Promoting Your Business In South Africa
Promoting your business is not easy, a survey conducted by Mailchimp shows that the greatest challenge that faces businesses is marketing. It doesn’t matter how awesome or amazing your product is, if you can’t get it in front of people’s eyes then it won’t sell. This practical guide will show you how to promote your business in South Africa. There are marketing methods that can work well in other countries but not so well in South Africa. This article is based on marketing strategies that work for South African businesses.
Marketing is an art; some people are naturally good at marketing while others are not. It’s not as simple as following certain steps and getting everything right, it’s also about getting the timing right and understanding the market and what people want. In order to know exactly how to promote your business in South Africa, you have to know what will appeal to your customers and where to find them.
How To Market Your Business In South Africa
1) Understand the power of the internet
The internet is a force to reckoned with, look around, some of the biggest companies in the world by market capitalization are internet companies. Take Amazon, Facebook and Google for example, they operate primarily on the internet and they are bigger than almost every traditional business that exists. Billions of people around the world have access to the internet, focus most of your marketing campaign on the internet. It’s way more cost effective and also very good at getting you customers. Millions of South Africans use the internet on a daily basis.
2) Build a website
I am quite sure you have come across many articles on the web telling you build a website for your business. That’s because it works, most people don’t see the value of a website because they use it all wrong. They use it as a portfolio, that’s not how it should be used, use it as a marketing tool. Your social media campaigns won’t work well without a website.
The real secret to having a website is knowing how to perform SEO, have you ever wondered how Google chooses which websites to appear for certain searches, have you thought about the amount of traffic of traffic those websites receive from clicks. You probably clicked through to this article from a search engine, now that you are here, I am giving you valuable information, I could also advertise my business services to you as you are reading this article. That’s the beauty of SEO. Try to build a website as soon as possible for your businesses. If you already have one but it serves no one purpose than being a portfolio then you can get SEO services from Promta and enable your website to receive traffic from the search engines. Here is a more detailed guide on how to use your website effectively.
3) Social media marketing
I am willing to bet that you have a social media account, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. If I am correct about that then I am also correct about assuming that a huge amount of your target market uses social media. The good thing about social media marketing is that people can immediately take action on your adverts and promotions. Think about it, let’s say Mike makes an advert promoting his clothing brand on a billboard and Nkosi makes an ad on social media doing the same thing. Each advert gets to be seen by 100 people, who would win in terms of generating leads? Nkosi, the person seeing Nkosi’s ad can immediately click on it while the person seeing Mikes ad cannot take immediate action.
Social media marketing is also very cheap compared to traditional forms of marketing in South Africa. It’s actually one of the cheapest ways to promote your business in South Africa. You can run an ad for R50 on Facebook and have it reach over 1 000 people.
4) Use influencers to promote your business in South Africa
Social media doesn’t only allow you to advertise through paid ads, it has created mini celebrities. These people are so popular on social media platforms that they have followers (fans). You can use them to advertise your business to their audience, this is known as influencer marketing. Say for example you are a business developing beauty products, you can find an influencer with a good skin and pay them to advertise your products. How much this will cost depends on the influencer, there are so many influencers that influencer marketing is fairly cheap. Especially on Instagram.
5) Word of mouth
Word of mouth can be very powerful, technically in order to get word of mouth you should provide the best services or goods. People will recommend you to their friends, word of mouth leads usually have a higher conversion rate because people will naturally trust you. This is because you have been referred to them by someone they know.
6) Business directories
Business directories present high value and leads for businesses. If you signup to Promta you will automatically get free exposure for your business. It takes a lot of time to get SEO going and signing up your business to a business directory like the one of Promta will boost your SEO efforts.
7) Google ads
Google ads are on of the best ways to promote your business in South Africa. This platform is a little bit different from social media platforms. The method used for social media advertising is known as disruptive advertising, this is because you disturb a user with your advert while they are consuming their favourite content.
Google ads Is different, a user will see your ad because they are already looking for something similar to it. The users see your ad because they are intending to, user intent leads to higher conversion rates on leads. Let’s say for example a user searches for “hosting companies in South Africa” most of the time they make that search because they want to purchase hosting or do just a bit of research before they choose a hosting provider.
Marketing In The South African Business Space
Most business especially privately-owned business is usually established with the purpose of making a profit. Profit is a function of the number of the product or service you sell as a firm, given the cost of production. The number of product or service a producer or a firm sells is a function of how popular the product or service is in the market. In other words, it is a function of the demand for the product.
One of the popular ways in which firms have utilized to stimulate the demand for their product is Advertisement. Advertising is a means of communication between the owner of a business and customers with the objective of increasing sales or stimulate demand. According to Kullabs.com, advertising is the sale message directed to mass on behalf of the paying sponsor. The importance of advertising cannot be overemphasized as available data shows that spending on the advertisement has been on the increase.
According to Statista.com, It is estimated that advertising spending worldwide will surpass 560 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, representing a growth of roughly four per cent compared with the previous year. Similarly, in Africa, there has been an upward trend in expenditure in an advertisement. For example, in 2018, the entire advertising market in South Africa was estimated to be worth 36.6 billion South African rands (approximately 2.5 billion U.S. dollars).
Conclusion: How to market your business in South Africa
These are by far some of the best ways to go about when looking for ways to promote your business in South Africa. Other methods like Newspaper advertising, TV and Radio are also effective but way more expensive.
