BW Communities

6 Step Marketing Guide For Emerging Businesses

BW Online Bureau Nov 08, 2014

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root available-locales="en_US," default-locale="en_US"><static-content language-id="en_US"><![CDATA[Every big business today was once small, this sentence very simply captures the scaling up challenges that growing businesses face. Scattered across regions, these businesses are connected in their aggressive approaches and their desire to succeed. Yet not all businesses manage to and often the differentiator between the ones that do and don't, is the way they market themselves. But marketing is a tricky business, especially for growing businesses. You have to ensure intelligent, innovative and optimal use of your resources to build that desired level of brand equity. While small businesses suffer the disadvantages of not having enough time, money and resources; embedded in their nature is also the fact that being small, they are more agile, flexible, adventurous and experimental.The technology space offers these enterprises the perfect channel to use innovative and flexible approaches to make their presence felt and eventually attract the attention of customers and investors. Its time growing businesses move beyond cash flow and budgeting, and refocus the fundamentals of marketing to understand how they can bring structure and success in this new world of marketing online. Explained below are 6 marketing tips for these businesses that could be of immense help while they embark on their scale up journey. Networking Networking is one intangible, yet invaluable asset to have for all businesses; more specifically for growing businesses. It gives a business the arms and legs to get things done. The ability to communicate effectively, build and nurture winning relationships and expand a network is absolutely essential in today's business world for increasing possibilities. Technology has a huge role to play in professional networking. Web 2.0 has bridged geographical boundaries via the evolution of social networks and gives growing businesses an opportunity to connect with all influencers across the world. It is with this insight that Dell created the Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network (DWEN). DWEN is a global network celebrating some of the wonderful and amazing accomplishments that women in business are achieving and nurturing discussions around new opportunities, expanding geographies, sharing best practices and strategies to grow their companies. This community is connected year round on the LinkedIn Women Powering Business group and meets once a year.   Elevate Your Brand A great company begins by offering great products and services; this is essential in today's business environment. However, brand equity is how businesses truly differentiate themselves from their competition. Growing businesses should take these steps to build their brand equity: <ul> <li>•Ask what is unique about them vis-à-vis their competition? </li> <li>•Listen to their customers and build a relationship with them</li> <li>•Think beyond the purchase - Start building their brand before the customers start purchasing their products and/or services</li> <li>•Integrate their customers into their social media activities</li> </ul> Foster an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Culture 50 per cent of people who search online share recommendations with friends and family and often write positively about their purchases online. SMBs need to: <ul> <li>•Make it easy for "Spiders" to access and crawl</li> <li>•Include keyword-rich content</li> <li>•Include quality inbound links from trustworthy, high traffic web-sites</li> </ul> Use Their E-commerce Platform for More than Just Sales While making sales from their website, it is important that SMBs capitalize on their e-commerce platforms to: •Listen and engage with customers to better understand their wants/needs •Develop and optimize robust promotions, online demand generation, merchandising and search programs to drive traffic and conversions If one doesn't know one's customers, one doesn't know one's business. That's why I encourage my team to interact with customers at every opportunity. For us, if a growing business needs a server, there are hundreds of partners that could sell them one. However, we want to focus on providing the best infrastructure possible for each customer. To do that, we need to deeply understand each customer's needs and priorities and this holds overarching relevance for small businesses. Embrace Social media For small businesses, two of the easiest, and most effective ways to get engaged in social media is to blog and be active on Twitter. Blogs are a great sounding board, engaging key audiences in fast and honest conversations. Restrict all business-talk to an offline platform and make sure to get across one's personality and opinions.  Yes, one can attract negative comments – but one can respond openly and transparently by answering questions and updating a personal blog. Micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter) allows companies, large and small, to send out regular chunks of news or insights easily.  Even while expanding one's small business and hiring new recruits – Twitter and Facebook can be great ways of getting the word out there. Linkedin is also an extremely useful tool for B2B businesses and/ or for addressing audiences in the B2B space. The platform suits business dialogue and facilitates many business conversations. The addressable audiences on Linkedin are also widely spread out. For example, at Dell we've micro-targeted audiences via relevant communities to reach out to women entrepreneurs, CIO's and SMB's; and with results to show. In an effort to innovatively reach out to maximum SMB's, Dell created a ‘More Growth' community that since its creation 120 days ago, has connected 11600+ members from 6000+ SMBs in over 400 towns and cities in India. Measure Your Success Set measureable objectives for the company's marketing efforts and track their progress. To do these growing businesses can: <ul> <li>•Leverage free programs such as Google analytics</li> <li>•Measure web-site and blog traffic</li> <li>•Track the number of mentions about the company</li> </ul> These are simple and straightforward practices and using them will help growing enterprises showcase their brand promise and create an increased level of attractiveness towards their brand. However, it is often in the intricacy of implementing simple practices that companies go terribly wrong, which makes the above suggestions critical. (Vikas Bhonsle, General Manager, Medium Business, Dell India)