Digital marketing strategies for SMEs

A list of five digital marketing strategies to develop new communication options with clients or prospects.

by Julian Arcila*

The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic consequences for SMEs have surely led you to ask yourself how to be more efficient in a crisis scenario. Fortunately for many entrepreneurs, there was an explosion of digital marketing strategies that offered options to continue developing companies in the midst of difficulties.

But, contrary to what one might think, not many SMEs took advantage of the amount of digital resources that they exploited during the pandemic, and according to the Andean Development Community (CAF), the COVID crisis left many SMEs knocked out. ECLAC, for its part, predicts that the coronavirus will result in the closure of 2.7 million Latin American companies, most of them SMEs.

For this reason, I want to tell you how, with the gradual implementation of five common digital marketing strategies, you will be able to develop new options to be in communication with your clients or prospects, while building a brand.

Although our focus from SMEs Go Digital will always be B2B SMEs (those focused on selling services/products to other companies, usually corporate clients), the strategies that I include in the article can be applied to any type of enterprise.

The digital marketing strategies that I will cover in this article are the following: • Website optimization • Implementation of a CRM • Agility in the management of social networks • Digital advertising integrated with the CRM • Email marketing / marketing automation

Why is strategy important in digital marketing? If you've spent the last year reading business content on the internet, you might agree with me that the words 'strategy' and 'digital marketing' have been used to abuse as soon as an article has been published. writing about business

However, strategy is more important than ever for digital marketing. The reason? There are so many possibilities to promote a company that, doing it without a defined plan approved by those responsible for it, can lead to wasting valuable resources without achieving the desired objectives.

In a nutshell, defining your digital marketing strategies will allow you to build a logical path to achieving your business goals.

Now, many times the term 'strategy' is confused with plan or program, even with tactics. Although these concepts are related, they are not exactly synonymous. For example, strategies are the macro groups of actions that you will undertake to achieve your goals. Meanwhile, tactics can be specific actions within strategies.

My recommendation is that you do not invest in marketing if there is no logically defined plan, with clearly established strategies.

5 efficient digital marketing strategiesTo what we came. Next I am going to tell you about five marketing strategies that from technology can contribute to the efficiency of your SME.- Web Content Management Systems (CMS)CMS entered the scene quite some time ago. Of them, WordPress is perhaps the best known and most popular around the world.

Before, to make a website you had to have an expert developer to create and manage the content of your website. However, with the rise of CMS this task became easier.

Today, these systems offer you the possibility of having a professional website, something fundamental for our times, where much of the credibility of a company is built on the Internet.

Why are these CMS efficient? Because thanks to preconfigured templates, anyone with basic knowledge can manage your website (even you). In addition, new information needs for companies arise every day, and the available plugins, many of them free, allow you to access said data.

Unfortunately, many Latin SMEs still have their websites based on complex HTML code systems, thus complicating their administration and updating, and wasting the main commercial asset of companies today.

- Business Relationship Management Systems (CRM) Talking about CRM is not something new. In fact, this term began to be used strongly in Latin America for at least 15 years. You may even think that this is another business fad.

But no. Relationship marketing, in which CRMs play a fundamental role, is a competitive advantage for modern SMEs, since it is based on offering unique experiences for each customer or prospect segment.

A CRM is essential software to increase your business efficiency, as it allows you to gather as much information as possible about your customers or prospects in one place. Additionally, these apps can be combined with marketing tools to better communicate with your customers.

Today, SMEs cannot think of competing if their customer information is scattered, without any order or stored in a database where it is not used in any way. And a CRM offers you agility, order and control over your company's commercial information.

- Social network management software One of the main reasons why social network marketing plans fail in SMEs is the lack of knowledge of all the tools available to streamline the process of publishing content on these platforms.

Currently there are many tools; some of them with free plans, to manage and monitor what happens with your company's social channels.

These software allow you, among other things, to schedule posts, manage messages, find out if any of your followers have shared your content and even monitor if someone talks about your brand, something essential in the digital society in which we live.

Like everything else, to make the tool more efficient you will need help, but even so, the benefits outweigh the consequences of not managing your social channels efficiently.

- Advertising management from your CRM Another situation that was reflected after the pandemic was the explosion and development of digital advertising.

Numerous media around the world have outlined how this business tactic developed and grew, leaving companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon as big winners.

I think there is no doubt in your mind that your company should already be investing in digital advertising if it is looking to at least build and consolidate brand recognition.

Surely you will think about how advertising can make your SME more efficient. But the way to achieve such efficiency is when you integrate those digital efforts with your CRM tool (remember how we told you that one of its great advantages was being able to integrate everything in one place?).

Every time someone visits your website, or converts a new lead as a result of a digital campaign, your CRM will be able to automatically store that person's data and start tracking all their interaction with your company, with which decision making will be much simpler.

Not all CRMs allow you to integrate marketing campaigns with the CRM. If the one you are using allows it, then great. Otherwise, there are tools like Zapier that make that process easier for you.

Marketing automationThis is another of the great advantages offered by technology applied to marketing.

There are currently many CRM systems that allow you to integrate marketing automation features to, among other things, “automate” and streamline communication with your current or potential customers.

Automation can be viewed from two angles. For one thing, you can create sequences of business emails, which will stop when a prospect replies to your email.

This is fundamentally interesting when you are launching informative campaigns for the sale of a service.

But there is also something known as workflows, which are sets of actions that are automatically triggered when a prospect has performed an action.

Among the workflows, the most common actions are sending preconfigured emails, assigning leads to specific lists and opening tasks or reminders to notify your sellers that they must contact someone interested.

Therefore, if you are a small or growing company, investing in marketing automation will save you from hiring multiple people, since many tasks can be performed by the CRM platform.

And so we come to the end of the article. I hope it has helped you generate many ideas for the growth of your company. If you have any doubts or questions, do not hesitate to contact me. I will be aware of you and ready to support you in any digital marketing project in your SME.

* Julián Arcila is the director of Pymes Go Digital and you can write to his email: [email protected]