Best Online marketing tools: A must for all Small Medium Enterprise in India

If we analyze the economy of India, we find that the Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have proved themselves as a major contributor in today’s dynamic economy of India; however traditional promotion and marketing strategies, for long, have put a lot of strain on limited SME resources. So, though traditional marketing tools, such as print, billboards, radio, and television play an important role in doing business, they also has a disadvantage of not having direct interaction with the consumers, and thus more effective for brand building rather than actual conversions. So SME’s have typically relied on one-on-one promoter marketing, usage of sales force and referrals.

Online, has opens up the window for SME’s to not only use mass media (yes it is truly mass now) for business development but also now provides a potent branding opportunity. SMEs can improve their business prospects by focusing more on online marketing, and yet stay within budgets. Consumers in India are popularly using the internet for information, doing business, and shopping.

SME’s can use online marketing to effectively and quickly communicate with their consumers, highlight their key business, attract new customers and keep customers interested in your business. Other benefits of Online Markting activities include:

• Cost effectiveness:  Traditional marketing tools like print, television, and radio has always proved to be costly, and also is of short-duration. Internet marketing tools like emails, blogs, and websites are much cheaper and sometime free.
• Tracking success: With Internet marketing, you can track and keep record of all of your marketing activities. You can easily calculate your returns on investment (ROI) by using Google Analytics, which is a free traffic analysis tool.
• Location based marketing: Interest and requirements of consumers varies by locality. You can easily apply different strategies to communicate with consumers.
• Product branding: You can create and maintain a positive brand image and manage your online reputation. A well organized and regularly updated website can keep your consumers interested all the time.

The first step is to get a website if you haven’t already done so. There are several ways to get a cost effective but good website. After this we can proceed for marketing activities.

Below mentioned are the best tools to use for online marketing:

• SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is perhaps the most important online marketing tool. Since an estimated 80% of Indian search happens through Google, it makes sense to optimize for being found online. To take the mystery out of SEO, the idea is to identify certain keywords and keyword phrases which will attract you target audience and optimize the site for those words and phrases. To start with get a person, making the site to do SEO upfront, and moving on move to specialized vendors as SEO is an ongoing activity.
• Email Marketing: You can reach majority of consumers through emails and SMS. Email has become an integral part of today’s Internet savvy people. Typical email campaigns could have conversions rates of .1 to1 %, not bad, as sending an email will cost close to nothing.
• Affiliate marketing: Look for online sites which attract a similar audience as yours e.g. if you are selling HR services look to tie-up with HR blogs and offer them money for lead generation or converted leads to get listed on their site.
• Get a Facebook page: Facebook though really a “friend” network, allows you to create a FB page for free. Start collecting likes and building a community around your business.
• Create a LinkedIn profile: LinkedIn allows you to create your business profile for free. Also join LinkedIn groups which are relevant to your business and post in them. I use LinkedIn quite frequently to generate business leads.
• Get on YouTube: Use your handy cam to create some interesting content about your product or services and put that up on YouTube. Put that link in your site for video content.
• Blogging: Nothing works like putting up articles and content in the online space. This is perhaps one of the best tools for branding and becoming a thought leader. Contrary to popular belief of withholding information, be generous and give out “value” information your prospective and existing customers can really use. This also goes a long way in gaining consumer trust
• There is of course paid online advertising: For B2B I have found LinkedIn effective and there is the traditional PPC on Google.
• Provide something free is important: Use the various social media, email and your website and give out a freebie to attract traffic and get conversions. This also allows you to get email-ids and contact details of prospects which you can use for email marketing.
• List in directories: Try to list your business in various online relevant directories, some of which are free and some paid, but all add to online presence.

You can find more valuable inputs regarding SME online marketing on internet.