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Technological advancements are happening daily all across the globe. There will always be room for improvement no matter how advanced the company may be. Small and Medium Enterprises are an important part of an economy as they provide employment, supplement other large companies, and accelerate the growth of any nation.

In the initial years of business, small companies face a lot of challenges which are at times very hard to overcome. Having said that, many of these problems and challenges can be fixed. What one needs is to take time to understand the pain points, re-think the strategy, and come up with solutions to fix them.

Let us look at some of the common digital challenges faced by small and medium enterprises and how these can be addressed:

1. Finding customers – This is a huge challenge that any company faces. Marketers work hard in every company to bring in new customers but this problem is amplified in the case of SMEs’ as they are not a household name. There are many channels that they can choose from but which one to prioritize is the real question. To address these challenges, companies need to focus on building buyer personas to get an understanding of their target customers. Based on these buyer personas, the content should be created to get in front of the target audience online with messages that they care about.
2. Increase brand awareness – The target customers need to know who you are for them to buy from you. Strategies need to be adopted not only to spread the word about the brand but also to work towards building a good reputation for the company. There are many ways of creating brand awareness with activities focussed on PR, blogging, and co-marketing. PR activities should focus on finding a voice and place for the brand in the market. Partnering with other brands can help SMEs’ inherit some of the reputation and image and create brand evangelists. It works well to gain new contacts along with organic marketing activities. Maintaining a high-quality blog helps in building brand awareness and helps drive traffic to the website. This traffic can be converted into leads. Blogs also help in establishing authority in the industry and trust.
3. Building an email list – To convert prospects into loyal customers, the companies need to focus their efforts on building trust and provide value consistently. For this, companies need to build an email list with all the prospective clients. This should be done by having an opt-in email list which is mainly made up of subscribers who voluntarily share their email addresses for companies to send out emails to them. Blogs can also contribute to building the email list. Great content makes it easy for people to subscribe, build search authority, and increase the online presence.
4. Lead generation – Another challenge that the SMEs’ face is generating leads, especially high-quality ones that convert. A good lead generation strategy is what turns website visitors into prospective customers. To make this process work smoothly, the website needs to be optimized for conversions. Prioritize the most popular pages of the website like the homepage, the “About” page, and the “Contact Us” page. The next step involves implementing conversion tools such as pop-ups, Slide-ins, and taking advantage of the free lead generation management software and apps.
5. New Digital Marketing Avenues – Webinars continue to be the most efficient, and fastest way to use digital marketing to generate more profits. Webinars have become the best way to reach and engage an audience. Over 60% of B2B Marketers are already using webinars as part of a lead nurture campaign. More than 75% of digital marketers believe that webinars are the most effective or among the top content marketing strategies available.
6. Delighting customers – Customer delight is as important as customer satisfaction. It is the delighted customer that comes back to buy again, write testimonials, and refer a brand/ company to people. This requires brands to focus their energy not only on satisfying customers but also go beyond their expectations and deliver an extraordinary experience. Efforts need to be made to understand why a customer selects to for their needs, set expectations at the start of the engagement with customers, and then ensure that you can deliver on those expectations. Brands should look at ways to innovate to provide unexpected benefits and measure customer satisfaction.
7. Employing talented people – To achieve success the brands need to have a competitive and talented team that understands the company vision and supports the efforts. Hiring is often one of the biggest challenges for SMEs’ as hiring new employees is a complex process and the cost of onboarding is usually high. Hence, time should be invested in the careful screening of resumes to not just find good ones but try and get to the great ones. Creating candidate personas for each role not only lays out the traits you are looking for but also defines the company culture.
8. Managing workflow – Having the right people is not enough. The workflow needs to be managed with scaling up of operations. one needs to ensure that the team has the necessary tools and processes in place to work efficiently. To overcome any roadblocks that the team faces, there should be a proper channel to provide feedback. This can be done through employee satisfaction surveys, one-on-one meetings, occasional sip-level meetings, pinpointing the threats to the business and that issues that create roadblocks in their roles.
9. Financial planning g– to create smooth operations, the companies should focus on providing resources. The main challenge is the budget restrictions face by SMEs’ which are based on revenue and margin. With budget restrictions, it is a big ask to improve efficiency. However, this can be handled by some good decision-making which is based on financial planning. The focus should be on cutting costs wherever it is possible and manage the cash flow.
10. Scaling– it is one of the toughest things to do as it is important in every area of business. Companies are faced with the problem of either building scalability early which can overwhelm the team members who may still be getting trained.

These are just some of the digital challenges faced by SME’s today. With proper planning and strategy in place, these can be overcome to become successful in the long run.

Data is now an integral part of every sector and function in the global economy and much of the modern economic activity simply cannot take place without it. The large pools of data when collected and analysed can help identify patterns and help in making better decisions which form the basis for competition and growth for organizations. To determine the competitive advantage that an organization can gain with customer data-enabled learning, there are some important questions that they should answer.

• How much value addition is made with customer data?

The higher the value-added the higher the chance of creating a lasting competitive edge.

• How quickly does the marginal value of data-enabled learning drop off?

What this means is that how soon does an organization reach a point where additional customer data no longer enhances the value of the offering? When the marginal value of learning from customer data remains high even after having a large customer database, the organization still will have a lot of competitive advantages.

• How fast does the relevance of the data depreciate?

If the data become obsolete quickly, then the organization stands to lose its competitive advantage over others in the same industry.

Having looked at how data can help organizations, it is now time to consider the role of data for marketing agencies and how it is driving growth. The role of a marketing agency has been evolving due to the ever-evolving digital landscape. New sources of consumer insights clubbed with new technological advancements have transformed the way brands connect with their consumers. Agencies are now tasked with delivering unique actionable audience insights to provide the base for persona development, analytics, and more by

1. Crafting new client pitches – customer data can be crucial in forming new client pitches as they offer insights and opportunities to grow a business. This data helps in formulating a plan that will translate into client deliverables. Since the customer data will not be available for a comprehensive analysis, the agency can leverage what they know about the brand’s target audience concerning demographics, psychographic, and other data. In doing this, they can clearly show
   • A strong and distinct understanding of the target audience and audience segments.
   • Help in enhancing the brand’s existing customer files, campaigns, and analytics
   • Gather insights about the competitors and show prospects and untapped opportunities.
   • Help in planning of product roadmap based on untapped consumer wants and needs
   • Enhance and improvise on the customer experience based on consumer personas.

2. Formulate data-driven personas – data can be very useful not only in formulating new client pitches but also to develop personas for organizations. Personas focus on creating characters to represent user types for a brand, site, or product. These personas have contributed in a big way by helping a brand get a better understanding of their customers to personalize projects for better ROI. Strong personas can help brands
   • Improvise the customer experience by ensuring that brands are talking to the right people, delivering the right message through the right channel.
   • Invest in the right channel- personas help brand prioritize what channels to use to have the maximum return.
   • Craft relevant messaging-personas have known to help brands tailor communication by ensuring that the audience is receiving messages as per their preferences. With the right data, brands can pinpoint the key motivators and help determine what makes the audience different and tick.
3. Improving campaign performance– developing personas in the stepping stone to elevating the marketing efforts of a brand. Consumer data is a vital resource for agencies who are looking to meet and exceed the performance goals. By combining various kinds of data, efforts can be made to build sophisticated audience models that can be consciously used for the execution of the campaign through all the stages of a customer’s journey from acquisition to retention. This has often led to a better campaign performance from awareness to engagement to conversion.
4. Enhancing analytics and insights– analytics and insights based on consumer data are essential to optimizing efforts made for the future. Enhanced analytics is a key area of focus for brands. To capitalize on this, the agencies must have on-demand access to unique data sets and tools that can be used to the needs of the brands they serve. It is a well-known fact that third-party data when used with campaign analytics can help brands discover new audience insights that lead to new opportunities.
5. Provide data processing and consulting service– in today’s date, the agencies should not only be equipped with deep data expertise that helps in persona development, campaign performance, and enhanced analytics and insights but also serve as always-on advisors for data management and evaluations. According to a recent study by Forrester Consulting, companies are dedicating 21% or more of their marketing budgets to data and analytics. Having said that many organizations have hurt their campaigns due to inaccurate, outdated, and inconsistent data, thereby presenting an opportunity for marketing agencies to offer value by using data and analytics to their advantage.

For brands to get the most out of the marketing efforts, there needs to be a shared understanding between the brand and the marketing agency of the goals and the target audience. By offering high-quality consumer data and leveraging across the marketing funnel, from persona development to campaign execution and analytics and insights, new doors can be opened for a collaboration between the brands and the marketing agencies.

The generation we are born in defines who we are. Be it Millennial, Generation X, or any other generation, they are likely to respond to advertising in a way that aligns with others from the same generation. With Generation Z which mainly comprises of individuals born between 1995 and 2015 now entering the workforce, they are poised to upend the digital marketing industry.

How is Gen Z disrupting digital marketing?

• This generation is unique as they have always had technology as a part of their lives and they have never known life without social media and smartphones. This shift has led to the way we communicate, connect, and market to one of the fastest-growing consumer bases. They are also a generation that has transformed multitasking into an art form. Having said that, Gen Z stands to contradict themselves as they are comfortable with analog forms of communication instead of the digital channels.
• For Gen Z, a workplace is a primary place where they feel the most comfortable and prefer face-to-face communication. With more and more of this generation joining the workforce, it becomes essential for any digital marketer to gain a basic understanding of what makes them tick and their preferred channels of communication.
• Gen Z has values that include determination, independence, and a strong work ethic and they love to learn new things. They create anything and everything and use social media channels to promote it. It is in their era that influencer culture has picked up and become a unique marketing avenue. Influencers set the precedent for trends by promoting clothing lines, beauty products, social causes on their blogs, social media channels, or by creating videos. Influencer culture provides a unique opportunity for marketers to think outside the box and convert Gen Z followers into leads. Getting an understanding of influencers or channels that make them stand out will help in reaching a wider audience.
• Social causes are a major selling point for Gen Z. a large population of them believe and advocate for the environment. They are a contribution to promoting the sustainable product revolution. The cause coupled with digital interaction provides a perfect avenue for marketers to connect with Gen Z potential consumers who are willing to pay more for sustainable products. Gen Z is searching for sustainable fashion products video content to engage with providing a platform for marketers to reach them.
• Gen Z is accelerating the change in the communication industry. Marketers must focus on understanding the rules behind social media functionality. E.g. hashtag best practices- when these are used to grow the audience base, the focus should be on not only appealing to the target audience but also on the causes they support. Another important aspect of communication is the ability to adapt. Gen Z shows lightning-speed dexterity as they navigate their smart devices, switching between apps skillfully and easily. This generation is equipped to multitask and also are looking for a change. The digital marketing campaign should be designed to keep these principles In mind and prepare for the unexpected.
• Disruption is a part of the digital marketing world, making change a constant for digital marketers who need to navigate this change for achieving success. Staying on top of social media trends is not enough. The focus needs to be on technological advancements that will help expand the reach.

Gen Z is defined by its relationship with technology, its commitment to social causes, and transparency. The use of technology helps in documenting every aspect of their lives from leisure to work. This combination poses a challenge for digital marketers who are struggling to keep up with Gen Z.