India is an entrepreneurial country where SMBs want to grow quickly using modern digital tools. How can digital and social media monetization happen?

“66% of SMBs we spoke to say that they are moving their marketing purchase into digital because they are seeing that it is more responsive. That’s a $58 billion dollar pie in 2014. It is up for grabs for Indian digital marketing companies. Website and blog are predominantly used by SMBs today. New technologies are emerging and SMBs have to be bold in using them.”

So which global markets are ready for digital marketing? The Americans have arrived but definitely India is ready too. India is eager for this. Do we have a market that uses digital? Is India really there yet? Online purchase numbers in India has beaten Japan and Honk Kong. There is a lot more that is going to happen in this space. Average frequency of online purchases out of India is 2 ½ times every month, likelihood of making a purchase in the next three months 10-11%. So the increase in digital marketing spend is high, traditional ad spend is decreasing.

70% of B2B marketers have started using videos; it’s one of the most important content delivery channels. The eye can capture 2500 words in a video versus 150 on paper; you then definitely want to reach more through video. In everything you do, you should have the next level of personalization.

Marketing and sales are doing various activities together; we talked about segmenting, customization, individualizing communication components. What’s happening on the sales side? Earlier it was feature selling, then benefit selling, solution selling and now it’s all about vision selling. Video is the right way to sell vision.

The top CEO problem is – business is not growing fast, expenses are going up, salaries are increasing even if sales are sluggish and profits are down. CEOs need to be aligned with the CMO to identify a matrix of the marketing spends. CFOs also need to be in tune about what the company is doing on the marketing side.

Employees first

Who do you market to first? I think you should market to your internal team first. That’s where a good chunk of your marketing spend should be. A lot of SMBs are missing this. They are ready to market to the world, can’t change the world, first start changing the mindsets of people in your enterprise. These are people who can take your capabilities to your client base. You got to work hard, play harder; you got to use digital, video to reach your employee base first then customers

SMBs can go digital, grow global without breaking the bank. You can deploy a lot of the solutions within a couple of lakhs today. For example, you can have a 10 country presence online with just Rs. 10,000 to 20,000 a month and you can start growing digitally. It’s about speed.

The digital thought process of personalization should be carried to the offline space as well. We should also map the partners, anybody can partner with them, all within a couple of lakhs. You don’t need to invest lots particularly if you are a digitally empowered organization.

“Why am I so gung-ho about digital marketing and the potential for India at large? For every dollar being spent on IT at least 3 dollars is being spent on marketing. Of which most companies are spending 30-40% on digital.”

Are we ready to grab the B2B digital marketing pie? A huge opportunity awaits all of us. Let’s not relax and let this pass by us. We are in the green zone. It’s high time for marketers in this country to wake up to this huge opportunity that is awaiting B2B SMEs.