To be honest, most ads around Kampala city are just average. It is rare to see a piece of ad work that stands out as in the one shown in this article.
As a consultant and mentor, I understand that to get business and sustain your company growth, you must find creative ways to market your business. Failure to market will lead to your eventual exit to the more shrewd and ambitious marketers and business people.
There are several tools available at your disposal to market. The common ones are (i) conventional marketing tools and (ii) unconventional marketing tools.
Before you start any marketing campaign, you need to first clarify who is your real target market or customer. Don’t just start spending money before you do this. Remember, the most effective marketing campaign is cheap.
Let’s say your target customer is Alex Notrealname.
Alex N should represent your target market. What is the age group, level of education, annual revenue and interests? The more accurate information you are able to collect about your ideal customer, the more lethal and successful your marketing strategy will be. Take time to know who your Alex N is.
With that in mind, write three to six reasons why Alex would be interested in your services or products. Is it airtime, Internet, accounting or legal services? Specify a product you intend to sell to Alex and why they would need it. Remember, many people need your services but they don’t know that you exist or whether they need the service. Using your marketing, you have to educate the prospect that they need your services and that you are the only best person to offer it.
Many of my customers in my private mentorship program at first tell me that are already successful and doing well and see no reason in joining my private mentorship program. I ensure that I let them know that if they had joined my mentorship, they would be far ahead than they are today. So, by not joining, they are missing out on achieving their full potential. No one is too good to be improved. Even the President needs advisors!
How are you making your prospects to want your services?
Next, identify the ideal marketing weapons.
There is a company in Germany that wanted to tap into the US Internet market. To do so, they approached the Bloomberg Business Week, and asked for the price of running six months adverts none stop. They then looked for financing of those ads. It was a huge risk, but they did it anyway. After the advert, the company is said to have acquired five corporate clients that gave the return on investment of their ad spend and more.
To get to such high profile clients, the company had to explore strategies to gain instant credibility. And placing an advert with BusinessWeek gave it. It is damn too expensive to run ads in Business Week. If the company could do it, they are credible and strong. Note that, such a strategy may be ineffective to other services like healthcare, as someone could wonder why spend all that money instead of investing it in corporate social responsibility!
You get the idea.
The common conventional marketing weapons/ tools are bill board TV, radio, print and now the Internet.
TV adverts are very effective if well done. To be effective, a TVC (television commercial) must be short and generate emotional attachment of the viewer to your products. You have to find creative ways to do that.
For that reason, a 5 minutes commercial is far effective that 30 seconds commercials on television. There is just not enough time to bring the emotional content. Of course, ‘marketing gurus’ will want to tell you that 5 minutes is too long for someone to be attentive.
Just inform them that over 90% of people with TV watch soap operas of 45 minutes none-stop! They also watch news for 30 minutes none-stop. The idea is people will have time for anything they see makes sense.
Print. This is the most abused. Billboards in Kampala are too wordy to make sense of. If you want to write a lot chose the right media i.e. a newspaper or business magazine. Otherwise, billboards should have no more than 9 words and offer clear next steps.
In the next part, we explore the unconventional strategies or the guerrilla marketing strategies.
I remain, Mustapha B Mugisa, Your Success Partner. 2014 All rights reserved.
