Businesses urged to use digital platforms to enhance their businesses
According to Katangane, local and small businesses lack technological skills and are illiterate when it comes to using social media to keep their businesses going.
Kwatsaduza – Digital marketing agency Makatz Empire wants to educate businesses on how to use the internet to attract new clientele and promote their businesses during the pandemic.
The founder of the agency, Irvin Katangane, said since the beginning of lockdown many businesses have been badly affected.
According to Katangane, local and small businesses lack technical skills and are illiterate when it comes to using social media to keep their businesses going.
He is willing to assist businesses to take their brands to the digital space.
Katangane explained digital marketing as follows: “Simply put, digital marketing is the promotion of products and/or brands through one or more forms of electronic media, such as email and social media.
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“It differs from traditional marketing in that it uses multiple channels and methods that enable a business to analyse campaigns and understand what is working and what isn’t,” he said.
To provide a better understanding of digital marketing, he broke it down into eight steps:
1. Social media marketing – the use of social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter to promote a product, service or brand. That means sharing and creating content with followers, fans, partners, competitors – your audience across social channels, with the goal to increase engagement, followers and ultimately sales.
2.Content marketing – the form of using story-telling and valuable information to increase brand awareness and to promote a product or service, with the end goal of getting your audience to take any action that’s profitable. Content marketing aims to build relationships between your business and your customers, becoming a partner rather than an advertiser.
3.Email marketing – has quickly become one of the best converting marketing channels. By keeping your email subscribers regularly updated, you build and nurture a relationship with them. A good place to start is a monthly newsletter.
4. Search engine optimisation (SEO) – the process of optimising websites and content so they show up on search engines, like Google and Bing. SEO should always be the number one on any marketing strategy you do.
5. Search engine marketing (SEM) – while SEO is the process of getting unpaid traffic to your website, SEM is the opposite. You aim to get paid traffic to your website from search engines. The most common form of SEM is Google AdWords, for the simple reason that Google dominates the world of search engines and is the most used search engine in the world.
6. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) – similar to SEM, PPC advertising also describes marketing methods where the marketer will pay a predefined amount, usually known as a bid, to an advertiser to display an ad on their site relevant to the targeting set by the advertiser.
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7. Affiliate marketing – the practice of recommending products or services from another company to potential customers, generating a sale and earning a commission in return. You upload product feeds to an affiliate network, like AWIN, where third parties, such as blogs, YouTubers, social media influencers and life-hackers, can apply to become an affiliate of your brand. They then pick and choose products to feature to their audience and then provide them with a link to purchase directly from your website. An example is those popular vloggers on YouTube, reviewing make-up and whatnot. They will provide a link to an online store to purchase and they get a cut of the sales in exchange for featuring a product to their tens of thousands or millions of viewers.
8. SMS advertising – is something many people have forgotten about but proves to be very useful if you collect mobile numbers of your customers and have permission to send them texts as a form of marketing.
“Digital marketing is becoming more and more popular, with more and more devices connecting to the internet every day, the opportunities digital can bring increase every day.
“The above-mentioned should feature in most if not all of your marketing strategies for whatever products or services you are offering to the world,” he explained.
For enquiries contact Katangane 0614694097.
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