whether their aspects are getting accomplished in a manner the company is expecting. If a company is spending much on marketing, they expect some return on that. Marketers need straightforward ways to determine if their efforts are generating revenues. Measuring ROI and knowing how to increase it poses an altogether challenge. First companies need to know the value of their data they collect and utilize to analyze and plan a strategy. The key is to recognize and act once the strategy is set. Calculating Return on interest (ROI) may differ from company to company and is a complex task. Some calculate via formulas and algorithm, manually or by analyzing monthly patterns of their sales. Predictive modeling is an important tool for both measuring and increasing ROI. It enables marketers to use website and social data to interpret specific information about individuals and enables the development of marketing activities. It helps in unlocking the opportunities to your brand. Resource management is a way to increase ROI. The company can automate their marketing into small segments like managing emails, housing documents, thus help in carrying out complex tasks with limited resources. To expect a high ROI on small investments company need to know in which segment they need to spend to get the desired output. A company need to act “SMART" and should start with in-house members or campaign rather than spending and hiring the third party. According to a survey the good ROI ratio is 5:1 if a company tends to maintain that ratio, half a milestone is achieved.

When any startups or small business start marketing they should keep in mind what type of audience they need to target. As marketing incurs costs in each domain whether it is campaigning or connecting to customers via any medium, it should be less. Companies conduct surveys on historical sales data to get to know about their interested customers and what provokes them for conversion. Personal communication medium between both the parties results in a longer relationship. But what about the audience that companies exclude, they need to focus on a new marketing strategy to influence them. Targeting customers precisely can be done in many ways via cart re-targeting, website re-targeting, retracing their cookies and history for frequently searched products. A slightly unethical but a good Practice to get ahead of the game is to study your competitors who would likely have a bigger audience than your company does. Studying what they post about, looking at their social networks and even doing some research work on who is connecting to their sites can provide them an insight into their target audiences. Also, the price of a product is also a determining factor when it comes to digital marketing and selecting customers accordingly. Startups and small businesses can use various tools to get a clear idea of the popularity of their post. Content should be precise enough that speaks to your target audience. Once the target audience is being identified, then a well-planned strategy will work like paid ads, this should be well managed else it put a huge dent on the company’s budget.

With the tremendous growth and use of social media and an increase in the variety of services and products, it is not an easy task to woo the customers and influence them to make a purchase. They have their benchmark for any product. What seems reasonable to them is really what convinces them to buy. Customers make comparisons of the desired product with other competitors for the price, quality of the product. To match customer set expectations, every brand has managed its presence online via digital marketing. Word of mouth is considered as a powerful tool for affecting the purchase online; it is done in terms of reviews or testimonials online. It helps customers to compare the reviews of the brand to make a purchase decision. The company needs to understand the behavior of the customer what they are expecting of the brand. Customers expect an immediate response; they want their query to be resolved fast. Thus, companies spend on live chat element. Customers are always experimenting; they are now welcoming new products that give way to new startups. Companies need to be smart enough to understand the existing customer’s needs, create a strong customer relationship with positive feedback to influence new customers. Companies need to show how they stand out of everyone’s league, why they are best to choose. A company comes up with new offers to tempt customers to influence a customer to make a purchase.

With all distraction in the digital world, getting the attention of your audience is an increasingly difficult task. Some digital tactics take time to deliver their values to the audience and don’t generate quick sales. A well-planned strategy should be a fast and efficient way to drive new leads and sales to the company. The company emphasizes a lot on which strategy to use and when to use them. The key is to use analyzed historical data to identify the search criteria for a digital marketing campaign. The company also implements campaign tracking as a part of a digital strategy to know when the targets groups are working. It is crucial to stop the campaign at that time when every click brings you money. It saves the company’s time and increases sales. Split tests the keywords, images or text that you have to increase ROI of digital marketing campaigns. Among the many techniques, email marketing is mostly implemented by companies. It may include the click-through rate (how many customers clicked on image or hyperlink in the email), downloading a report or subscribing to an email list. Another way is via social media marketing. Customers are wary of the ads because most of the ads are poorly managed.  Choosing an appropriate ad network is necessary. You need to gather information on which sites are frequently accessed by your targeted customers to post products ads. Company’s impression on the customer is the key factor to increase in sale. Using sale for free is one of a good strategy to pull customer, take a live example of Jio sim. This type of strategy first develops customers trust, and they are willing to pay for that service as well. Some companies implement tiered pricing; people tend to buy mid-price items from a menu with too low and too high prices. Sending follow up emails to customers may increase the possibility of a sale, like an upgrade to existing software.

It is the traditional model of product promotion where customers have to pay attention to the message leaving their work aside. These activities are considered to be intrusive or nuisance such as telemarketing calls, a television advertisement. The focus here is always to follow the user’s interest and intent. The company will find customers more willing to listen to your message there. This doesn’t mean the company has to discard display ads entirely — under the right circumstances these ads can perform well and may be impactful to their customers. Also, don’t forget about all other less-intrusive forms of digital advertising. Creating the best, most creatively engaging ad a company can dream of is a definite and inspirational goal, but it doesn’t automatically solve the core problem plaguing digital advertising, the interruption. One thing advertisers could do is focus on creating ads that people want to see and fits their expectations. Digital media is evolving all the time, offering exceptional solutions for building creative and engaging ads such as cinema graphs. It is the concept of providing consumers with timely, relevant, compelling ads they want to talk about and share. There are many other complicating factors, it’s common that pop-up ads don’t perform well on desktops but on mobile they truly flounder. Screen size and user behavior are serious issues, so creating advertisements that are user’s screen friendly helps a lot. Also, video, animation, and other dynamic content are a drag on page load time and eats up user data. With a little thinking, the company can build a cleaner, faster, precision-targeted advertising experience that consumers won’t automatically want to tune out.

With digital marketing, a company can reach to the target audience which is not possible for traditional marketing. Now a day’s customers and company are connected via a single medium, i.e. online. The company can reach to its customers at any time or any place via this medium. Traditional ways incur huge investment costs and are specific to regions, areas and could not reflect the exact picture of their sales whether it was successful or not in terms of ROI. Digital marketing allows the company to connect to its customers regularly to maintain longer and trusting relationship which is not easy in traditional marketing as it includes surveys offline and takes time for any result. Digital marketing helps in branding their product which adds values to target audience and lead generation opportunities while in traditional marketing branding is not possible for every area as it can be costly and time-consuming. With traditional marketing, a company cannot interact with their target audience. They need to wait out for the responses to come in before they can plan their next step. This is a long and tedious process. With digital marketing company know when they are having a downfall in results and have a view to improving them, but in traditional marketing, a bad review won’t matter much as by the time the response received the market has already gone down.

Traditional vs. digital marketing is an almost unfair comparison here. Traditional marketing has no scope to deliver in this regard whereas with digital marketing; there is a chain of shares and comments helping the company to reach a new audience and earn a new visitor every nanosecond.

Digital marketing is considered as a dream business project for digital marketers. If startups and small businesses want to get success, they should know about the pros and cons of digital marketing. Digital marketing is nothing but smart utilization of digital technology to achieve marketing objectives at lower cost possible. The continuous study and analyzing customer’s behavior will help digital marketers to understand the strengths and weaknesses of Digital Marketing. Digital marketing is a powerful term as it requires nothing but specific skills to utilize digital technology

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