In Zimbabwe, when it comes to marketing and advertising your business, theres no better time to use social media to reach your best customers and demonstrate your services nationwide in real time with very little cost. Icono Global can grow your business with the power of social media channels like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to grow your audience and customer base, and build your brand and business in a strategic way.

Why use social media to grow your business in Zimbabwe?

As traditional methods of marketing to customers like news paper adverts, or flyers become less and less effective, businesses in Zimbabwe are turning to digital marketing to connect in positive ways with consumers. The key to social media success is to focus on how you can use it effectively to:

• increase the visibility of your personal brand and that of your business
• build and cultivate your personal and professional networks
• develop and grow relationships with customers and influencers in Zimbabwe
• engage in real-time two-way interaction with people, including answering queries
• publish and distribute original content that demonstrates your products and services
• share curated links to relevant information that adds value to the lives of your customers
• communicate with your community of followers, advocates and supporters
• ultimately generate new leads and boost sales for your business.

We need to be acutely aware just how social media has fundamentally changed the way we are connecting, communicating and collaborating as individuals, and therefore society as a whole.

Understanding the social media equation

Think of social media in two parts.

Firstly, there is social media participation, this is where you are present on social channels and are constantly delivering value to the online community in the form of:

• sharing other people’s content on Facebook or LinkedIn, or retweeting them if you’re on Twitter
• answering customers questions if you’re in a position to help whether they’re directly related to your business or not
• joining the conversation on a particular topic- this could be a group on Twitter talking about a certain issue that’s sprung up through the media, or joining a LinkedIn Group
• leaving genuinely interesting and relevant comments on selective blogs you read and podcasts you listen to
• promoting other people’s businesses and causes (for example, your municipal council may be running a street festival that could be good for you to be promote via your networks).

Make sure that before jumping into conversations on social networks, it’s critical to listen first, sit back and take note of the ‘lay of the land’ – try and get acquainted with the nuances of the particular network you’re intending to become active on.

Secondly, there is the creation and distribution of original content that informs, empowers, educates and/or entertains – content that will attract the right people to your brand, potential customers as well as the people who influence them.

To be effective however, content published and promoted via social media needs to be created with the audience in mind (thus it’s important you first understand who you’re trying to communicate with and where they hang out online).

Creating content with the customer in mind

This is where Icono Global comes in! More often than not your content should provide utility. In other words, it needs to be useful, relevant and add value to people’s lives. It could simply be information that answers people’s questions or satisfies a need they have relevant to your business, or it may be more around providing ‘thought leadership’ and demonstrating your knowledge and expertise. For example, this might mean an accountancy practice that publishes a blog post outlining its top tips on how to approach end-of-financial-year tax issues.

Once we create your content, it’s then simply a matter of publishing it to one or more of the social media platforms available which is best suited to your business needs and sharing the links with your followers on social networks.

Building your presence on social networks is important not only because they make for excellent content distributors, search engines such as Google use social media shares to determine the usefulness of content to an audience, so social media presence can also positively affect search rankings.