One of the most well-accepted definitions of marketing is creating, communicating and
delivering values to consumers. Now that we see from a global perspective, traditional
marketing has gradually transformed to digital marketing, Bangladesh is utilizing
the usage of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) as a tool for
development and sustainability under Digital Bangladesh approach. Small and
medium enterprises (SMEs), considered to be the backbone of industrial growth
in the country, are placed at the core of any digital transformation strategy.
Observing recent global
trend, investment in Digital Marketing has increased by double-digit
percentages every year whereas that of traditional marketing has dropped by
single-digit percentages every year. Small and medium business owners are
constantly juggling with their budgets – how much to spend on marketing?
Digital markets earn around Tk 2,000 crore per year from the digital
advertising sector in Bangladesh. A
total of $1.04 billion or Tk 8,744.20 crore have been spent by three prominent
private mobile phone operators on social media advertisement in recent years (The
Daily Star, 2019). Bangladesh’s digital foundations are set by a large supply
of low-cost IT professionals, a young urban population with an appetite for
digital services, a fast-growing IT services industry, a growing base of
digital start-ups, a shortage of venture capital, an expanding consumer market,
a fragmented, but promising business market, and an improving regulatory and
legal environment (Digital Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, 2018).
The following figure
represents the state of mobile, internet and social media use in Bangladesh for
January 2020 indicating a favourable environment for SME owners.
One must not assume
that digital marketing is only for the giants of the industry; rather SMEs have
almost similar capability to redirect their traditional marketing budgets to a digital
platform to reach target consumers here and abroad. “14% of small businesses
fail because they ignore their customers’ needs, while the same number fails
because of poor marketing skills”. Moreover, researchers claim that small
businesses flop because their product or service is not required by the market
indicating a lack of marketing research and planning (Fortunly, 2019). This is
where digital marketing shows its stand for SMEs in terms of one of the best
return on investment – reach where your audiences are, create a level playing
field, highly targeted, more personalized, easy to formulate, easy to
implement, easy to evaluate, integrative and ample analytics (Lyfe Marketing,
2019).
According to Ovick
Alam, Co-founder & CEO of Webable Digital, he and his friends were looking
for an opportunity to come up with a new kind of service for Bangladeshi
customers. In 2013, Jaago Foundation gave them their long-desired stage; they successfully
managed to attract 235 sponsors within 2 months through social media marketing
on their first campaign. They could fight head-on-head with 3 big agencies –
Asiatic JWT, Bitopi Leo Burnett and Adcomm. This result-oriented aspect of digital
marketing gave them the confidence in 2014 to start their advertising agency
offering digital marketing, event activation, branding, UI/UX, web development,
and social & behaviour change communication solutions. Now they are a 65
member team (IDLC, 2018).
Here’s another story of
a big break from Nausher Rahman, Executive Director, Mighty Byte. He came for a
short visit to Bangladesh to handle an urgent family matter. But his experience
of the advertising industry in South Africa got him delayed. He saw a huge gap between
marketing practices globally and that of in Bangladesh. Hence, he sought to
understand the Bangladeshi consumer behaviour and tap it using digital
platforms, giving birth to a creative consultancy servicing the private, public
& social sectors where they design & develop communication campaigns,
projects, partnerships & interventions to help clients achieve triple
bottom line results benefitting people, planet & profits (IDLC, 2018).
Acknowledging that
Bangladesh is highly dependent on the clothing industry and agriculture for
export and employment respectively; SME based digital entrepreneurship can be a
successful alternative. Owing to the idea that investment in digital marketing
platforms and tools are a lot inexpensive but more effective than the
traditional ones, Bangladesh has now many digital service businesses that spend
their entire advertising fund on digital platforms. To survive the intense
international competition, Bangladeshi SME owners need to be adept at adapting
to the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem.
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