How Indian Small Businesses (SMEs) can Generate Business Leads at Low Costs
Generating Business leads is a tough job for any kind of business, be it SMEs, be it startups, be it sellers, suppliers or exporters. But every Business needs leads to survive and to expand. And in today’s world, you cannot ignore either the offline ways or the online ways. You have to focus on both. While the offline ways are simple and most SME owners and sales team are good at that, the online ways are generally overlooked. Those who are focussing might be spending the money at all the wrong places. The simple reason is that most often SMEs don’t always have the best people when it comes to web, IT and cloud understanding as the people with understanding can easily get jobs at MNCs at better salary and opportunity. This problems is more common with the non IT businesses, the manufacturing companies, the suppliers, wholesale marketers etc.
But, you can rest assured that if you have been using computer and using the likes of Facebook and amazon, you can start with any web or cloud platforms. The good things we are going to tell you here is how can you achieve these goals at lowest costs or maybe even free. Before we start with the exact points, let me tell you about CoreLogs- Business Community bringing all SMEs on one Platform. CoreLogs is a startup which has created an open community of SMEs where businesses share their requirements and people can directly interact.
Now coming to how can SMEs generate business leads so as to find suitable opprtunities and expand and that too at lowest cost. And the focus is on online channels.
- Creating an online presence: This is really important so that people in your target area get to know about your company. You might have a website but that’s not enough. There are so many web platforms which give you a free fully functional company profile. CoreLogs is one such platform. Create a company profile on as many places as you can and this won’t cost you money.
- Do your own Social media marketing: It’s a known fact that if your company profile link is shared on big sites like Google Plus, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, google search engine gives it more weightage and your company profile will rank better than your competitors. So share on facebook, linkedin etc.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This is really important. Not only people searching for your company, but those who are searching for companies selling what you sell and companies in your city must find your link on searching relevant terms. For this you need to target key words. But so many companies are doing the same thing that it is very costly to do this. CoreLogs provides a simple solution. You select products you sell and products you buy all on CoreLogs and internal search brings up your company when people search for those key words.
- Business Community: People who purchase what you can provide are your leads. Now CoreLogs is an open community where companies and businesses share their requirements directly on the community which is openly accessible to all where you can send quotations or directly connect to the other party. Join CoreLogs and any other similar business community.
- Targeted Ads: Now, Advertisement is something for big companies with lots of money. You don’t have that. But again, CoreLogs comes to your rescue. You can create ads targeting very specific companies or industry segment at costs as low as Rs 100. This can seriously act as the perfect opportunity to promote your company in the right target audience.
- Constant Engagement: This is also an important way to get repeat customers. Once in a while, connect to your contacts who might be forgetting you by sending them an email. The content of emails can vary but it should not be a very direct mail trying to push them to buy from you. Rather, you can send a piece of news or recent advancement of your company. Another way is through CoreLogs. You can update similar thing on CoreLogs Network and this will be a reminder for them without you being pushy.
- The Transparency of the Channel: When you are making accounts, make sure that any inquiry you get reaches to your inbox. This way you wont miss opprtunity. CoreLogs in this case is purely transparent and without having to pay even a single rupee, your entire setup is complete. The inquiries reach your mailbox, you get to see the contacts of those who sent you inquiry. And people do send inquiries. If the channel is transparent, that inquiry will be sold to you for money. SO get to know things.
- Email Marketing: If you have a database of your target audience, you can try email marketing. When doing that, try to keep the content as little as possible. Maybe 3 mid sized sentences. If the audience size is low, most probably you can do it for free. Mailchimp is one platform which gives 20,000 emails free every month.
Again we repeat, learn this thing from startups, they figure out ways, and sometimes create new ways to expand and bring in leads. But to get in that way, you must not ignore the web and cloud. To understand how to use web and cloud, read this article. And in this world you cannot afford to ignore web and cloud. You can lose even if focus on web but you will surely lose if you don’t. And that’s why CoreLogs is here. To connect you to cloud. Join the Community of SMEs & Businesses and start on the winning path.
