Every entrepreneur in Kenya has at least two concerns about marketing. One, you got to ask about just how relevant is marketing to your situation. Even if the internet is potential of more customers than you can imagine, you have to wonder if things are so obvious.
Using this platform, and others, to push for sales is obvious. Nobody overthinks about gaining more sales. It’s clear. It’s like when you picked someone and now, in the morning, you want them to go. On the other side, marketing uses vague words like brand and exposure. Plus, it has in-the-air payoff that you can only claim after longer periods of time. The other rivals of entrepreneurs (apart from employees), investors will agree that the longer the payoff window the greater the risk of you losing out.
Nevertheless, marketing can work for small businesses too. You need to have specific marketing goals. Just like any Nairobi woman would have that list with attributes of her perfect man (it hurts. Men don’t have specs like phones, guys). When you allocate a share of your budget to marketing, instead of other business needs, your return should be obvious.
Another concern for entrepreneurs is how to send that message. How do you know if you’re being creative? You don’t want to roll out what has been criticized as a “me too marketing.” Captivate us. But, as we mentioned in 2018, you can’t know prior what is creative and what is not. This is why some business owners prefer to go with what has worked for others. But this doesn’t captivate us. The thing is that creative, innovative and similar adjectives only happen after the fact. So, as an entrepreneur, your only choice is to accept the risk of going over the line, out of the box and wherever.
Do you have a choice? Not really. We live in a time where competition for prospective customer attention is wild. And besides knowing ‘how to say it’, you must figure out ‘what to say’. You don’t want to say too much nor reveal too little. In fact, one tip we picked from Rookie Manager blog is about how you should not hide relevant information from your intended audience. A good marketing message will be composed of two things.
One part of it should be about the obvious utility of your work. Answer, “what we do.” The second part is that customer perception of value thing. The creative part of your marketing message, bits of it is you influencing this. They always ask, “what’s in it for me?” And their answer is not always linked to utility. Why do you think we have luxury bottled water and status symbol phones? Haha. But let’s not make fun of customers. We need them.
The thinking to implementation process of your marketing project can be summarized in a chart, because why not?
And when you have a couple of minutes to spare, go through our amazing infographic collection.