Marketing is an effective way to increase sales and boost name recognition. An indispensable tool of the commercial strategy, the marketing plan should be adapted to the specificities and size of the SME.
Marketing refers to all the actions that enable a company to introduce its products or services and increase its visibility among a target audience. This approach is sometimes perceived as a luxury for large corporations that can afford a PR department, the services of an advertising agency or even a full-time employee dedicated to this task. Nothing could be further from the truth. Development of a marketing strategy represents a crucial step for any company, whatever its size, its age or the state of its finances.
Defining your goals
Before developing a marketing plan, it is essential to determine your goals: Are you trying to conquer new markets, improve market penetration, or diversify your offerings?
- Building new markets. A company can, for example, pull business away from its competitors. When they were launched, low-cost airlines like easyJet managed to capture part of the market of traditional airlines thanks to lower prices. Ikea did the same thing on the furniture market.
- Improving market penetration. A company can prompt larger transactions with its existing customers or generate more frequent repeat business. Example: the Zara chain of clothing stores changes its collection every three or four weeks to be more responsive to new trends. Customers come back more often because they know they will find something different each time.
- Diversification. A company can expand its new product offerings, generating additional sales volume. Apple, whose Macintosh computers were in decline, experienced a real renaissance in the early 2000s with the launch of new product ranges like the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
In addition to defining the main points of its marketing strategy, one must also establish a time frame. Should results be achieved within a few months or over five years? The outline of the strategy may vary considerably based on this criterion.
Advantages of SMEs
No company can do without a marketing strategy. But this strategy will be very different depending on whether the promotion is for Coca-Cola or an SME’s products. Large companies often have dedicated marketing teams, whereas SMEs typically handle their own marketing efforts. Due to a lack of resources, they often cannot use an external agency to carry out their entire marketing strategy. They can, nevertheless, delegate specific tasks, such as graphic design or website creation.
Unlike large companies that invest in their image, small and medium-sized businesses often have to ensure that each marketing campaign generates sales to cover its costs. Therefore, it should be calibrated carefully.
Nevertheless, SMEs enjoy some advantages when compared with large firms:
- Closer contact with the customer base. Multinationals often spend thousands of francs on customer polls and surveys. The director of an SME, who comes into contact with his or her buyers on a daily basis does not need this type of approach: he or she has access to the target market every day, free of charge.
- Personalization. Modern consumers want a company to speak to them directly, be aware of their tastes and preferences and provide them with personalized goods or services. Here again, SMEs have an advantage to exploit.
- Flexibility. The internet provides small companies with a unique opportunity to stand out. More flexible and less subject to pressure from an overly large management structure, they can make the very most of these tools (social networks, blogs, e-mails, etc.), usually at no cost.
By capitalising on these aspects, SMEs can position themselves effectively and cheaply against their larger competitors.
Digital marketing: a crucial issue
In today’s business landscape, digital marketing has become increasingly important, particularly for SMEs. This variant uses online channels such as social networks, search engines, email marketing and websites to reach its target audience. This method enables the expansion of the potential client base and more precise targeting.
Accessible to all and relatively inexpensive, digital marketing provides innovative and practical solutions for SMEs to execute their customer approach and sales strategy. In agriculture, for example, digital tools can enable producers to engage in direct sales via a suitable digital platform or an e-commerce site. For a hair salon, digital tools are a particularly effective way to establish a presence and maintain a relationship with their clients. In a more functional setting, they can also be used to facilitate appointment scheduling.
From a general point of view, digital tools enable them to present their skills, build relationships with customers and also with partners through testimonials or images across all sectors of activity.
Digital marketing is based on several interdependent pillars:
- Storytelling: Telling a story to promote your brand is a key concept in storytelling. Companies are increasingly speaking out and also directly soliciting their users to invite them to build stories around the consumption of a product or service. To produce a coherent and convincing story, however, it is better not to invent anything. It is a matter of tapping into the company's history, its DNA, and its values or portraying its daily activities.
- Mass sharing (or viral content): Content published on the internet can create chain reactions, positive or negative. Viral content can help consolidate awareness and maximise the visibility of a company or one of its products. To avoid conveying a negative image, it is essential to thoroughly research the content's reach and anticipate its reception by the public before publishing it.
- User experience and personalisation: Relatively affordable and easy to use, digital tools such as social networks, apps and websites are powerful vectors of a brand’s image and customer experience. It is essential to note that consumer satisfaction now depends not only on the quality of the product or service itself but also on the overall experience. Currently, it is built around a narrative that must be shaped and maintained. Social networks play a crucial role in fostering emotional connections as users follow, like, comment on, and share content.
- Continuous dialogue and customer relations: Chatbots and virtual assistants have proliferated in recent years. They are now ubiquitous tools on companies' websites. Today, the advent of large language models, on which SwissGPT, Le Chat, and ChatGPT are based, enables these robots to increase their performance tenfold and automate customer interactions.
- Algorithms and predictive marketing: The data from companies' CRM systems or clickstreams represents a goldmine of information, allowing for a detailed understanding of users. By analysing this data, predictive marketing anticipates buying behaviours and personalises messages to customers. Among the marketing techniques based on algorithms, trigger marketing enables the automatic triggering of a marketing action according to the behaviours of a prospect or consumer, for example, by sending an email after a visit to a website. Marketing automation manages these techniques in an automated way to maximise efficiency.
Digital marketing is a must for most marketing campaigns. Any company developing a strategy for that purpose must ask itself how it can create touchpoints with its customers through digital tools and platforms. The approach not only allows one to position oneself on a whole section of the market, especially that of the younger generations, but also to make oneself known at relatively affordable costs.
Sources: Hiam, A., Heilbrunn B. "Le Marketing pour les Nuls", John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2021; Livre blanc cerfrance : le marketing digital pour les tpe & pme, 2021; Marrone, R., Gallic, C., Le grand livre du marketing digital, 2018; Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, Barbara Findlay Schenck, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2012.
