5 Marketing Ideas To Implement For Your Business in 2023

7 out of 10 business owners I talk to describe marketing as the biggest challenge in their business.

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Most tend to think that marketing is reserved for large businesses only which is untrue.

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Every business regardless of size, needs marketing. For people to buy from you, they need to know you, and for people to know you, you need to place yourself in front of them.

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In Zimbabwe, we have very big companies like Econet, Innscor, Simbisa Brands, Edgars, etc. If you think about it, all these companies, although they are now big were once very small startups that were scrambling just to get by.

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They did not wake up today and decide to be big; they had to fight for it.

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One term that is used to describe the relevance of a business is market-share, which is simply how much of a market a company controls.

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The keyword in the word market share is ‘market’ which is where marketing comes from.

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Simply put, to gain market share or recognition, you need to invest in marketing. As long as you are not marketing, forget about achieving your growth goals.

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This year, I had one of my very good clients come to me for assistance in crafting a marketing strategy. She is in the fashion industry, and her business had not been growing of late.

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The company had been running for 2 years with one shop located in the CBD.

As an SME, she wanted help with how she can improve so that she drives volumes and moves her sales in a cost-effective manner.

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She had a Facebook account and for a while had only been boosting her adverts without many results.

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To help her improve on her marketing, these are the five things we started with.

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Social Media

Since the company was already utilizing Facebook Ads, our goal was to maximize the entire Social Space since Facebook alone would not be enough.

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So we first made sure she was available on all social platforms, including Instagram, Tiktok, and Twitter.

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After setting up the platforms, the next we did was clean up her campaigns so that we make the ads targeted. As she was selling trendy fashion items, we defined buyer personas and targeted users within her personas so that she gets qualified inquiries.

This worked like magic.

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You see, the reason Facebook put up the boost button was to make everything seem so easy that everyone would end up believing that they could do it themselves, which is not the case.

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Regardless of how easy these things seem, you need guidance to do it right.

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Groups and WhatsApp

This is a platform that my client wasn’t using, and we had to add it to the platforms.

There are over 7 million people using WhatsApp in Zimbabwe, which makes it a valuable platform for online marketing as it’s almost universally accessible to everyone.

Our strategy here was simple. We created groups where we added all clients who would inquire through our Social Media platforms.

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To explain it differently, we used Social Media to drive awareness for the brand and get people inquiring who we would then add to these fashion groups.

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We did not only want to use the groups for advertising but to provide value, so we’d send through different tips on the groups on how people can take care of their clothes, fashion and outfit ideas, etc, you know the drill.

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To prevent spamming, we made the group admin only. On average, within a month, we had 5 full groups that were driving 50 inquiries a day, it was surreal!

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Email Marketing

There are over 2 million Zimbabweans with email accounts. This is big! It means that Email is still a valuable channel for communication.

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To use email as a tool, we’d ask our customers to share their email addresses with us, and in most cases, they would comply.

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We would then add these emails to a Mailchimp database. We ended the first month with 500 emails, a good number considering we could reach these people directly.

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Using my client’s profile, we sent a weekly fashion newsletter just to give value to our clients without asking for a direct sale. This worked wonders as we often received emails thanking us for the advice.

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E-Commerce Website

We only got to work on the E-Commerce website after building a clientele database digitally. A mistake I’m seeing most Zimbabwean businesses make in E-Commerce is building a platform first and then looking for the customers. This is the sole reason why E-Commerce Platforms fail.

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You need to build a customer or prospect base in the form of an E-Mail database and a community before launching an E-Commerce website.

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We put up an E-Commerce website with all the products listed and professional photography done for the website, and we shared the link to both our groups and Email database.

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On the day of the launch, we had over 50 clients place their orders through the site mainly because we shared it with people who knew about us and who had been interacting with us for 3 months which meant they trusted the brand.

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Google Search and PPC Ads

The last thing we did was set up the Google Search and Display Ads.

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Google Search Ads are those that appear when someone is searching on Google for an item.

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Our approach was different. When we did our research with Google, we noticed that a lot of Women turn to Google to look for different fashion outfits.

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We purchased keywords that leveraged them as they were doing research.

These were keywords like “Ideas for board meeting suits” or “dinner dress ideas”.

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So whenever someone would search for those, guess what? We were there, ready for them.

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To finish off, don’t make marketing more complicated than it needs to be. You need a strategy to Attract people, and after attracting them, you need to Engage them and then Convert them.

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I hope this case study has given you some ideas as to what you can use.

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If you need a free consultation on your marketing, my team is always eager and ready to serve you at the highest level, just respond to this email.

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It's time to make 2023 your best year yet.?