5 Mistakes to Avoid When Opening a Business

The digital marketing is also for SMEs , although not many years ago most trusted him directly to large companies, considering it was not for them. Now, digital marketing for SMEs has become an essential resource to survive the fierce competition in the market.
The digital transformation has always been a challenge for
SMEs, but with the pandemic, this fact has become a must. SMEs need to adapt
more than ever and have an online presence to attract the attention of their
target audience and, thus, attract customers.
In this article we will see 8 digital marketing actions that
every SME can incorporate into their marketing plan. Do not miss it!
Before starting any action, digital marketing has almost an
obligation to develop prior planning and, above all, work on the definition of
various aspects. The idea is based on identifying and establishing the
foundations of your digital strategy to ensure that you are allocating your
resources in the right direction. In this way, we will not only organize
ourselves better by focusing on the right information, but we will also avoid
many errors.
What steps must be followed to design a digital marketing
strategy for SMEs? These are our recommendations:
• Identify
what your competitive advantage is . To develop a certain marketing strategy,
either online or offline, you must be clear about how you differ. Competitive
advantage refers to the characteristics or attributes that a product or brand
possesses and that give it a certain superiority over its immediate
competitors.
• Describe
your business model in great detail . Defining your business perfect is like
knowing what your DNA is, how it is made, how it can be modified, how to
polish, how to change, how to mold ...
• Audit
your company . Once we know exactly what the characteristics of the business
model are, how it is structured, what is its line of products and services,
etc., it is advisable to continue analyzing. The ideal is to perform a SWOT
analysis to present in the form of a square matrix the conclusions about:
o Weaknesses
and strengths: focus on your internal characteristics and prioritize
impartiality in your analytical capacity.
o Threats
and opportunities: analyze the external situation of the SME.
• Definition
of your buyer persona : the buyer persona is the archetype of the ideal
customer for your service or product. Be clear about how is, what its
characteristics, needs or concerns are, how it can reach your product or
service, in which circles or online sites it operates, what is its economic
situation, etc. In this way, you can later trace the buyer journey and define
much better digital marketing strategies to target exactly who you want to
reach.
• Clearly
visualize what resources you have . Bearing in mind that being an SME it is
usual to have a tight budget, it is more important than ever to ask yourself
this question at an early stage. So you can invest in those actions that can
really have an impact on your goals.
If you have a website, you will know that working on SEO is
essential. And if you still do not have a website for your business, you can
start now, as it will be the basis with which to develop your digital marketing
strategies.
As you knows, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of
onpage and offpage actions and strategies that allow a web page to be
positioned in the top positions of Google search results.
To work on SEO, first of all it is convenient to identify
which are the main words for which you want to position your website . Later
you can design a strategy to achieves it.
In addition to working on all the page of your websites so
that they are well optimize at the SEO levels, you can go one step further and
work on generating visits through your own channel in which you put a content
strategy. Sound great, right? ... but how do you get it?
You must generate a content plan based on the keywords that
best satisfy the search intention of your buyer persona. Once you have it, it
is time to creates content to publish it on your blogs. If that content is well
optimize for SEO and is relevants to your buyer persona, it is a matter of time
to get your post to reach the top positions of Google.
This is how we will get to owned media , which is the term
with which we call our own medium or channel to achieve your marketing
objectives. In addition to the blog or the news channel on the website, it is
advisable to have different corporate profiles on social networks and even a
YouTube channel where you can, for example, upload the videos of your
interviews with external collaborators.
But we can still go further and make use of paid media. So
over time you will also achieve earned means.
If you want to know more about the difference between own,
paid and earned media, I recommend this
The next point in your digital marketing strategy for SMEs
goes through the segmentation of contact.
Knowing your databases is key to being able to communicate
with it. So working on the lead scoring technique can help you a lot.
This technique consists of, through an automated marketing
technique, classifying the leads in your database based on how they approach
your ideal customer and when they are on the buyers journey.
If you are generating your database, it is the best time for
you to spend time defining your own scoring system and, in this way, you will
have an ordered database that you will know well and, therefore, you will be
able to get higher performance.
To do this, asks yourself:
• What
information do I need to identify if a contacts matches my buyer persona?
• How is my
purchase process?
• What is
the trigger that indicates that a contact has enough interaction with my brand?
• What is
the behavior of a contact who is in the decision phase?
• When is a
contact ready to move from marketing to sales?
• How to
identify and classify my client to work on them personalized loyalty actions?
• How to
identify sleeping contact to direct engagement actions on them?
Once you know your database in depth, designing a
communication strategy with it through email marketing will serve as a speaker.
A tool like email marketing can help you send emails to your
database with personalized content adapted to different situations to achieve a
variety of marketing objectives. For example:
• Educational
emails focused on accompanying and guiding users in their purchase process.
With this channel you can make an ideal accompaniment in each phase of the
user's purchase process, providing the appropriate information at the most
convenient time. This is what is known as lead nurturing or lead maturation .
• Newsletters
to maintain contact with the user . For example, keeping you informed of the
news in the sector and positioning yourself as a reference. In this way, they
do not observe this channel as something merely commercial, but also a means
with which to keep up to date, considering us useful.
• Communications
necessary to support a good user experience , for example, to send the user
downloadable content or thank you for subscribing. You always have to appear
helpful and clearly guide the user about the next action to take.
• Loyalty
emails , to encourage recurrence in the purchase, disseminate special offers or
look for upsellings. Believe it or not, it is one of the most effective
numerical marketing techniques to achieve sales among the most indecisive or
those who seemed to forget about us.
In this way, we can start to implement inbound marketing and
try to get the user we are interested in to make certain conversions.
An online marketing strategy conceived as an accelerator of
results for SMEs is online advertising. Place like that, it seems like a very
general way of speaking. But previously we told you that, just as you have to
work with an owned media, you also have to resort to paid media. And one of the
most effective for short-term results is online inbound advertising (POI).
What this type of advertising does is take advantage of the
downloadable content that you have been able to generate in your content
strategy to promote them on social networks. In this way, you will be able to
capture records in the initial phases of a purchase process and boost the stage
of attracting the target audience.
This is an well-organized way to feedstuff the upper part of
the funnel . Once you get a series of contacts or you manage to increase the
number of web visits, you will have a better chance of reaching a second phase.
In other words, after promoting content through payment channels (such as
Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn Ads), you will have the opportunity to
accompany and educate the user until the moment of the final transaction,
putting your segmentation and maturation strategy to the test. of leads.
Another choice is to invest in transactional campaigns using
traditional connected advertising . That is, directly promote your products or
services. However, from the inbound marketing methodology, this is something
that we indorse once the contacts have gone through lead scoring and are in a
more advanced stage of the purchase process.