The amount of money South African brands are prepared to spend on digital marketing is on the increase, hitting more than R2 billion in 2020 – an increase from R1.4 billion in 2019.
Covid-19 saw brands needing to make a dramatic shift in thinking, moving from traditional advertising to the digital way of doing business.
A survey conducted by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that, on average, South Africans are using the internet more than ever before to shop, game and stream television. South Africans are online, so as a brand, your business should be investing resources into meeting them there.
Are you making the most of what digital marketing has to offer? Here are three ways you can market your brand without breaking the bank.
Start with email marketing
If you’re not yet leveraging the power of email marketing, now’s the time to look into it. Research has shown that in South Africa, email marketing produces the best return-on-investment when compared to other digital mediums.
A study by TouchBase Pro found that on average clients have reported an ROI of 30:1 when using targeted email marketing. This means that for every R1 clients spend, they make R30 worth of return.
To keep your email marketing budget down, you can use tools like MailChimp, which is free, as long as your email send does not exceed the daily limit of 2000.
Another option is GetResponse, which is free for businesses that have 500 or less contacts. These packages are perfect for a small and medium enterprise (SME). Both these tools will give you access to analytics like open- and click-through rates so you can make informed decisions based on data, rather than launching a campaign based on guesswork. All you need is an investment of time and a healthy dose of patience to make email marketing work for you.
Is your brand ready for the Gram?
If you’re an SME that has its eye on the millennial or GenZ markets, Instagram is where you’ll find them. Compared to other channels, which have relatively complex advertising placement systems, boosting a post on Instagram is easy and intuitive.
What’s great about the platform is that you no longer need to have an Instagram profile or account to run ads. You can set everything up using Facebook and opt to have users be redirected to a landing page, your website or any other URL. Another SME-friendly factor about Instagram is that you can pause or delete your promotion at any time during the campaign, should you find that you’re not getting the results you’d hoped for, or if you run out of budget.
Instant messaging for seamless customer communication
One of the most affordable means to get your business in front of your target audience is to use WhatsApp – currently the most popular instant messaging app in the country. WhatsApp has a dedicated channel for small businesses, called WhatsApp for Business, which enables SMEs to communicate with their customers using instant messaging. Using WhatsApp for Business, you can create a profile with your business information, generate automatic responses and organise your chats using labels. There are several innovative small businesses who are leveraging the use of WhatsApp as a digital marketing medium.
We’re seeing coffee shops allowing their customers to order their coffee via WhatsApp and have it delivered to their place of work. Restaurants and takeaway outlets are using it to take orders and promote daily deals and specials. Musicians and artists are using it as a way to promote their shows and incentivise people to join their network. WhatsApp can be a powerful marketing tool, particularly for small businesses whose objective it is to grow their database without unnecessary ad spend.
Ben Bierman is a managing director at Business Partners Limited.
BUSINESS REPORT