Covid was my wake up call — small business owner
I was not really affected by Covid, I was affected by the digital revolution — said almost all small business owners
We have been reaching out to a lot of small business during these challenging times. From our conversations with them, we understand that small business owners are affected because of the physical lockdown that was affected and hence lesser or no reach to their consumer base at all. Take for instance a bubble tea store that was on lockdown for the last 5 months, you can imagine that inventory, rent, salary, and other overheads are still eating away from a cost standpoint but they don’t have the means to produce bubble tea orders and to sell them physically in their store. Essentially, they are closed off from generating any form of revenue. So they decide to let their staff go or put their salary on hold until they open up again. And when they open up again, the cash flow is no longer there to support the operations of the business so they have to bootstrap in the next 6–12 months. What if something happened again, something unpredicted and they have to close the store again? What happens now?
Small Businesses need to go digital with their business
Small businesses need to develop a digital strategy for their product lines. There is no excuse to say that if you operate a bubble tea store that you cannot sell bubble tea to your consumer base via online platforms and online food delivery. You can’t sit on the fence anymore and say you are not going to join in on digital or only join in halfway by creating a Facebook and Instagram page. Those days are over as having social media pages is not digital marketing and that is not the way to create a moat for your business. The real question you have to answer is what sort of demand you can get via digital and how you resource to fulfill that demand and still stay profitable. And the question of on-demand generation is also in part affected by how are you reaching out to the digital community to generate demand and to forecast demand? So what do you do?
Small Businesses need to leverage digital marketing agencies and companies
Small business owners will have to leverage help from digital marketing agencies to test and run the SKUs of their product line digitally. This is not costly at all. Even a quick and easy vote or poll on social media platforms will give you the first gauge on the potential demand and rolling demand forecast for your SKUs. This comes from doing market research and analyzing the potential of consumers how are interested in purchasing your products online via their preferred food delivery service(in this case). Then we have to understand the SKUs, the price points, and the opportunity to stay profitable with the potential consumer base. Online market research like this will cost a few hundred dollars and can be completed in a week based on marketibble’s professional experience and track record.
Once that is done, we can craft a content marketing and online advertising digital strategy to test with this consumer base. Supposed on average before the lockdown, you sold 100 beverages of bubble tea in your physical store, and now based on the market research, the data is telling you that you can only expect 20–30 orders per day, then plan the scenario where you have under 10 orders, more than 30 orders and between 20–30 orders. Based on these scenarios, you can map out with the digital marketing agency the scope of what they should do in order to create content marketing and online advertising to meet each need and to be able to pivot based on the sales trends. In that same breath, you can proportion resources and ways to meet the scenario demands accordingly so that you optimize your profits and returns.
Small Businesses should have a digital market budget for digital marketing services
But here is the real clincher, how many of you small business owners have said that “ digital is a small part of my business and our business model is really running via our physical stores” or say things like “ We are not a digital business because our products are not really meant to be sold online”?. Well, name us one product that you can think of that is not sold online? Even homes, ships, planes, and cars are sold online.
How many of you even know the potential of digital business for your products? I mean real market research, testing, and analysis of the demand of course, and not your social media followers count or your “ for the sake of having an online merchant account eg. ubereats account” etc.
How many of you have tried to develop a business model where the mix of the revenue contribution was 40% digital 60% instore or even 60% digital and 40% instore?
How many of you really know what digital marketing is all about and how to do it right?
And how many of you really know how much money is needed for digital marketing services and the kind of services your business will need?
This is why marketibble exists as we want to give the small business owners a chance and a shot of understanding digital marketing, the digital marketing services out in the digital sphere, and how to stay up and running on digital no matter what product you sell. And most importantly to debunk this notion that digital marketing services are costly and that digital marketing agencies are going to rip me off with no real returns. Top digital marketing agencies will do that to you and make you feel insecure, but you need to know better than that. And we are telling you that. We offer digital marketing services to support your business from as low as $100 USD per month and yes we can get the job done for you without the need for you to hire or keep a digital marketing executive or digital marketing manager or marketing manager. Treat us like your digital marketing executive. Stop using the excuse that the lockdown and the Covid situation is affecting your business, and face up to reality to honestly say that it is the digital revolution that is affecting your business. If you change your mindset, visit us at www.marketibble.com to learn more.
