ago, I was involved in a project with a start-up company. We worked our hearts out till we got the big bang deal with a company from UK. The deal was going to be our breakthrough and change our lives forever but not all stories have a happy ending.
Our United Kingdom partner demanded to see our website. Obviously we didn’t have one and the deal was off.
To vent my anger, we engaged the services of a “professional web designer” – take note of the quotes – to design our website. He did but instead of creating a communication platform online, he used all his designing technics as if our website was his last project on earth and made an overdesigned website wi
th a lot of addons which ended up making our users waste there precious time waiting for the pages to load. (Will be writing a separate post titled; fatal mistakes to avoid before launching your website). Iam not shooting at designers. Almost all designers I know can design a website far much better than mine but I learnt an important lesson when it comes to online marketing. Designers should work with marketers to produce a website for marketers. Ironically, the best websites were designed by people who know nothing about coding. Back to my story, Is Zimbabwe ready for internet marketing?
There has been a complete change in the way people interact. Be it relatives and friends, buyers
and sellers or customers and suppliers. We can all agree that the world has changed. People spend more time chatting on social media platforms than they do when they meet and people spend less time in shops than they do when they do online reviewing the product. It is in our nature to trust something that is written in black and white than being told by someone.
Most people in Zimbabweans me included detest it when they are followed by a shop assistant who always use the cliché conversation starter “tokubatsirai nei” (how can I assist you). Instead of engaging customers this way, businesses have now resorted to blog posts, tweets, rss feeds, pinterest, Google plus. A lot of Zimbabweans who have embraced social media prefer to chat on twitter, Facebook and sometimes linked in.
There are now so many ways to keep in touch with your clientele which are cost effective and simple and just a click away. If you haven’t started marketing your products online, start now.
Warning: One of the greatest advantages for marketing your business online in Zimbabwe is Internet marketing eliminates barriers to entry and therefore levels the playing field between a small firm and a large conglomerate. Even though an sme in Zimbabwe doesn’t afford to put billboards all around the city and host a radio show, the cost of creating a podcast of an online banner is the same irrespective of the size of the firm.
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