Posts
The Importance of E-marketing to SMEs.
Category:
Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs) are companies characterized by a small limit of turnovers. In the UK, figures showed that by the start of 2008, there was an estimated 4.8 million private sector enterprises out of SMEs which composed 99.9 % of all enterprises. The employment rate for SMEs was estimated at 13.7 million, 21% higher than that in 2007 with a turnover estimated at £1,500 billion (4.2%) higher than the previous year (BIS 2009).
Through internet marketing, SMEs can promote and boost their sales by creating a strong multimedia presentation which can either be posted on their company’s sites or any other online marketing medium. This marketing medium offers many unique benefits which cannot be gotten from traditional marketing or advertising.
The internet proves to be a vital tool in business, its importance as a marketing tool should be captured by SMEs if they are to withstand competition. SMEs are dominant in many industry sectors, representing an important role in the economy. Compared with the large enterprises, the SMEs have fewer financial resources, lower technical expertise and poor management skills (Caldeira & Ward, 2002).
Marketing research on the other hand is a vital tool to every company’s success, especially in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. Used to determine feedback from consumers regarding existing or new products, e-marketing comes into play to ease this process, for SMEs especially.
E-marketing facilitates research because it tends to be cheaper in the sense that, it does not cost anything to send out surveys per say, to respondents regardless of location. It is also time saving because the time it takes to post out questionnaires and have them posted back could possibly waste time. Also, responses are faster and returned on time enough for the research to be accomplished (Times 2010).
HOW BENEFICIAL IS E-MARKETING TO SMEs?
The greatest benefit e-marketing offer is personalized marketing which keeps track of a customer’s database (Business link 2010). Meaning that through internet marketing, SMEs can promote their business the way in which they prefer and at affordable prices, compared to other communication media like TV or magazines. Some other benefits are:
- This medium of marketing enables the small and medium enterprise companies to showcase their business (goods/services) in a better convincing way. For example Copacabana restaurant which makes use of this medium to show case their recipes and prices to their various target audience.
- Internet is a medium of marketing used in brand building and also achieving outstanding sales for the SMEs which can give the owners excessive benefit over the bigger firms. A successful example of this is http://www.babymafrica.com/ which made use of this medium introduced to them by http://www.wildfusions.com/ to boost their business.
- One-to-one marketing; which permits them to let their target audience have easy access to them hence getting to know more about whom they are and the products or services they offer.
- With e-marketing, SME’s can create interesting campaigns through interactive campaigns using graphics, music and videos. They could send customers messages or links which could interest them.
- E-marketing permits customers to make purchase directly online without necessarily having to go to the stores or post orders like magazines or TV adverts request them to do. Online companies like Amazon do provide the possibility to purchase products directly online.
- SME’s can get feedback about their campaigns and measure the effectiveness of these campaigns by e-mailing customers who give their opinions about the campaigns and they in turn can use this information to measure how efficient or effective they were.
- With e-marketing, SME’s can reach a very wide range of their target market, because of the flexibility provided by the internet where anyone in the world can have access, in terms of competitive advantage, it also permits them to find new markets and invest at a low cost.
References
Analogik (2010) “What is E-Marketing” [online] ‘available from’ <http://analogik.com/article_principles_of_emarketing.asp> [20 February 2010]
BIS (2009) ‘Department for Business Innovation and Skills’ [online] ‘available from’ <http://stats.berr.gov.uk/ed/sme/smestats2008-ukspr.pdf> [22 February 2010]
Caldiera,M. & Ward, J. (2002) “Understanding the Successful Adoption and Use of IS/IT in SMEs: An Explanation from Portuguese Manufacturing Industries” Journal of Information System (12)121-152.
MICROSOFT (2010) Expert Urges Use of E-marketing for SMEs [online] ‘available from’ <http://www.microsoft.com/UK/SMALLBUSINESS/SBNEWS/SALES-AND-MARKETING/EXPERT-URGES-USE-OF-EMARKETING-FOR-SMES-19315135.MSPX> [23 February 2010]
TIME (2010) First, E-marketing, Now E-research [online] ‘available from <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995937,00.html>[20 February 2010]
Very good job I can say! No questions at all.
To do an E-marketing strategy ask lot of work and especially to survey it, for the big company it's can be a communication agency which do it if it's for a comunication campain online. Do you think the SME's can do it alone and it will be not too much money in their budget ?
Cedric do you mean E-marketing research? if you do mean E-marketing research then it would not be a lot of work to carry out the research online because all one would need to do is post the questionnaire online and the respondent would answer them immediately then all that the company would do is take the data from the questionnaire and put it on SPSS and the company would have the feedback it would need about the research they were doing. When it comes to doing the research manually one would have to print the questionnaires manually and employ people to distribute them so as to be able to get feedback, this process would take long to get the feed back and would be quiet expensive because one would need money for the paper and to pay people to distribute the questionnaire and from what you have read above SME's do not have a lot of money in their budget so doing it manually would cost them much more than doing it online and yes SME's can do them alone
Thank you Bozhidar
@Joe: Thanks for your answer but, My question was more for the after research, when you have launch your strategy, and it is the time to survey the evolution of your strategy, to see the statistic or the feedback of the strategy. e.g.: for a website you can analyse it and study how the people act on your website as result to change or not you website if their is a problem. Also for a communication campain you can analyse the feedback of the campain.
All that ask lot of work so do you think a Small company can do it ? As the big companies which can spend lot of money to do it with webAgency or Communication Agency to manage the campain or the website.
Thank you
Okay Mr Cedric i get you now yes SMEs can conduct their own communication campaign and it would not be a lot of work because the channels used would be simple and the response would be monitored quickly examples would be direct mail and this would entail sending e-mails to the said target market another effective means would be to open a Facebook profile or a fan page on Facebook and you would send a friend request or fan request to your customers and they would invite their friends to the companies/product fan page or profile and someone from the company would be assigned the mandate update the profile on offers the company has or products it's offering. This method would be effective because the frequency of the message would be repeated as much as possible and the SMEs would get feed back as soon as possible and sometimes it would be more effective than print advertisements, television and radio advertisements because one is reaching their target market directly and the target market would not switch off the advertisements like when they appear on television screens.
As for a website it would be easy to maintain because it would only need three or four people to maintain it, and the companies servers would be used to maintain the internet traffic and since it's not a big company the internet traffic would not be that much so the servers needed would not be expensive
Great post. Well thought out, well written out. Learnt something new here. Well done!
Thank you Emily.
The article was very informative about the benefits of e-marketing, however the use of examples that related to specific SMEs would have made the article more relevant and easier to understand and also it did not reveal the direct benefits that market research have on e-marketing and on small and medium enterprises.
Great article, it was very relevant and highlighted the profitability of SMEs.
An interesting work. SME are surely small entriprises which face a lot of difficulties in the market. With the introduction of e marketing to such small organizations, they can improve and be competitive in the market which often has large competitors. Emarketing will allow small organizations to focus on specialized area and reach out large profile of customers over the World Wide Web.
However we should keep that in mind that these organizations have limited budget which may hinder expensive marketing efforts.
Good work. simple to read and understand.
You only mentionned Internet as the unique Emarketing tool which is not the only one. You should have distinguished the terms Internet marketing and Emarketing
Otherwise your post is quite good especially the beginning
Yes we can agree setting up a website is a much cheaper alternative for advertising a SME, however the time it takes to set up a website and to keep it constantly updated is also a resource. Some small companies do not have an in-house marketing/web department or they cannot afford to pay a web design agency, so it is the manager who must take responsibility to the day to day running of the company and their website.
Thank you E-Forensics for your comment on areas that needs to be improved it has been noted and would be imporved
@danish Naseer yes SME's face a lot of difficulties when they have to compete with their competitors in the market,but with the introduction of E marketing it makes it quite easy for the SME's.In terms of the budgeting on like other forms of marketing activities that requires a huge amount of budget.The internet is actually cheaper and affordable when the company works with their budget properly.Thank you for your post.