A wise person once said “You can avoid having ulcers by adapting to the situation. If you fall in the mud puddle, check your pockets for fish”. Once you’ve got rid of that smirk this quote is sure to bring to your face, can you start to fully appreciate that it stands true in most situations in life. In today’s increasingly competitive business environment, nothing demands us to adapt more than the might of the digital revolution.
Having an online presence is not just something you should consider anymore, it’s often the difference between your business succeeding and falling so far behind the competition that revival is an uphill battle, often futile. Regardless of your area of business, a digital presence is a must. Consider the fact that India’s internet user base has now crossed 400 million, taking us to the number 2 spot worldwide. This has happened after registering a 49% growth over the year before. It took India more than a decade to move from 10 million to 100 million, 3 years to move from 100 to 200 million, and only a year to move from 300 to 400 million. To say the growth rate is phenomenal, is putting it mildly.
To look at this from a different lens, consider that in 2015 cashless transactions have surpassed cash transactions in India. Better Security and the availability of multiple channels to make online payments have pushed online transactions to a whopping INR 92lakh crore, beating paper-based transactions that totalled to 85 lakh crore in FY 2015. Expectedly, brands have jumped onto the band-wagon with digital spends on advertising recording nearly a 50% growth rate in 2015, as compared to the more ‘traditional’ mediums such as print (12%) and TV (10%).
So what does having an online presence really mean? It means making your business visible to the masses that are now on the web. You can achieve this primarily through two routes. First, ensure that your own presence is easy to find. This means, you have a website that is easy to locate and user friendly. One of the quickest ways to get online is to use an engine like shopify or zepo. If you’re not necessarily looking for a transactional website or willing to get your hands a little dirty and save a few bucks while you’re at it, you might want to consider wordpress or a similar content management system (cms) that has hosting options built in.
It also means you have a solid social media presence with quality content that is relevant to your target customers. Don’t just sign up for every social media channel out there, pick the ones that are relevant to your business and do a good job of creating content that adds value to your audience. Social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn are all content driven where quality matters more than quantity. Keep in mind that for each channel, the audience has a slightly different expectation and engagement personality. On Facebook, it’s usually humour and clever, witty topical takes that work best. The Twitter audience is slightly more, let’s say ‘intellectual’ and here you want to showcase yourself as a thought leader in your field. You can start by curating good quality articles and once you’ve got a hang of it, write your own. Linkedin is a channel where industry specific news work best, it’s the stomping ground of the professional in all of us, so as much as possible, be serious here.
Aside from the content driven channels, another area of focus should be paid channels like SEM, SMM, select display networks & SEO that are to be looked at purely from an ROI point of view, to generate leads. SEM or ‘Search Engine Marketing’ is an extremely effective channel which captures potential customers at the ‘Research’ stage of their purchase cycle, effectively capturing intent. This is a good channel to start with. The potential conversions from these leads are higher and if you’re achieving over 80% qualified leads from this channel, you’re doing very well. You can always outsource SEM to an agency, but a word of caution – understand it yourself before you outsource and the chances of being taken for a ride are fewer. There are no hard and fast rules that apply across industries, but good practices include setting specific goals before starting, working backwards to a daily budget you’re comfortable with and structuring your SEM campaign in a manner that reflects your product range and offerings.
I had started a personal concierge business in 2008, its goal was to service NRI’s globally, had I known about SEM then, I’m sure the fate of that business would have been very different! SEM is a very powerful tool to bridge large distances and also efficiently target customers based on their intent, as their search terms are a strong proxy for what they are looking to do/buy.
SMM or ‘Social Media Marketing’ is more of a push medium where targeting audiences is possible on factors like interest (everything the audience has shown interest on Facebook by interacting with it through likes/comments/shares), behaviour, location, look-alike (looks like the audience that follows your page) and so on. The wide spectrum of experimentation you can do here allows for multiple permutations and combinations, making it a process that needs continuous optimization and attention to detail. Overall, you need to ensure the images you use are attractive and warrant a click, what you say in your ad copy, whether its SEM or SMM is met with a landing page that delivers the information the potential customer needs in a crisp manner enabling the decision to fill up your form and become a ‘lead’.
The second route is leveraging the market places that exist. This simply means taking full advantage of the aggregators that are prevalent across the web. Names like urbanclap, zomato, ebay, amazon and flipkart should be part of your marketing arsenal if you have products that fit their ranges. If you’re in manufacturing or distribution/trading of products, this becomes an important medium wherein the effort of marketing can be substantially reduced and you can ride on the coat tails of the big ecommerce companies, albeit you will have to pay for this convenience.
So once you’ve got your basics right, then what? The job is not nearly done until the loop is closed. Leads need to be picked up and interest needs to be addressed in a timely manner. The quality and speed of your response will determine the final result, so ensure you have a savvy team in place, ready to engage and close deals.
So go ahead, get your SME online and watch your business grow!
Data Sources:
IAMAI
Economic Times, DNA, Livemint
ZenithOptimedia report (Publicis Group)
Images:
Leverage
Economic Times
