How MSMEs & Small Businesses Can Scale Up Online Successfully – Essential Tips for Success

No longer is the online space regarded as a domain meant just for large and mid-sized companies, or as a launchpad for digitally savvy millennial start-ups. An increasing number of traditional, brick and mortar, small businesses and MSMEs are now establishing their digital presence – to varying extents, and in a variety of ways – and with good reason.

Go Digital (Online)

Taking your business digital is not just about building your image or being seen to rub shoulders with the big boys. There are tangible advantages to be leveraged.

Today, no matter what category your business operates in, no matter what model it follows, no matter what sort of customers you cater to, you will find a way to use the online space to your benefit.

A simple search on Google will demonstrate that any business you can conceive of, has some sort of online footprint, including some that you may regard as direct competitors to your own business. Clearly, they’ve consciously chosen to establish a digital presence because they see value in it.

In fact, even if you do regard yourself as a purely brick and mortar operation, you’ve probably already, albeit unwittingly, gone digital to some degree. Because if you think about it, even the simple act of accepting card or mobile app-based payments, means you’ve taken a step towards digitisation.

Even if your business is predominantly online, there’s always room to expand. By boosting your digital presence, you can tap into opportunities like MSME loans for growth. Strengthening your online footprint not only attracts customers but also enhances your chances of securing vital financial support.

Six digital trends impacting small businesses and MSMEs

1. More small businesses in India will move online

A recent study shows that while 63% of surveyed MSME in India MSME surveyed would like to go digital, only 5% of them have actually done so. 80% of all digitized MSMEs indicated overall positive digital experiences. Another survey showed that small businesses that have gone digital have grown twice as fast, compared to their offline counterparts. Both surveys indicate large-scale digital adoption amongst small businesses is imminent. This coupled with the rapid growth of technological adoption in the customer base indicates that the businesses will have to move at a similar pace to avoid going out of business, citing competition threat from modern digital startups offering conventional products with great offers and ease for the consumer.

2. Small businesses adopting cloud-based solutions

60% of MSME adopting cloud-based technologies, do so to gain a competitive advantage and enhance productivity. Solutions on offer are advanced yet affordable, adaptable to all sorts of businesses scenarios and provide economies of scale. Key solutions they opt for include password management, CRM and managing mailing lists. These solutions albeit have limited application to the more conventional brick and mortar businesses directly, however when used in conjunction with the modern software and solutions, the aforementioned cloud based solutions like CRM, mailing list, etc. can be really helpful in expanding customer reach, and marketing. Also, these solutions might help in making the business operations more efficient for both offline, as well as online businesses.

3. Government encouraging small businesses to scale-up using cloud-based technologies

One of the stated priorities of the government is to help MSME leverage the latest digital technologies to grow and scale, in order to increase the sector’s share of the GDP from 35% to 50% over the next 5 years. It has started 18 technology training centres or ‘Tool Rooms’ to help MSMEs learn and adopt technology and aims to increase the number of such centres to over 150. It is also extending subsidies to MSME adopting cloud-based communication and information technologies via the direct benefit transfer route. The subsidies for adopting these solutions would greatly encourage the entrepreneurs to take a chance at modernizing their offline businesses. Having a rapid expansion of technological adoption among the huge offline market at a macro level will help in boosting the economy, and at a micro level help the entrepreneurs with streamlining the growth strategies in small business to boost efficiency.

4. Small businesses are adjusting to millennials and their habits

Small businesses are gradually moving towards social media, video content, influencer marketing and mobile marketing to engage millennial consumers who are dominating the market – in sheer numbers and in terms of purchasing power. Considering the fact that the consumer mindset is shifting, this coupled with the increased spending and purchasing power of the consumers in the new generation, the businesses are targeting this consumer base as serving them is a lucrative strategy.  

5. Social media dominates the marketing mix for small businesses

According to a recent marketing report, 96% of small businesses are using social media in their marketing strategy. Facebook is particular is doing wonders for them in terms of reach, impact and conversion. In case the entrepreneurs are able to run an efficient online marketing campaign, the return on investments can be multifold in terms of exponential increase in sales! Small businesses are coming to realize that online marketing strategies have outperformed more conventional strategies to attract buyers, and this will continue to do well citing the fact that more and more businesses are moving online, not only for marketing but also to offer their proposition.

6. Chatbots will play a crucial role for small businesses

Around 45% of small businesses believe better customer service is key to revenue growth. As they continue to embrace the online space, given their limited resources, automation will be key to improving customer experiences, while also streamlining their operations. Since chatbots are a tool to enhance customer service, it helps with customer retention as well. With more conventional chat options with a customer representative, for a business with high volumes of query, more often than not the query wait time is long. This sometimes ends up being counterproductive. With automated chatbots, the more general queries can be answered quickly, resulting in less turn around time for issue resolution. Furthermore, the chat data can be leveraged to enhance the chatbots in the future, resulting in a more data driven and sophisticated query resolution which will ultimately enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Your springboard to success

Going digital can help your businesses scale-up exponentially and serves as a springboard for your business to leap to the next level of performance and prosperity. Here’s how:

1. An agent of business transformation

The aspect of digitisation that can have the most direct, powerful and transformational effect on your business, is via the adoption of a range cloud-based business tools and technologies, to help you address streamline operations and enhance productivity and profitability. If you’re wondering how to grow your small business with limited resources, the strategy can be more focused on digitization, since it can enhance not only the performance of your existing and new revenue streams, but also enhance your after sales service resulting in customer loyalty and stickiness. 

2. A powerful and versatile medium

The digital medium provides you with unprecedented reach yet allows you to target your messaging to your customers. It enables you to create high-impact branding and communication using text, visuals, audio and video. It helps you create dedicated brand platforms to drive interactive engagement and immersive experiences and uniquely, allows for real-time two-way interaction with your customers. Growing business in India can be challenging, however by leveraging the digital tools efficiently and effectively, an entrepreneur can benefit from exponential growth. This is due to the fact that India has a growing economy with rising spending power among the consumers. This along with a high number of internet users means a plethora of opportunities waiting to be tapped into.

3. The ultimate sales enabler

ECommerce platforms allow your customers to purchase your products and access your services without having to leave the comfort of their homes, and provide seamless and secure online transactions. Irrespective of the scale of your business, you can still become a part of the e-commerce ecosystem. To expand MSME business, a lot of entrepreneurs instead of investing in their own website, are listing their products on established e-commerce platforms. This is enabling them to increase sales by helping them cater to a larger customer base with a higher spending power hence helping in growing businesses in several categories.

Now, let’s delve a little deeper into each of the advantages listed above:

Cloud-based tools and technologies trigger business transformation

1. Plug-and-play solutions that adapt to your needs

These on demand tools and technologies are highly flexible and adaptable to your specific business needs. And they are scalable enough to keep pace with the growth you will inevitably enjoy, once you embrace them and leverage them to the fullest. Plug and play solutions are great for businesses with great potential to scale. This is beneficial as certain solutions which may be beneficial for small scale businesses may not fit the need as the business grows. In such cases, the entrepreneur may choose to opt for a solution more suited to the current needs. It ends up helping save costs.

2. Big data analytics enabled

These analytics-enabled tools help you to discern patterns and unearth vital insights into your business, enabling you to make better decisions that tangibly improve business outcomes and gain that critical edge over your competitors. Data analytics enables businesses and entrepreneurs to make data backed decisions which have a high probability of working in favor of the entrepreneur.

3. Cost-efficient

Best of all, they work on a pay-as-you-go model, which makes them far more cost-effective and far less human resource intensive than comparable, on-premise technologies. If the return on investment is lucrative enough for your business, you can continue with the subscription, if not then you may decide not to do so.

4. Tailored to the needs of small businesses

Many new-age digital start-ups have dedicated themselves to develop cloud-based technology solutions specifically designed to cater to the requirements of small businesses and MSMEs. These solutions are targeted to solve issues usually faced by small businesses and may greatly help the entrepreneur with scaling up revenues and profits. 

5. Cross-horizontal functionality

These cloud-based tools may provide a range of solutions that may cover one or more – or even all – the functional horizontals of your business – from manufacturing to supply chain, marketing and advertising to CRM and sales, finance and accounts to human resources. Some cloud-based tools popular among small businesses and MSMEs include:

• Mailing and Data Storage Management – MS Outlook and Onedrive, Gmail and Google Drive, Dropbox : These tools are great for businesses in the organized sector that can leverage data storage for their business use cases.
• HR and Payroll Management – Kredily, Open HRMS, FactoHR, Synergita : Such tools can be really useful for businesses which deal with a high number of workforce, and can benefit from streamlining human resources, and payroll.
• Antivirus – McAfee, Sophos, Webroot, Panda : Antivirus software can be leveraged by the businesses that mainly have a digital infrastructure in place to safeguard themselves from any cyber attacks, or malware. With SMEs in India moving digital, these software can be highly beneficial.
• Accounting software – Intuit QuickBooks Online, FreshBooks, Pabbly, Zoho Books : Irrespective of the industry you’re operating in, accounting software is something that can be leveraged to your advantage as all businesses can benefit from efficient accounting.
• POS software – Epos, ShopKeep, iVend Retail, GoFrugal POS : POS machines are really useful for companies that have a physical presence in the market where they offer their products and services. POS machines enable businesses with higher collections by offering payment using cards to the customer.
• CRM software – Apptivo, Hub Spot CRM, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM

6. Vertical-specific customisation

Many of these start-ups have a unique combination of technology expertise and specific domain knowledge that enable them to be customized to the needs of specific sectors. Some examples include:

• Retail – Epos Now, GOFRUGAL, 
• Apparel – Cin7, ApparelMagic, PolyPM, BlueCherry
• Restaurants – Toast, Tray, ITWERCS, Appetize
• Food delivery – Swiggy, Zomato, Food Panda
• Hotels – Cloudbeds, Hotelogix, trivago
• Pharma – Meditab, CoverMyMeds

7. Exponential return on investment

It requires a significant investment in time and effort to research and evaluate all the various solutions available before selecting the right solution for your business. It also requires monetary investment to acquire the solution/s selected and hiring the resources to leverage them optimally. However, you will feel the positive impact they are likely to have on your business almost immediately and the mid-to-long-term returns on your investment are likely to be exponential.

Digital is a powerful and versatile, yet cost effective medium for marketing and CRM

1. Unparalleled reach, targeting and cost efficiency

Digital, as a marketing and communication medium, allows you to cast your net wider than ever before, to reach out to a massive base of prospects nationwide and even worldwide.

Assuming you can go national, think about the sheer number of people you can reach. The number of internet users in the country stands at a staggering 560 million in 2020. Just to put things in perspective, this exceeds the total population of the US, the UK and Germany combined, by around 40 million.

It also allows you to effectively narrow down and target your most likely prospects, geographically, demographically, contextually, based on interest and purchase intent.

Used intelligently, digital marketing can be highly cost-efficient, compared to offline mass media like TV, Print and OOH. It includes a mix of:

1. Pull mechanisms

• Search marketing through search engines – Google, Bing
• Business listings – Google my business, Just Dial, Trade India, India Mart, Yellow Bot, Sulekha
• Vertical specific listings – Magic Bricks, Auto Raptor, Trivago

2. Push mechanisms

• Targeted Affiliate marketing networks – Google, Facebook, FlipKart Affiliate, Amazon Affiliate, GoDaddy Affiliate, vCommission, AdmitAd

3. Hybrid Push-pull mechanism

• Content marketing, various aspects of which have been covered in detail under the ‘Engagement’ section below.

2. Impact

It gives you the opportunity to build high-impact, multi-sensorial branding and communication using not just text, visuals, audio and video, but also interactive engagement and immersive experientials.

Statistics from reliable sources like Hubspot, Google and Facebook show that videos are by far the most consumed type of online content.

According to Hubspot, 81% of all businesses are using videos as a key marketing tool, while 55% of regular net surfers watch online videos on a daily basis.

In another 2020 finding, this time from Google, 6 out of 10 people prefer viewing online videos over watching TV. And Alexa claims that YouTube is second only to Google in terms of popularity.

A top Facebook executive recently predicted that Facebook content would be 100% video and 0% text
by as early as next year.

For small businesses and MSMEs, online videos are a great way of reaching out your audiences. They don’t require the fancy production values that TV does, and are therefore far cheaper to make.

One of the more effective ways by which you can capture eyeballs and register your brand / business with relevant audiences is to tie-up with YouTube, and get them to air pre-rolls or mid-video films along with popular videos, that have some sort of contextual link to your business / category.

Another way to expose your business amongst relevant audiences, without having to spend anything at all on production, is to sponsors segments of, and secure mentions on, popular but category-linked videos and podcasts.

3. Engagement and CRM

While paid advertising can lead to a degree of engagement, you get maximum engagement from branded content marketing pieces, usually seeded on one or more of a business or brands owned platforms – its website, its mobile app and/or its social media pages, handles and channels.

These may take the form of posts, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, videos or even interactive deeper engagement pieces which may be embedded widgets or apps.

Engagement occurs when your prospect, on being exposed to a piece of content, goes beyond just consuming it, and takes some sort of desired action, or interacts with it in a deeper way.

For instance, when a prospect lands on your website or eCommerce site, glances through the content and leaves, no engagement has taken place.

However, after reading the content, if you can somehow induce the prospect to click on a link to read more, share the page with a friend, fill out a form, take part in a poll or quiz, or engage with an embedded app., widget or game, then engagement has taken place.

Similarly, your content marketing pieces – posts, blogs, vlogs, brand videos, podcasts etc. must be compelling or interactive enough for your prospect to engage with them by liking, sharing, commenting or responding to them or interacting with them on a deeper level.

Influencer marketing – influencer-generated posts, tweets, stories and videos seeded on owned social media brand pages / handles / channels on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube among others – is also an important component of engaging content marketing, particularly in categories like food and beverages, fashion and lifestyle, technology and gadgets, among others.

Engagement is a key performance metric that you must track in the online space, as it is typically an expression of greater interest than simple consumption. It represents a prospects progress along the journey that culminates in a purchase, which is your ultimate goal.

From a customer relationship management perspective, the digital platform is incredibly powerful. It allows for two-way communication at a strategic lead nurture campaign level or a tactical promotional messaging level.

Uniquely, it also enables real-time, two-way communication with customers, enabling you to respond to customer feedback instantly, by way of email, DM or chat.

Such instant feedback and response mechanisms can also be fully-automated using AI-powered chatbots.

Sales enablement platforms

This typically occurs on either your eCommerce site or on your transaction-enabled mobile app.

You may also choose not to have your own transaction platform, but piggy-back on various multi-vertical ecommerce aggregator platforms – also called online marketplaces such as

• Amazon
• Flipkart
• Snapdeal
• India Mart
• Ebay
• Facebook Marketplace
• ShopClues
• Infibeam
• Rediff
• PayTM
• Naaptol
• Homeshop18

Various categories have their own set of aggregator platforms. For instance:

• Apparel – Meesho
• FMCG retail – ShopX
• Home décor – Pepperfry
• Automobiles – Droom
• Food & Beverages – Swiggy
• Hotel bookings – trivago

There are also various ecommerce enablers who help you to create a basic plug and play ecommerce platform of your own. Some of these include:

• Shopify
• Shopmatic
• Wix
• 3dCart

These platforms allow for seamless and secure online transactions, though it may entail physical delivery of the final product or service. A huge convenience for customers who can purchase, hire or rent your offerings, without having to leave their homes.

The transaction phase is really the culmination of the journey that you attempted to get your prospects to embark on, with all your digital marketing activities. It’s what can really enable you to scale up and give wings to your business.

Embrace digital

Depending on what stage of the digital adoption curve your business is at, you can begin evaluate all the aspects of digital, that your business will benefit most from, depending on your business priorities.

One thing is clear – the more you digital you go, the more your business benefits. So, your ultimate goal should be to prudently select, embrace and leverage as many aspects of what the digital space can offer your business in order to take it to the next level.

Beware of pitfalls

The digital space can be a bit of a double-edged sword. Done right, it can propel your business to great heights. But the nature of the beast is that it lays bare any weaknesses you may have to public scrutiny. Any bad experiences that your customers may have, can get blown out of proportion and damage your business and its reputation.

So, ensure that you stack the cards in your favour by preparing thoroughly for the tasks ahead. Bring in the right experts to design and develop your digital platform. Test it, retest it and repeat, till it works perfectly. Hire the right resources with experience in eCommerce. Ensure you have all the back-end logistics in place. Double check every last detail before you take any new digital initiative live.

No risk no gain

Yes, there will be significant investments involved. And yes, any such initiative involves an element of risk. But if you’ve thought things through, have a watertight plan in place and are confident you have your bases covered; the potential rewards will automatically outweigh the risks.

We’ve got your back

If you’re worried over funding, it’s time to stop losing sleep over it. Just get in touch with Lendingkart.

We are a fin-tech startup operating in the working capital space. We’ve developed tools based on big data analytics to helps lenders evaluate a borrower’s credit worthiness and disburse loans accordingly.

Our objective is to make capital funds available at your fingertips so that enterprising entrepreneurs like you can focus on your business, instead of worrying about gaps in your cash-flows. We are currently based in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Mumbai but we serve our clients across India.

Why us?

• 100% online application takes no more than 15 minutes
• We only look at your bank statements if you’re in the eCommerce space
• We require neither your net worth details nor any collaterals
• Secure your loan within 72 hours 

So, when it comes to funding leave everything to us and plough ahead fearlessly with your growth plans.

In conclusion

The digital wave is sweeping across the planet and you can ill-afford to be left behind. If you haven’t already, now is the time to take the plunge and ride the wave. It promises to be both an exciting and richly rewarding ride, that could potentially launch your business into a whole new stratosphere of success. And when it comes to funding, remember, Lendingkart has got your back!