Small businesses in city look keen to go online

COIMBATORE: A lot of businesses are looking at the benefits of getting into online marketing, like low cost of advertising, space to put up more information on the product and a bigger opportunity to expand their clientele. Mighty Electronics Equipments which specializes in providing laboratory equipment for engineering colleges has been facing loss of business since engineering colleges started cutting costs.
"We currently have around 150 clients mainly spread across Coimbatore, Erode and Trichy, we are now looking to establish a website so we can reach out to more clients across the country and make up for the loss in business," said owner of Mighty Electronic Equipments, S Vanitha.
Vanitha is not the only entrepreneur looking to enter the internet domain. Gone are the days when small and medium scale enterprises, especially in the manufacturing and business to business (B2B) sector stuck to their old clients and marketing meant going door to door informing people about their products.
A workshop on online marketing organized by Tamil Nadu Small and Tiny Industries Association and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung Foundation (TANSTIA-FNF) service center on Tuesday was attended by almost 15 small-scale entrepreneurs who wanted to get into online marketing.
Owner of a nylon filament company in Vadivalli, Arjit Rakesh Sahai said, "We have a website which functions more like an online brochure, It was sufficient for the last seven to eight years because we were exporting in bulk only to four clients." "However, we want to upgrade our website where people can buy our products online. We are doing this to start supplying in small pieces to the domestic market," he added.
"Currently out of the 40 million MSMEs in the country, only 500,000 are online," says Rishab Chandra, who founded Script Technology, a web development and management company. “In online marketing, you are seen by lakhs of people instantly, off which 10,000 might be interested, of which 1,000 might contact you and you make 100 sales instantly," he said. "You will not generate this viewership in any store or showroom in a minute,' he added.
However, some entrepreneurs believe that online marketing is not a one-time solution to run a business successfully. "I think what you do offline is more important," says Hariram Yeshwanth who started Advanced Clothing Concepts around five years ago. "While a website is mandatory, social media marketing on facebook has become outdated because many people don’t log in for months," he said.