Google has taken a very important step to empower the small medium businesses in India. Google CEO, Sundar Pichai announced back about Digital Unlocked – an initiative through which Google will help small and medium businesses or individuals in India to come online and grow their business on digital platforms.

According to him, Google Digital Unlocked program will reach around 51 million people of small and medium businesses in India. Also, the focus is on initiative helping to enable businesses at the start of their digital journey

Here are the 10 things to know about Google Digital Unlocked:

1.    Digital Unlocked is launched to help around 51 million small and medium businesses in India to go online and get benefitted from it.

2.    Google will provide both online and offline training and certification under this program to assist the SMBs of India.

3.    The training is meant to guide SMBs on how to go online, need to be online, various digital marketing platforms such as Search Engine Optimization, use of search ads, analyzing their traffic etc.

4.    Google has partnered with Federation of India for Commerce Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry (FICCI), and Indian School of Business, Hyderabad for training and certification.

5.    Any business with Internet access can join this program by Signing Up here: https://digitalunlocked.withgoogle.com/

6.    Google has also launched an app ‘Primer’ that will teach SMBs skills to develop their business online and provide training. Primer can be used without internet and is available for download on iOS and Android Play Store.

7.    Along with online training, Google also has its offline centers in Chandigarh, Haridwar, Jaipur and Bhubaneswar, Jalandhar etc. Here it will offer eight-hour sessions to SMBs.

8.    Google has planned to conduct around 5,000 workshops across 40 cities in the coming three years.

9.    Currently, 23 topics based on Digital Marketing is included. Google has said that it will keep on adding new topics as required.

10. Google has also announced to launch “My Business” in order to help SMBs in building their own websites from scratch. According to Google around 40,000 SMEs are listed on their search engine but not every one of them has their own website. Under My Business, Google will help SMBs create their own Mobile compatible websites.

How Digital Unlocked for Small Medium Business is important

With Digital Unlocked program, the Small and Medium Businesses are going to be benefitted leaps and bounds who are not much tech savvy in India.

As per Rajan Anandan, Vice President, South East Asia and India” Less than 32 percent of small businesses in India have any sort of web presence, and a large number of small businesses don’t understand why they need to be online”.

Through this initiative, Small, Medium Businesses will be able to experience the true power of going digital. Not only they will understand the benefits of going digital but will also be able to earn them more.

“Small businesses online have significantly larger market share outside their cities. SMBs that go digital end up employing more people than those that ignore online,” said Rajan Anandan.

Contribution of SMBs in Indian economy will help India’s GDP grow by 10%, as per the KPMG – Google study.

Also Read: Google’s Digital Marketing Learning Initiative for SMBs