Digital Marketing helps businesses build their online reputation. In this day and age, where the customer has moved online, it is only expected that businesses are one step ahead of them. Through digital marketing businesses can engage with their customers in a cost-effective manner. Post the pandemic, so much attention has been given to digital marketing so that customer experiences and communications are customized to suit their interests and behaviors.
So what are the most important pointers a business needs to get in place to win at the digital marketing game?
Whether you are a restaurant owner or a trader of spices, your customers will be searching for you on Google. As India continues to be one of the fastest adopters of digital tools, simple as they may be, more and more people will use digital as a way to discover business opportunities around them.
What is a “Google My Business” listing?
A “Google My Business” listing is a way to list your business to show up on Google so that all your important information is given. This way when a search for your business happens on the web, your customer can see what your business does, where it is located, what time you are open and gives an opportunity for them to contact your business. The best part is that even those who don’t really know your business may be able to find you.
How, you ask? Well, these days people tend to search for vendors near them, even when they don’t know the name of a particular vendor they need.
Instagram has become the most downloaded app in India and has continuously been in the top 3 most installed apps on the play-store. These figures are the same whether it is in urban or rural India. If your business has a sizable audience that is in the 18-44 age group category then tapping into local influencers on Instagram will be a great way to promote your business.
Why do influencers work so well?
There is a psychological element to this. We use Social Media as a means to escape, for entertainment. These influencers are the ones that provide us with these means. Hence audiences are more likely to stop and listen to what the influencer says about your product and service.
Small Businesses are able to grow and retain customers by having and creating a personal relationship with their customers. Their customers will also want updates with their local businesses. The best way for this one to one relationship to happen is by creating a WhatsApp community to communicate these updates. The user behaviour of WhatsApp has changed over time, people do not mind getting updates as long as it provides value for them.
India is the land of festivals and most families in India plan purchases around festivals due to deep discounts/gifting. This trend also applies for local and small businesses. Creating offers for these festivals and then tap into the WhatsApp/Facebook communities to push these offer communications. On average festival related offers increase revenue by over 100% and increase the number of transactions by 150-200%.
Nothing helps to showcase the benefit of your business as good as testimonial content. When Well-presented and pushed on the right channels, testimonials can be used to build trust, nudge people who are on the fence to buy from you and even help spread the word about your business.
These testimonials can be of various formats, they can be just a picture of a happy customer with a quote about the business. It could be a video of a customer using a product bought from your business or it could be a video testimonial where a customer talks about their positive experience with your business.
All of these formats help to add a bit more trust to your business and would be great content to be sent on the WhatsApp community and the Facebook page, we discussed above.
Try these five simple steps to augment the digital presence of your business, and you’ll see it quickly making a difference to how you interact with your customers.
Christopher Vadakkel is the CEO and Founder of Social Tribe , a performance marketing agency. He and his team have helped brands across the world, scale their revenues by understanding how the ever changing algorithms work.
