Seminar on 'Digital marketing, a boon for modern day SMEs'

Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) play a major role to the growth of the economy, job creation and even exports. They produce great products and services, but when it comes to sales and marketing, many of those still resort to the age old methods which are overly dependent on sales persons, and word-of-mouth types of campaigning.
 

But things are changing fast, and a great boon has been the emergence of new age startups that are innovatively reaching out to the audience world over, using digital platforms and marketing tools. This was amply highlighted by speakers from different fields in recent event on Marketing SME products in Digital Era, under the banner of Business Standard Smart Business in association with industry body Karnataka Small Scale Industries Association (KASSIA).
 

KASSIA, for example has created a Business to Business (B2B) portal called www.kassia.machinenmotor.com to connect the SMEs under one roof. Among others, the portal aims at interconnecting the member companies with peer groups, and bringing the buyers and sellers onto a single platform, said Basavaraj Javali, President, KASSIA in his opening speech.
 

“The most important thing for me is to study my customers well and profile them to understand the demand pattern. A lot in modern day marketing is the perception game and if you understand your customer better and they perceive that you the brand they are looking for, then the battle is half won,” said Chinu Kala, founder of Rubans Accessories, a fashion jewellery brand which started with small brick and mortar outlets at big shopping malls but now majorly focused on online platforms.
 

H R Jairam, CEO and proprietor of CS Aerotherm, an SME which manufactures and supplies oven, bakery machines for commercial and industrial use says that when he started the business in 1987, those were still very early days even for use of computers. “Those were the days when even you can run a software company without any knowledge of software. But a lot changed with the evolution of internet,” said Jairam, an alumnus of IIM-Ahmedabad. He said that while digital is getting ingrained in the model of any business today, one has to streamline the needs since the need of a B2B focused company may be very different from a B2C one.
 

According to Prabhanjan Deshpande, a senior marketing professional who runs a digital marketing company called the Higher Pitch, digital medium has levelled the playing field for every company now a days, big or small. He said the biggest advantage the modern day businesses have is access to data and digital tools and platforms like social, media, analytics, cloud and automation has given immense power to the enterprises to even compete with the bests of the world with minimal investment. “SMEs accounts for around 40% of the country’s GDP but continuous pressure on capital need restricts them to be innovative in marketing strategy. But one doesn’t need to be deep-pocketed to take the help of digital marketing which comes to you almost free to low cost,” Deshpande added.