Articles

Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Small & Medium Businesses

by Buana Sari Digital Marketer

Small and medium enterprises account for the majority of businesses globally and are major contributors to revenue generation and global economic development. They represent about ninety percent of businesses worldwide.

According to The Definitive Guide to Digital Advertising Trends for SMB Businesses (2023) published by Regalix, 93% of those global SMBs who pay for digital advertising, plan to maintain or increase their digital advertising spending over the next 12 months, and 47% of them have a consistent weekly digital advertising spend, suggesting that SMBs who currently spend on digital advertising have realized benefits from it. SMBs approximately pay from USD 750 to USD 10,000 per month for various digital marketing services (Source : WebFX).

The pandemic and other macro-economic factors have pushed the growth of digital technologies adoption by small and medium businesses. Many of them relate much more to digital marketing than to other traditional marketing channels. SMBs, both in the B2B and B2C segments, have integrated digital marketing tools into all sales and marketing activities. Nearly all small businesses players prefer to invest more in digital channels with an emphasis on mobile advertising to boost brand awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, retention and other marketing activities. Expats point out that ninety-five percent of small businesses are committed to spending more on digital marketing in 2023.

Digital marketing tools have brought many significant benefits for small and medium firms. Digitalization has decreased costs by providing better and quicker access to marketing information, and interaction between businesses and customers. Digital technologies assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) integrate into worldwide markets, through cost reductions associated with cross-border operations & transport; significantly enhancing global scalability.

Digital marketing tools boost innovation as well as the potential for small firms to generate big data and analyze their own marketing activities in new ways, driving performance and revenues. The past few years have shown how quickly the tools can evolve. While small businesses have seen several new digital marketing tools, it may not be easy for them to adopt digital marketing strategies using them.

High-quality digital advertising takes time, money, and effort. A limited budget may hold them back from implementing some of the bold digital marketing strategies. That being said, experts tell confidently that there are plenty of digital marketing strategies that SMEs can use to effectively build their brand and grow business.

Here are the best digital marketing strategies for a small and medium business that can provide fantastic results :

1. Low-cost Lead Generation

Lead generation using digital marketing can be a profitable strategy when done right by SMEs.  They need a cost-effective lead generation strategy to be formulated for finding potential customers, attracting their attention, and capturing their contact information. For each lead generation strategy, small businesses need to determine which specific audience persona they need to target.

For lead generation to be successful, it is essential for SMEs to go for tools and technologies which use high volume data to extract leads. A common lead generation mistake committed by small businesses is to focus too much on building things on the business’s website like blogs, podcasts, lead magnets, etc. or extensively use social media which then fail to produce desired leads.

Innovation driven SMBs are fast resorting to new-age lead generation platforms like moLotus to capture more leads at a low cost per lead. The platform is capable of generating quick leads in the form of contact information via message delivery directly into the inbox on all mobile handsets, irrespective of phone type or model at low cost per lead. Lead generation capabilities of moLotus marketing platform are enhanced by a gamut of smart features including global scalability, automation, personalization, customization, interactivity, integration and more.

2. Personalized Marketing

Evergage survey highlights that 98 percent of small and medium businesses believe that personalization has a deep impact in enhancing customer relationships. Across the small and medium business sector, experts have been talking about doing personalized marketing for many years. Yet in reality, most businesses of all scales from SMBs to MSMEs are still struggling to do personalization. According to a Gartner survey, seventy-four percent of respondents say that they struggle to effectively bring personalization efforts across their enterprise despite the increased availability of digital technology. The same data indicates that poor personalization can cause small brands to lose thirty-eight percent of their customers.

Small businesses can now hyper-personalize customer communication using rich media formats thanks to the development of mobile advertising technologies like moLotus, which allows them to pre-identify customer preferences. Small and medium-sized businesses will prioritize developing personalized mobile advertising campaigns to fulfill customers' needs.

moLotus breakthrough technology provides SMEs with multiple personalization options such as greetings, customer names, rewards, etc. The personalization capabilities leverage customer data to deliver the hyper-personalized messages in customer’s mobile inbox. The personalized advertisements remain there until deleted by the customer himself. By creating hyper-personalized recommendations, small businesses can quickly engage their customers and maximize revenues. The level of personalization is unmatched to any other advertising platform.

3. Automation & Transformation

Automation is helping SMBs to streamline business processes. It is imperative for them to automate and transform marketing processes to save time and make their limited staff more efficient. Automation and digital transformation are one of the must-have digital marketing strategies for SMBs looking forward to work smart and grow.  According to a study, 92 percent of the SMEs believe digital transformation is crucial for their business (Source : Quixy). Automation can not only boost their productivity but also supercharge conversion rate.

25 percent of small businesses in the United States are currently using AI-based automation for various purposes, including chatbots, task automation, and more. The number is set to increase. In other parts of the world, small businesses are trying hard to transform their businesses but despite potentially tremendous benefits, small and mid-sized enterprises lag in automation and transformation.

Top-notch automation tools like HubSpot, Marketo, Leadpages, Buffer, Hootsuite, moLotus, etc. are assisting SMBs for lead generation, mobile advertising, email marketing, social media management, referral marketing and much more. If latest data are to be believed, moLotus technology, with its superior automation capabilities, is being applied by SMBs to seamlessly automate the customer processes like service reminders, new customer onboarding and a lot more while lowering cost and enhancing revenue growth.

moLotus technology could be of great help in transforming the loyalty card space; replacing plastic cards with mobile loyalty cards. It builds a long-term relationship with the millennials and Generation Z customers by keeping them engaged via moLotus mobile transformation capabilities like Mobile Reminders, Feedback via mobile, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), Digital rewards, How-to, Real-time customer ratings, and more.

4. Presenting Brand Story

Nothing inspires customers like a brand story. Customers have been captivated by brand stories, so it makes sense for small businesses to use brand storytelling in their digital marketing efforts. Brand storytelling is a powerful tool that small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) may use to set themselves apart from the competition and forge a distinctive brand identity.

SMBs must comprehend their target audience and what appeals to them in order to properly express their brand narrative. By carrying out market research and determining the needs, priorities, and motivations of their target clients, this can be accomplished.

With the advent of digital tools and technologies like moLotus, they are now equipped to educate their customers about specific topics, or about their products / services by incorporating mobile video ads. The mobile videos can educate, inspire and entertain SME customer base achieving the desired outcomes. The 40 sec long video ads also have an emotional impact on the varied SME customers and have proved to be the most effective media for brand storytelling for small businesses.

According to studies, SMBs mostly use moLotus mobile video advertisements in conjunction with other rich media formats, such as video, greeting cards, photos, brochures, and more, to create emotional connections with their target audiences.

5. Market Expansion

The SME market comprises millions of businesses in different industry verticals, with different marketing goals, and at different levels of maturity. It can be pretty overwhelming to strategize as to how to scale businesses and expand, especially in times of economic uncertainty. By implementing digital marketing tools, SMBs can expand their markets and reach new customers increasing brand recognition, market exposure, demand creation, lead generation and sales.

Fortunately, new growth marketing tools & technologies like moLotus, Expandi.io, Zapier, HubSpot, InMobi, etc. are assisting SMEs to expand globally and diversify business; building awareness, enhancing customer engagement and developing a brand perception.

Small and medium businesses can now directly reach an unlimited number of customers via mobile advertising platforms like moLotus. moLotus mobile video customer interaction platform stands out in reaching millions of customers daily just in single go on their mobile devices irrespective of phone model or phone type - be it a smartphone, feature phone or i-phone. moLotus campaigns offer diverse targeting options based on demographics, interests, interaction, and other business criteria helping SMEs to not only reach unlimited customers but also the right customers in real time.

6. Customer Interaction & Support

For small and medium businesses, the next frontier for customer engagement is quick, easy and contextual customer interaction. Small enterprises mostly juggle multiple priorities with limited resources. Balancing operational priorities and implementing customer interaction and support strategies can be a real challenge.

Nowadays, customers expect even small brands to offer as much value as the big brands providing competitive prices, reliable and attractive products and services. They expect small businesses to be responsive, empathetic, flexible, and finally more aware of their requirements.

Tech-savvy customers are getting attracted to brands that interact well with customers using new mobile technologies like moLotus. The technology offers many easy customer response options. Customers can now easily connect with SMEs via mobile using SMS, Web Link, Call Back, Clicks, USSD, etc. moLotus customer interactions transform customer support to be real-time, mobile, seamless, available, simple and engaging.

Several SMEs are using chatbots and virtual assistants offering customers with interactive communication. Although these technologies help customers quickly get answers to their questions or resolve issues, without waiting for a customer service representative; they require more investment on the part of small businesses who are already suffering from financial crunch.

Conclusion

Small and medium businesses should stop wasting their resources on tools and techniques that don’t meet their digital marketing goals. Rather, they should invest their resources on new-age technologies like moLotus for digitization. The platform has been of great help to small businesses in prospecting, acquiring, engaging, and retaining more customers. Embrace moLotus to earn high margin digital advertising revenues at less cost.


Sponsor Ads


About Buana Sari Professional   Digital Marketer

970 connections, 54 recommendations, 2,638 honor points.
Joined APSense since, December 5th, 2021, From Singapore City, Singapore.

Created on May 10th 2023 05:42. Viewed 173 times.

Comments

Peter Paul Professional   Manager
Small and medium businesses should stop wasting their resources on tools and techniques that don’t meet their digital marketing goals. Rather, they should invest their resources on new-age technologies like moLotus for digitization. The platform has been of great help to small businesses in prospecting, acquiring, engaging, and retaining more customers. Embrace moLotus to earn high margin digital advertising revenues at less cost.
May 11th 2023 02:39   
Please sign in before you comment.