Pathway Platform Offers 22 Tech Training and Marketing Support Modules to Small Businesses
The Pathway platform is a growth-centric technology program that intends to help emerging businesses leapfrog in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. These businesses are usually referred to as small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), or startups.
The Pathway platform offers the following 22 technology training and marketing support modules to small businesses. You can contact Pathway to get associated with it.
By Rakesh Raman
Collaborative Marketing Concepts: The collaborative marketing is supposed to cover a segment of similar businesses that want to conserve costs by carrying out joint marketing campaigns. The collaborative marketing concepts are particularly suitable for micro units in segments such as handicraft makers or small garment manufacturers who have limited financial and manpower resources.
Digital Brand Management: After understanding the business of a particular company and the surrounding ecosystem, the next step will be to make a complete marketing strategy for the company and provide custom brand management services. The work also includes creation of corporate kit, product kit, and media kit in multimedia formats highlighting the brand strengths.
Artificial Intelligence for Marketing: Although artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are in their infancy, they can still be applied in a limited way to generate content for marketing communications. Small businesses can learn and use Generative AI tools to generate market intelligence for their business domains.
Artificial Intelligence for Content: Since most small businesses lack content creation skills, they can use AI software interfaces such as ChatGPT (or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) or Microsoft Bing AI Chat for creating multilingual content that can be used in diverse business environments. These environments include staff training, soft skills, events content development, partner communications, and so on.
Digital Content Creation: If the company website is built with old static technologies, it must be revamped with the latest responsive design options, providing a smooth access to users on different front-end devices. Plus, the content on the company site should always be fresh. Corporate and brand content creation and regular updation of the website or blog is an important activity.
Social Media Management: Although social media communication is a tricky ballgame, each company should at least build its brand presence on popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. Regular brand messaging on these sites can help you attract consumers for enhanced brand recall.
Advanced Search Engine Optimization: It will be a mistake if you have a site of a dozen odd pages and you start expecting search engines to show your site pages at the top of search results that cull out data from over a trillion pages on the Web. As contemporary Web search technologies respect content, the company should have content-based SEO services, which are more effective than conventional SEO techniques.
Web Analytics: There are a slew of Web analytic services – including Google Analytics, Amazon’s Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, and others – that promise to provide you data on different parameters about the interaction on your site. Trouble is, none of them is reliable. You can test this by comparing their results for the same site for the same period of time. Their Web traffic estimates will differ drastically. The same is true for social media analytic services. Still, a company should consolidate content on its website as well as social media pages and carry out qualitative traffic analysis.
Digital Public Relations: While public relations (PR) is an important brand promotion activity, traditional and old-styled PR approaches do not work in the new-media universe. We must understand the finer nuances of PR and digital media channels to provide complete PR services including content creation and communications to promote a brand in the local as well as international markets.
Mobile Marketing: Today, mobile marketing is mainly limited to SMS, and mobile is still not a reliable medium for brand messaging because of various factors such as m-spam, geographical limitations, device form factor, and so on. However, we can provide selective and ethical mobile marketing services to client companies.
Competition Tracking: An important marketing need is to know what your competing companies are doing. Web monitoring can help you do that. But the Web is like an information ocean. It’s not easy to track your competition’s activities, but you can still use some digital tools for limited tracking.
Pathway Proposal: The Pathway platform offers technology and marketing services to small businesses as well as ad agencies and public relations (PR) companies. You can click here to download and study the proposal.
Cost-Effective Advertising: Online ad landscape is undergoing a seismic shift where most digital ad options are increasingly being challenged. So, it’s not advisable to go in for paid online advertisements particularly in the initial period of your digital marketing exercise. However, depending on the brand requirement, we can handle complete advertisement work including ad creation, selection of online media properties, ad delivery, payments, etc.
Marketing Campaign Management: Instead of spending money on individual, one-off ads, it’s always recommended to carry out sustained digital promotional campaigns. Although these campaigns are expensive, they are extremely useful for consumer engagement and for higher levels of brand recall. In most cases, these campaigns – called hybrid campaigns – are supported by field activities.
Online Event Management: All of us know that physical participation in local and international exhibitions can cost you an arm and a leg, as traveling and display costs are very high. We should have options to participate in virtual events that use digital platforms. Virtual exhibitions are not only cost effective, but they also have far greater impact on your potential buyers and other business partners.
E-Commerce Platforms: Depending on the category of products, we should be able to create our exclusive e-commerce stores or use other established e-commerce platforms to actually sell your products in different parts of the world. Initially, it will not be easy for you to attract consumer traffic on your e-commerce sites. However, with sufficient content creation skills, it is possible to create relevant content to ensure consumer engagement which can be translated into sales.
Marketing Impact Analysis: Unlike traditional media, the biggest advantage of digital media is the impact measurement. You can measure – or at least estimate – the impact of your digital marketing efforts. It can help you calculate the return on investment (RoI) that you make on digital marketing. However, the standard quantitative tools to measure impact may not be sufficient to give you the real level of impact. We need to generate quantitative and qualitative impact measurement reports for different digital brand promotion activities.
In-House Training Management: In today’s information-driven world, digital marketing can’t be a secondary activity for your company. Rather, you should adopt it as a complete and exclusive business process for which you need to usher in an enterprise-wide cultural change. To help you achieve this goal, we can provide digital marketing training to your select staff so that they could become an effective interface between the digital agency and your company.
Export Marketing: Depending on your requirement, we can act as your integrated sales & marketing partner. To handle your exports, we will work as an extended export arm for your company. In this case, we will use traditional and digital channels to manage end-to-end work under a suitable commercial arrangement to market your products in different export markets in a revenue-sharing arrangement.
Video Conferencing Training: Although video conferencing is a simple technology to have two-way communications, most small businesses lack soft skills to present themselves in video conferencing sessions. This training module will educate business executives to learn video presentation skills and the applications of video conferencing for internal and external communications.
Business Process Management: Since most small businesses work in an ad hoc manner, they do not make dedicated processes for different areas of their business. In the absence of manual business processes, they cannot apply technology to automate their work environment – which results in increased operating expenses (OpEx). In this module, the small businesses will learn the importance of enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Communication Skills: The issue of weak language and communication skills has become a major bottleneck in the growth of most small businesses. They are particularly hesitant to use English, which is the current global lingua franca. The small business executives need specialized training on the use of English and application of English in the business environment.
Market Research: You cannot run your own business successfully if you do not understand the market in which you operate. In this training module, small businesses will learn the traditional as well as digital market research techniques. They will also know how to analyze research findings and apply them in different corporate and marketing communication domains.
While these marketing areas are extremely complex, the best implementation model will be a combination of in-house skills, consulting support, and digital marketing services.
The modules explained above are in addition to the advertising and marketing services offered on our RMN News Sites.
By Rakesh Raman, who is a national award-winning journalist and founder of the humanitarian organization RMN Foundation. He has been running the global technology news site RMN Digital for the past 12 years. Earlier, he was writing an exclusive edit-page tech business column (named Technophile) regularly for The Financial Express, which is a daily business newspaper of The Indian Express Group.
He had also been associated with the United Nations (UN) through the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) as a digital media expert to help businesses use technology for brand marketing and business development. You can click here to know more about him and his work.
