Century old Vismay Sarees is a Cochin-based small and medium scale business (SMB). Apart from coming up with modern saree designs, recent times have also compelled the company to adopt fresh ways to reach its customers. Defying the conventional method of advertising, the firm started investing in online marketing and advertising six months back and results have been phenomenal. ?A lot of young people look for saree designs online and it is an exciting platform for us to market our products,? says middle aged George EP who owns Vismay Sarees.
Analysing the behaviour of SMBs spending money online?Sridhar Seshadri, head of online sales, Google India shares that traditional businesses like Vismay Sarees now contribute almost 20% to Google?s advertising business, against 5% two years back. ?The five sectors comprising education, travel and tourism, financial services, exports and retail (domestic and international) contributed 95% of our SMB advertising business two years back, and it has now come to 80%. The last six months to a year have seen traditional sectors being involved in Google Adwords. Even other sectors like real estate or stock broking which conventionally depended on classified ads have substantially increased their spending on online advertising,? adds Sridhar.
Highlighting the benefits from online marketing, George from Vismay Sarees says, ?The conversion of inquiries into sales on our website has substantially gone up after online advertising. Today 250 people visit our website everyday and 20-25% of them are conversions into sales. Prior to online advertising, only 25 people visited our website everyday.?
On the other hand where classified offline advertising has dominated the real estate sector for a while now?the online platform is boosting it. Generating leads or inquiries through clicks on real estate advertisements is the new trend.
Metroplots, a real estate services company which focuses on residential projects also started online advertising six months back. Biju Ashokan, founder of the company, shares his experience, ?I have realised that none of the other advertising medium will give me the same revenues as the online platform. I started with an investment of Rs 30,000 a month six months back on online advertising and today I invest Rs 1 lakh per month.? Ashokan claims that though the number of inquiries that Metroplots receives has increased, but all of them are not quality leads. ?The popular residential packages usually get more leads as compared to the other ones,? he says.
A recent study by Google also reveals that SMBs from retail, apparel and travel and tourism sectors will be the biggest contributors in future and search engine advertising and online classifieds as a category will see an up-tick across industries. In the larger SMB scenario, businesses from insurance, technology business-to-business, IT hardware, and travel & tourism spend around 30-45% on online marketing. Annual average online spends are high among SMBs from media and entertainment, gems & jewellry and apparel.
Sridhar of Google explains that in terms of mediums used to advertise, traditional media like newspaper advertisements and outdoor ads still lead the advertising spends for SMBs, but internet is emerging as one of the fastest growing medium for advertising with SMBs with websites using the internet to generate business leads. Google India is working on a number of programmes to educate more SMBs on how they can get online and use the internet as a primary sales channel.
Thus, it is clear that digital marketing is becoming mainstream and knowledge awareness of digital has picked up.