FUNDAMENTAL AND BASIC DIGITAL MARKETING ‘To–Do’s FOR SMEs

First of all, just to make something clear I am not a digital marketing wizard.But rather I have been founders of few organizations and had to do the digital marketing myself, as I didn’t have enough fund to have a digital marketer.

To put a disclaimer my suggestions may not be the best by the book, but they are the ones which worked best for me, are affordable and are easy to do.

So here they go, these in the order of which I implemented for my organization –

1) Have a Facebook page:

I know many people will rather have a website first, and that is not wrong by any means. The advantage of a Facebook page is-it is free, whereas for the website you will need a domain which will cost you some money. Having a Facebook page will let you have some form of internet presence as a starter. You can share the page with your friends and acquaintances and get your idea or product validated.It will be a bonus if you can get some kind of Facebook page ad going, which you subscribe to with a reasonable amount.

2) Have a twitter account:

Whatever holds true for Facebook also holds true for twitter. Why we need both twitter and Facebook? Because there is a lot of social media users who are exclusive to either Facebook or twitter.

3) Create a website:

A website is a World Wide Web footprint every business and organization needs. It tells the visitor who you are and what you do.A good website goes a long way in creating trust and understanding among visitors.The domain should be representative of the organization.It lets one have a single point of entry for all social media platforms.

4) Register your website with Google and enable Google Analytics:

Register your website with Google to be crawled by Google bots thus enabling it for Google ranking. I think no one will dispute the importance of a website to show up in Google ranking.You can do some basic SEO, but do not spend too much effort or resources for SEO now. Then go ahead and set up your Google analytics. The basic version of Google analytics is a free product and can be extremely useful to analyze your visitor's demography and website performance.

5) Google Ad words and PPC:

It’s said – ‘Google’s’ 2nd page is the best place to hide a dead body.' And it’s not so easy to get to Google’s first page, especially if you have chosen a popular keyword. Well researched keywords and strategic Pay Per Click campaign can give one some good inorganic reach until he/she gets their website's organic ranking higher