Last updated on December 3, 2019, 5:04 PM

What does digitalization mean for sole proprietors and small businesses from a marketing perspective

Digitalization, the big word that’s floating around everywhere. But what does that actually mean exactly? And how can digitalization affect marketing? Since I have had and still have a number of SMEs as customers in recent years, I often see great potential for digitalization measures here too. Here are a few thoughts and explanations using examples of possible digitalization from a marketing perspective.

Switching from pure PR and advertisements in print media to online marketing

Strictly speaking, the integration of online advertising is a digitalization measure. Many companies still simply book their standard advertisements in daily newspapers or in the district newspaper or the NÖN without ever finding out whether this advertising measure is even effective. Of course, there is the option of voucher codes that can be used in print advertising, but this is often not used to measure advertising success.

However, if you already have a website as a company, your first digitization measure should be to simply try to use part of your annual advertising budget online. The big advantage of this is, of course, the precise measurability of what every advertising dollar I spent brought me online. A service company in the construction industry recently told me how much they like knowing exactly how many new customer contacts (leads) they get through online advertising measures. They were never able to find out for sure from their old print ads.

Conduct customer discussions via video chat - problem analysis via video chat

Technology is developing rapidly and every smartphone already has a pretty good video camera. Since the mobile phone tariffs and network expansion are very good in Austria, you can also integrate video chats into the services. Whatsapp, Skype and Co can be used free of charge. The installer who is the first to offer a problem analysis via video chat will win and secure a huge advantage over his competitors.

Why not try to get an initial damage report from the customer via video before you have to go out straight away and then perhaps don’t have the right part with you for the repair. An installer could therefore carry out more jobs per day and have more satisfied customers who are offered an extra service. Of course you can’t tell everything about a (installer’s) problem via video chat, but I still think that you can get a lot out of this through this digitalization measure.

Make appointments online directly on the website

There are already a variety of very well developed tools here. I see these used often, especially by doctors. These offer the customer a great deal of convenience. This means you can immediately see online which appointments are still free and can book a free appointment fully automatically at any time. This saves time for the customer and of course also for the service provider, as they can always query their calendar in real time. If you take a look at China (and Asia) and look at the functionality of WeChat there, you will notice how well these digital appointment booking systems already work.

Virtual teamwork and have information available at all times

Here too, the smartphone comes into play, which almost every employee always has with them. Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive or Office 365 and other cloud systems offer great potential for optimizing collaboration. Because it is often about data and information that should be available to several employees at the same time.

These tools make data immediately available to everyone and up-to-date at all times, which saves a lot of coordination effort and money.

Make yourself more tangible for the customer - better present your services with content marketing

Run Content Marketing via your own blog and answer customers’ questions that you get over time online. These are also digitalization measures. The information does not have to be requested separately, but is already available online and can be easily found by the customer. Simply providing the daily menus for a restaurant on the website every week is a digitization measure :) The customer can take a look at what’s available in the area via the Internet in the office and then make a pilgrimage there. But many restaurants can’t do this either and as a result they lose out on a lot of customers.

Another very simple content measure is to answer many customer questions well on the website. With a well-maintained FAQ (Frequently asked questions) section on the most frequently asked customer questions, you are doing very good SEO = search engine optimization and will get better positions in the search results in Google.

There is often an enormous wealth of knowledge lying dormant in companies and among long-term employees that has to be dug up and “digitized”. In order to answer potential customer questions in advance, this knowledge must be made discoverable on the Internet. This gives you an enormous competitive advantage over the competition, as you already position yourself as an expert and can build trust with the customer when they are in their “research” phase to find the right company for their order.

Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Even small companies can do marketing automation. If the points mentioned above are slowly introduced into the company, more and more digital data will emerge that can flow into marketing. Due to the constant up-to-dateness and automatic availability of this data, it is also possible to display advertising that relates to this data.

This creates a self-running system. Explained with an example:

• Doctor’s Practice XY is switching from print ads to online advertising
• The users who come to the doctor’s practice website via online advertising can be measured precisely
• If a user also makes an appointment (“lead” is generated), it can be traced back exactly through which online advertising campaign this user found the doctor’s practice
• This data can be evaluated fully automatically and the display of online advertising can be continuously optimized in order to get more users from the online channel that is most effective = i.e. able to generate the most appointments

The same system and setup works for almost all services that potential customers have who also research or select this service online.

If you want to get a small overview of what tools are available, here’s an overview.

Advancing digitalization is constantly creating more and more opportunities to optimize processes. Marketing is not neglected either, and new opportunities arise almost every day. So now it’s just time to get started :)