Implementation Of Digital Marketing Strategies In Micro, Small And Medium Enterprises (MSME) in India

Introduction:

The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) sector has emerged as a highly vibrant and dynamic sector of the Indian economy over the last five decades. MSMEs not only play crucial role in providing large employment opportunities at comparatively lower capital cost than large industries but also help in industrialization of rural & backward areas, thereby, reducing regional imbalances, assuring more equitable distribution of national income and wealth. MSMEs are complementary to large industries as ancillary units and contribute enormously to the socio-economic development of the country. Fast changing global economic scenario has thrown up various opportunities and challenges to the MSMEs in India. While on the one hand, many opportunities are opened up for this sector to enhance productivity and look for new markets at national and international level, it has also, on the other hand, put an obligation to upgrade their competencies to meet the competition as new products are launched at an astonishing pace and are available worldwide in short time.

Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises do not have any strategic marketing techniques for their business or product to promote in the highly competitive market. In the present competitive age, Marketing is one of the weakest areas wherein MSMEs face major problems. Marketing is the most important factor for the success of any enterprise. There is a need to for the MSME to adopt better and higher levels of technology and remain competitive in a fast globalizing world. The world is rotating on technological axis and revolving around the digital system and soon the whole business dynamic is going too engulfed in this digital world. In Indian context we are bit slow but at every level we all are trying to be part of this digital world.

Companies like Google, Yahoo and Bing has became a popular search engines in India. Tele-communication service provider whether it is Airtel, Vodafone, Idea or BSNL all are trying to capture each and every Indian individual. We as customer also, whatever the need is- food, shelter or cloth, we go for visiting the websites of the companies. The social media enables, companies not only to communicate but to interact with their customers. Companies/brands like Tata, Woodland, Raymond and HP are on social media and successfully completing the campaigns to understand, and design suite their customer needs. Even the YouTube becomes today’s necessity whether it is a launch of product or ad release of company all you want to do is upload the video on YouTube. Well, the main things in all these instances are the big names or brands so question is the digital marketing strategies works for local brands in small cities also.

Importance of Digital Marketing

India has 161 Million television households, 94,067 newspapers, and 214 Million internet users, of which 130 Million are mobile internet users. By 2018, digital advertising is projected to have the highest CAGR of 27.7%, while all other sub-sectors are expected to grow at a CAGR between 9% and 18%.

Cost:

Digital marketing is very cost efficient compared to traditional marketing channels like TV and print media. In fact, the cost of digital marketing campaigns will be a fraction of traditional marketing channels like print and tv.

Tracking:

In digital marketing tracking the results is easy compared to traditional marketing channels. There are many analytics solutions which offer us a detailed report of the campaigns and these are real time reports tracked hourly and daily basis which assists you to revise your campaigns and strategies if outcome is not up to your expectation.

Target Audience:

Targeting audience for your brands, products and services is very beneficial in digital media channels, like ads are a show based on age, profession, likes and dislikes region, sex and many other categories. Also ads are shown to people who have requirements like say a bookstore ad is shown to a person who is planning to buy books and searching for them on search engines. Digital marketing campaigns are inbound which increases the chances of conversions.

Interactive:

Most of the traditional marketing channels are static and one-time production, where as digital marketing is an interactive channel where customers can engage with the brands, data can be shared effectively and using advance digital marketing techniques we can even influence them to get converted into potential clients.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is a new compared to traditional marketing channels but if it’s implemented strategically we can get better ROI for your campaigns since internet penetration and digital media usage is increasing in India is an excellent way to influence your target audience into paying customers.Large enterprises have enough resources at their command to hire manpower to take care of marketing of their products and services. MSME sector does not have these resources at their command and thus needs institutional support for providing these inputs in the area of digital marketing gives a rise to need of this study.