You as a small business owner might find the thought of competing with large corporations – a very scary thought. This is because you probably don’t have millions of rupees to set aside as your marketing budget.

BUT

If you are able to come up with an effective strategy to market your products / services, you will not only survive, you will thrive. One of the most effective and cheapest form of Marketing which most of the Small Businesses in India ignore is Online / Digital Marketing.

To know more, let us look into some effective ways in which you can market your Small Business using the Internet.

Your Business Website

First things first – Have a website for your business, it is a window into your business. Anyone siting in any corner of your city or the world can have a glimpse into your business even before stepping in. Once your customer knows something about you, they are more likely to come to you.

Studies have shown that new customers tend to find businesses without a website less trust worthy.

What this means is that your website is one of the places you have to make a good first impression!

Your website must tell people more about your business, and your products or services.

Here are some tips that you can use to make your website better.

• Make it easy to navigate through your website and help the visitor find what they need.
• You must have high quality and unique content on your website, so that potential customers can gain more information about you and your product or service.
• Have a chat bot installed, so that anyone who has a question can immediately send you a message.
• A clean website design which is pleasing to the eye.
• A call to action button, that is easily visible to your potential customer.

If you do not have the budget to pay a web developer to build a new website. Try these easy- to-use online website builder tools like NextraOne, Wix, Simbla or Square Space.

Get on a one-to-one call with the author to get a free audit of your website.

Know your Customer

I cannot stress this enough – Always know who you are marketing to.

A benefit of being a small business owner is that you can be very flexible with your customer service.You can directly interact with the customer and that gives you a much deeper insight of who your most loyal customers are.

This way you are able to better understand them and their expectations from you.

With this valuable information, you will be able to serve them better in the future and attract more people like them.

You can use this information to even run specific marketing campaigns on ground or online as you know who your potential customer is and what they like.

Influencer Marketing

Influencers are people who are admired and respected by a large number of people.

Such influencers – As their name suggests, have the power to influence a decision making process. For example, a popular movie celebrity can be considered as an influencer as they have a loyal fan base.

Not just movie stars, with the wide spread use of the internet anyone who has a sizeable number of people following them can be considered as an Influencer!

To know who these influencers are, ask your loyal customer whom they follow on social media. This will give you an idea about whom to approach to promote your business. These influencers can review your product or service and then recommend the same to their fans or followers.

Influencer marketing is getting highly popular in 2018! Do not miss this opportunity.

Word of Mouth

Referrals or word of mouth marketing is one of the strongest forms of marketing.

A satisfied customer will always recommend your product or service to another customer. People take friend’s recommendation quite seriously. And the cost for acquiring this new customer is FREE!

With the evolution of Digital Media, recommendations have become very easy. Asking a satisfied customer to review your business online or posting something positive about your business on their social media page is Highly Effective and is a FREE form of Marketing.

OR

Brands like yours can create a loyalty program and offer an incentive to existing customers so that they can recommend your brand to their friends and family!

Building a Digital Presence

Now with everyone’s attention focused on their palms, you need to make sure that you are seen there. Make sure to make the internet your most loyal and efficient employee.

This can be done using paid advertising methods. Making sure you are the first result on Google for any query regarding your business segment will increase your visibility incredibly. This can be achieved through SEO and SEM.

Make a list of the most visited websites in your city. Using the Google display network, showing ads on these websites will greatly increase awareness about your business.

Higher the visibility of your brand online, greater will be your sales offline.

Social Media

With an exponential rise in people spending time on social media, marketing and building a social media presence must never be ignored. With 24.6 Cr users in India, Facebook is the most used media platform. No Newspaper or television channel can boast these numbers.

Social media users regularly follow brands and also report their experiences with the brand on social media.

This is a super effective medium to market your brand as a small business.

You can showcase your brand personality on social media with graphics, videos, content, contests, polls, social media campaigns etc.

You have the freedom to be really innovative and creative to engage with your target audience!

Want to know more about social media marketing, click here.

Concluding thoughts

Consumers have more options and are more knowledgeable than ever before.

So it is challenging to convince a potential customer to buy from only you and not from your competitor.

Hence, small businesses tend to struggle to compete with bigger players in the industry.

But the above mentioned tactics give small businesses like yours a means to succeed and make their mark in an extremely competitive industry.

To successfully use each of the above mentioned tips, you need to have the right skills and knowledge.

If not, you will only end up wasting your time and money.

Your brilliant idea or vision WILL NOT get the exposure it deserves and create the impact you want.

Learning these skills is very easy. By spending just 2 hours a day you can gain the basic knowledge to start your online marketing efforts.

You can also partner with Digital Marketing agencies like ours, as we are trained to create innovative marketing strategies for small businesses.

Agencies like ours have trained professionals who are experts in the various strategies mentioned above.

After all, being a successful entrepreneur is about utilizing other people’s knowledge and skills to turn your vision into a reality!

If you would like a FREE business strategy session with us, click here!

Are you an e-commerce store owner? Would you like to skyrocket your sales?

The success of your e-commerce store depends on TWO VERY IMPORTANT elements.

• Marketing – Process of getting visitors to your e-commerce website.
• Website Optimisation – Providing a great website experience to the potential buyers to maximise their chances of buying your product.

Let me explain this a little more in detail.

Marketing for e-commerce websites

Setting up an e-commerce website is like building a store in the middle of a desert, no one knows you exist.

This is very different from a physical store which can be noticed by people moving around!

It doesn’t matter if you are selling the best product the world has ever seen! If nobody knows you exist, does your product matter?

This is why Marketing is CRITICAL for your success!

Marketing can be done in two ways.

You have traditional marketing via television, billboards, newspaper ads, magazine ads, etc.

Traditional marketing is good for your store brand to gain exposure by the masses.

BUT there is ONE BIG disadvantage to the traditional marketing model.

It can be very expensive.

But do not worry; you live at a time where technology has transformed our way of life – Especially with the rise of the internet.

More and more people are spending significant amounts of their day on the internet.

Did you know the average person spends up to 7.5 hours of their day on the internet?

It may be on their phones, tablets or computers.

This number is only set to rise even higher with passing time.

What does all this mean to YOU?

You have a marketing opportunity unlike any other traditional forms of marketing.

This is the realm of Digital Marketing.

Why Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing gives you total control!

What I mean is, you can choose to spend as little as you want on an advertisement or as much as you want. – YOU DECIDE.

And the best part – You can not only choose where you would like your advertisements to be shown.

You can specifically choose who sees your advertisement!

For example:

You can choose to advertise a women’s product only to women within a specific age bracket and who can afford to buy such a product.

Unlike traditional marketing advertisements, here you don’t waste money showing advertisements to anyone and everyone who aren’t even relevant to your product.

With all the digital marketing tools available today, you will know whether your advertisement is working or not within just 1-2 days!

Get a Free Audit of Your E-Commerce Store (Lead Magnet)

You need to find different ways to drive website traffic to your store.

There is no rule as to which is the best approach for your e-commerce store.

Every business is different. What works for one business, need not work for another business, as the variables involving the businesses are very different.

We have listed out some of the ways below.

•  Search Engine Marketing (SEM/PPC) 

     If your ecommerce store sells shoes, it is VERY IMPORTANT that shoes from your website show up as the first result when someone types “Running Shoes” on Google.

This would result in more people visiting your website, and more people would buy from you.

•  Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As I just mentioned previously, the first result for the “Running Shoes” query is paid advertisement.

So what about the second search and below?

You’ll be happy to know these aren’t paid results. This happens because that particular website has been optimized for that query.

This is known as Search Engine Optimization

In my example these results have been optimized for the search query “Running Shoes”

It is SO IMPORTANT to get your ecommerce website to show up in the first few results.

Why?

It isn’t often that you click on a Google search result that comes 5th or 6th on the list.

And you can do this for FREE.

Get lots of FREE traffic sounds good, doesn’t it?

Get a Free Digital Audit (Lead Magnet)

• Social Media Handling

Would you ever buy something from a brand that you never heard of before?

Chances are that you won’t.

Consumers today have more options than ever before. You have to convince them to buy from you, and only you.

This is done with Social Media.

Every major store brand has a social media presence, either on Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest.

This is the chance for you to showcase your brand’s personality to get potential customers to like your brand.

Your social media pages must be updated regularly and must provide content that your audience can consume.

This channel can also be used to announce sales, competitions, new products etc.

•  Social Media Marketing

As more people are spending time more on the internet and social media, most of your target audience can be found on social media.

And this is a great place to advertise your brand, especially for e-commerce stores.

Facebook advertising has a track record of giving a very high return on investment, if done right.

All because you can choose whom to advertise to based on their age, gender, location, interests and much more!

Hence spending your money efficiently!

Get a Free Consultation for your business (Lead Magnet)

• Google Display Ads

The advertisements you see when you are browsing a random website are from the Google Display Network.

These types of advertisements help people notice and remember your brand.

• Affiliate Marketing

Your customers are your best marketers. As they say, word of mouth is the best marketing your brand can ever get.

This strategy involves your customer promoting your product for you, and in return all you have to do is pay them a small reward per sale.

If you don’t get sales, you don’t pay anyone.

This strategy is essentially FREE!

Celebrity or Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has been around for thousands of years!

For one good reason!

It works!

Influencer is someone who can influence the thought process of their fans or followers.

Why else do you think Hyundai has invested Crores in getting Shah Rukh Khan to promote their car?

When people see others they admire, recommend your product, they are psychologically wired to try your product themselves!

You don’t need to pay a big movie star to get this done. On social media there are thousands of people who are influencers!

• Email Marketing

Everyone checks their email at least once a day.

There are so many benefits to email marketing. Once you have your customer’s email, you don’t have to pay a single rupee to send them an email again.

Emails are free!

This is one of the best ways to engage with previous customers for new products and sales, for free!

• Re-Marketing

Here is the uncomfortable truth.

There will be many instances, where a customer will visit your website, add your product to cart, but won’t finish the purchase!

They get distracted, and then they forget to come back.

The human attention span is getting shorter every day.

And this is only one of the scenarios.

Remarketing reminds your potential customer to complete your purchase.

Such remarketing campaigns are known to be very effective at acquiring sales for e-commerce stores.

Get a Free Digital Audit of Your Business (Lead Magnet)

On-Site Optimization

Building a profitable online business isn’t just about setting it up well, making it look nice and then driving traffic to it.

Those are just the very first steps. There is a way of earning that sale or “conversion”.

Sadly, conversions don’t just happen.

You need to optimize your website so that the person who visits the website actually feels like buying and spending his money.

From the time a person comes to your website until they buy your product, we need to make their website experience pleasant, by:

• Enhancing the look of the website by updating the banners being displayed, with relevant products and offers
• Analyzing the customer interaction to determine how you can improve their website experienc
•  Using various third-party analysis tools to understand and optimize the shopping process
• Ensuring your website loads quickly. Nobody likes waiting.

Did you know Amazon could lose 1.6 BILLION dollars if their website loaded one second slower?

Website speed and optimization is that important!

Your e-commerce store needs a manager

Just like a regular store, your e-commerce store needs a manager too.

The person who makes sure everything runs smoothly and everyone is doing their jobs right.

It is the manager’s job to know if the customer coming in is annoyed or unhappy, find out why and recommend changes to the management in order to make sure that customers feel safe and satisfied when they are in the store.

The work also involves arranging prominent items in the store to get most sales, display branding material where it’s most relevant to attract, inform and persuade the customers.

So as you can see, Marketing and Website optimization are vital to your store success.

In each area of marketing you need specific skills that will help you find success!

Without the right skills, you will only end up losing your hard earned money.

Luckily for you, there are various agencies who can take care of all these for you, so that your e-commerce business finds the success you deserve!

You can choose to work with a digital marketing agency that you are comfortable with or you can also choose to work with us.

If you are serious about taking your e-commerce business to the next level, click here.

We can talk and strategize about how we can make the internet work for you!

Get a Free Consultation with the Author (Lead Magnet)