A guide on Digital Marketing for SMEs

The digital boom across the world has driven all businesses to adopt digital marketing as their primary form of advertising. While digital marketing holds a plethora of benefits for all scales of business, small and big alike, for SMEs, it opens up a vast set of opportunities. The digital forum provides the small and medium enterprises a level playing field that helps them compete with the large MNCs. The platform it offers is conducive for attracting the right set of audiences and getting closer to them. The biggest boon that digital marketing provides to these small businesses is cost-effectiveness. Moreover, they can track their progress and gauge the effectiveness of their digital investments. 

Like the big businesses, SMEs also have two segments, Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Customer (B2C) segments. It is easier to track the progress of digital marketing campaigns in B2C businesses. Digital marketing companies in Wollongong use SEO, Social media marketing, and PPC advertising to increase their customer outreach and garner new leads. The sales cycle, in the case of B2C, is shorter than B2B, and thus it is easier to assess if the digital marketing strategy is working or not. 

When it comes to B2B segments, marketers falter in their digital marketing strategy. The first step of their digital marketing journey is web design. However, what they fail to understand is that they are dealing with two kinds of customer segments: decision-makers and influencers. The website is for the decision-makers associated with prospective clients. All the SME’s service offerings and value propositions are for these decision-makers. However, the content present on the website is as per the research done by influencers. Thus, the customer experience is fragmented, and the SME is not able to connect to their customers well.

Also, another challenge associated with digital marketing for B2B firms is that it takes relatively a long time for the digital assets to show any upward trends in the sales funnel. Thus, digital marketers for B2B firms should build a sound strategy taking all this into account.

Building a strategic roadmap, before investing in the digital space, is essential for the B2B SME firms. It gives them a clear idea of their goals, objectives, KPIs, budget constraints, and priorities. Since digital marketing does not bring instantaneous results for B2B firms,  all stakeholders should agree on a specific timeline. Instead of looking at different aspects of digital marketing, they need to look at the holistic picture. They should create a relationship metric between owned and paid media. Providing superior customer experience and regular customer-specific content generation should always be their top priority. Thus, firms offering services for online advertising in Wollongong have a different approach for big and small industries, as well as for B2B and B2C firms.

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