Obtaining new clients is vital for any small and medium business (SME) that wants to grow. One of the best ways to gain visibility and attract new customers is to use digital marketing strategies in the most effective way possible.
One of the most common problems of SMEs with digital marketing is the lack of budget and staff.
However, many SMEs they don’t have the staff or the budget to launch this type of action. Fortunately, the development of these strategies does not require a huge effort and it is possible to do a good job with little budget and without great knowledge.
In this article, we want to help all those users who are looking for the best way to implement these strategies in our business, as well as the challenges they face.
The challenges of marketing for SMEs
-Lack of resources: SMEs cannot always hire a marketing team. Time is short and the budget is too tight to cover staff, tools and actions.
-Budgets: Unlike large companies, SMEs do not have a budget to allocate to marketing, since some actions can be expensive. This can result in you not allocating any budget to the most profitable channels, so you can never compete with bigger brands.
-Know the trends and technologies: Digital marketing is very competitive and it can be challenging for an SME to adapt to the constantly changing landscape of search algorithms, rising costs per click, etc.
How to do marketing for SMEs?
-Define the budget: Marketing for SMEs can be expensive, so it is important to analyze spending, create a strategy and prioritize those expenses that are most necessary to drive any action we take.
-Know the audience: It is important to know our target audience before starting. To do this, the first step is to create a target audience profile that can help us determine who our company wants to reach. To create this profile we need to know the user’s demographic and geographic profile, interests, budget, pain points, motivations, and more.
-Identify the channels: Once we are clear about who our audience and our target customer is. We must be able to identify which are the most important channels and focus our efforts on creating content for these channels.
-Define our message: Once the target audience, their needs and how their products or services solve the user’s problems have been defined, we must begin to create the messages that will have an impact on our client. The messages will be different depending on our goals, whether it is to educate, show value or authority, or stand out from the competition.
-Configure analytics: Before starting to launch messages on our channels, we must be able to analyze the performance of each communication. To do this, we have to configure the appropriate tools such as Google Search Console or Google Analytics.
-Content marketing: Without good content, any content will cease to be effective. Content includes any communication, from the home page to landing pages to blog posts.
-SEO: Search engine optimization is another technique that we must not forget, since SEO will allow us to position the content so that it is displayed in our users’ searches. In this way, we can get organic traffic to our website or social networks.