Social Media Marketing for SMEs - Now Every Business Can Fly...Globally

by Willy Lim
(Singapore)

Original article appears in April 2010 issue of SME & Entrepreneurship Magazine.

Running a SME can be a challenging task. The SME owner has to handle everything from staffing, finance, logistics, sourcing, sales & marketing, inventory management and production. Among these various areas, the two biggest challenges that SME owners face, according to a recent survey of more than 1,700 SME owners, are finding new clients and maximizing profits from existing customers.

The reality of being in business is that marketing accounts for 80% of your success. Success in business lies in your ability to market the product or service you provide. You could have the best product or service in the world, but if you do not have the marketing system to bring in targeted customers, you are probably not going to go very far as an ongoing business endeavour.

Traditional marketing channels available to businesses are mediums like TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, direct mail, flyers, yellow pages, just to name a few. You can write articles to express your views to forum pages in newspapers and others can write back in response. The local radio or TV station may decide to create a program interviewing successful local entrepreneurs and your company is in one of the featured interviews. While these are great publicity for your business (great because it's free and it has a wide circulation), they are hard to come by in the real world.

More often than not, you would need to pay huge advertising fees on such mediums, in order to put your products and services in front of the newspaper subscribers, radio listeners or TV viewers. A 3-column ad in a major newspaper will set you back by RM 4,000 and you will typically get anywhere from zero to 20 phone calls. With some simple calculations, you can see that you are paying at least RM 200 to get one enquiry. And these are just enquiries, not sales, mind you. These are not only expensive, but are also increasingly ineffective in today's context. Marketing can quickly become an expensive and painful lesson for those who are unprepared.

Without much low-cost marketing options, some SME owners go the way of attending business networking meet ups to connect with people, but these can be time consuming and lack the reach to get their marketing messages to their target markets.

More recently, online marketing channels such as email marketing, pay-per-click advertising and search engine marketing are gaining popularity. Some of the reasons why businesses are moving into these new online marketing channels are:- lowest cost option (compared to traditional media), easy to measure, easy to scale, fast to implement and in Asia, lowest competition.

The new kid on the block that is now getting all the attention and limelight is Social Media Marketing. What's Social Media Marketing?


According to Wikipedia,
"Social Media Marketing is a form of internet marketing which seeks to achieve branding and marketing communication goals through the participation in various social media networks."

Humans are social creatures by nature. Wherever humans go in the real world, they socialize and form networks for a variety of purposes, whether it is for pleasure or for business. So when the internet came along, humans being social creatures, started having conversations and building relationships over the internet, and thus began forming online communities.

These platforms where humans form networks and build relationships with each other on the internet are collectively called "Social Media". As with the real world, these online social media networks are formed by people having similar interests, and that includes groups that are formed for business purposes.

So in the offline world, we have newspapers, radio stations, TV channels and business networking meet ups. In the online world, they take the form of Blog articles, Podcast audios, YouTube videos, and Facebook groups.

Now with the rise of social media, everyone, if they choose to, can run their own online newspapers (i.e. start a blog), TV channels (i.e. start a YouTube Channel), radio stations (i.e. record a podcast) and business networking groups (i.e. start a Facebook group), sharing whatever content they like, whenever they like, to whoever they want, and often for free!

Also while newspaper advertisements, TV advertisements, radio advertisements and the competition for that corner retail lot along the busiest street can get extremely intense and expensive, there is very little competition right now in the area of social media marketing in Asia. Social media marketing in Asia is in its infancy stage at this point in time.

What all these mean to you as a SME owner is that, you can leverage on power of social media to extend the reach and effectiveness of your marketing activities. You can get the word out at a faster speed, and at a lower cost than traditional offline media. For SME owners who are savvy enough to leverage on social media marketing first, they will enjoy the first-mover's advantage and pull themselves ahead of competition. Inspired by AirAsia's tagline of "Now Everyone Can Fly", I'm of opinion that with social media marketing, "Now Every Business Can 'Fly' Globally"