Digital marketing is a recent development in marketing that has advanced business strategies from traditional to digital platforms. And Calicut, one of Kerala’s famous coastal cities, has been no less in bringing digital marketing to the business world. Small businesses in Calicut have also been using digital marketing to gain recognition and brand awareness.
Digital marketing is used because most people tend to browse businesses on digital rather than traditional platforms. The time that is used for passing flyers, brochures, outdoor advertising, etc., can be diverted to digital marketing activities, where products can be marketed more efficiently than the former. In this article, we will be discussing how digital marketing can be utilized efficiently for small businesses in Calicut.
Strategies for the Small Businesses in Calicut
To understand why digital marketing is most suited marketing for small businesses in Calicut, we have to explore the digital marketing strategies that can help grow them in the digital world. They are as follows:-
- Understanding the Local Market
The businesses in Calicut represent the customers it has had until now. A particular store or venture sells something that a particular audience at a local level desires to purchase. Therefore, small businesses have to understand customer behaviors and preferences, which helps them build strategies accordingly. This helps you to attract a specific local audience and can assist in the digital marketing strategies that will be discussed much further.
- Build a Strong Online Presence
When starting a venture, be sure you have created a professional website showing details about your business. This website is the digital face of your business, and you should keep an eye out for it by ensuring it remains mobile-friendly, easily navigable and provides essential information about your products and services. These websites also have a space to add blogs, contact forms, and customer testimonials for customer engagement. Local SEO also plays a role in building a strong online presence at the local level, which can be followed in the coming paragraphs.
- Utilising Social Media Platforms
Choosing the right social media platforms for marketing is essential to build a foundation for your business. For content marketing, social SEO, paid advertising, etc., social media platforms are useful for understanding where the local audience primarily is active, you can better target and engage with the audience. For example, if you have a store in Calicut that sells fresh monsoon snacks and ancient Kerala food diet, you know there’ll be people who are eager to have it, and having Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp can help people reach out to your store, with its luring videos. This product can also gain brand awareness.
- Leveraging Local SEO
Local SEO is an essential component of boosting the visibility of businesses in Calicut. Here, if you focus on researching keywords and implementing them properly, you can assure the potential customers will be able to see your products and services in the search results. You also have to enhance further by building a Google My Business profile where you can add reviews, images, menus, and your NAP( Name, Address, Phone Number). Having an optimized Google My Business profile helps the customer reach out to your store and learn them. Additionally, listing your business on citations and directories can strengthen your online presence at the local level. Local citations and directories can also attract your business if you list them in citations like Justdial, Sulekha, etc., and directories like Yellow Pages. Listing is done by providing details about your business, and you can use it effectively on your websites.
- Content Marketing
Content marketing, with its strategy, markets products with the marketed content. Content is a strategy to attract customers to your product. There are varying content formats and specific platforms where they engage the target audience. Whether to engage existing customers or catch up with new customers, content is marketed in accordance with that. You can explore engaging the people, analyze it, and select the right content that goes well with the people who constitute your customers. Some popular content formats are blogging and video marketing, which can mean more for the audience when they are eager to browse about your business.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective strategy you can harness to keep the customers engaging and make them come back once more. This tactic builds an email list and then decides on email campaigns. By collecting email addresses through store promotions, social media, and a website that serves as a medium between the sellers and customers, keeping them updated with discount sales or free resources for signing up. Later on, when you build an email marketing campaign, you can segment your subscribers based on their purchase history and preferences. These targeted emails alert the customers about new products, special offers, and personalized recommendations. Thus, you can keep your customers engaged and informed, building a customer base for your business. You can use email marketing tools like Mailchimp and GetResponse to make your campaigns effective.
- Paid advertising
Advertisements are a core of digital marketing, as they were usually in the decades. As advertisements are provided with paying money, don’t you think this is also made in terms of digital marketing? For a city like Calicut, targeting consumers through advertisements through digital platforms is very easy. Thus you can assure of attracting customers. Google Ads, as a tool for this, helps target local customers by having a location base of the store and ensures the ads reach the right audience. There are also Social Media Ads through which you can upload ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. These can help drive traffic to your website or physical store.
- Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a luring marketing strategy where you can find either the influencers on their like or, for business promotions, introduce the store’s details. Why this marketing is a better option is because the influencers are the ones who can connect very easily with the local audience as the culture and language are the same. Thus, local influencers are a major driving force for this marketing. For example, when a popular food item is trending, and when influencers happen to find that and make content for that, you would be aware that such a store has this and that product. And choose influencers wisely, as the ones who have the power to influence can only the ones who can strengthen your business.
- Analysing and improving the strategies
We can’t keep on going with the same strategies as people will have a shift in their tastes and preferences as time passes. Because if we see the differences in the generations, we can see that the outfits that our parents wear and we are different. In that case, businesses can be improved considering the variations in generations. Moreover, if you implement them with your analytical skills, they can help track digital marketing efforts. Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights can help you with analytical data such as website traffic, conversion, engagement, etc. Digital marketing, in the end, is the refinement of the current strategies that serve the sale and engagement of businesses very well.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is a continuous process where strategies are developed much further for business growth. As we have already spoken of how digital marketing is leveraged for small businesses in Calicut, let’s wind up our words now. The culture of Calicut itself is a basis for business where the local audience is targeted. Particularly, a small business should first target the local audience so that they can reach out to your store and recommend it to their friends and family. This can be way bettered with digital marketing, as explained in this article. Every consumer matters, and as a business owner, you can use plenty of opportunities that can come in handy in time.
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