How do you win an audience, prospects, customers, and clients online for your Africa business and how do you get more of them? Well, being the owner of a blog this is something I studied online tirelessly, but it did not really occur to me to share this as Africa business advice, as it seems to be such generic information – tons of it is out there… available to all.
But doing my research online, I found this – and it changed my mind: An article on AllAfrica that was titled
South Africa: Holiday Rental Company Doubles Its Website Traffic
This is not news, it happens all the time that businesses increase revenue, because they get more people accessing their company information online, but it had to be posted on an Africa news site for me to hit home: Of course it was relevant to you as an Africa business owner or entrepreneur and I should share some insights with you, before assuming you had it all perfectly under control.
First of all of course, you need a website! The majority of African businesses still have none, others have run a website for years and still do not attract enough visitors to the site.
A professional blogger once asked:
What is the main purpose of having a website for your business?
Think about it for a moment….
Information sharing…..?
Connecting with your prospects….?
Wrong.
The main purpose is: to sell.
And if you really understand how to use your website to actually increase revenues, you will need to do much more than putting up a site with some info and contact details. It is a real science and understanding that better or investing time and money into the implementation of it can simply help you grow your business.
I rarely copy and paste text from other articles into my blog, but since it was this particular South African story that caught my attention, let me share the part of it here, as it brings the issue right to the point.
Using technology to drive revenue
A local South African small to medium sized business, Cape Town-based Holiday Rental group Capsol, appointed an IT marketing guru, Max Guedy. Guedy, at the forefront of his field, realigned his client’s online marketing strategy to benefit from the shift in Google’s ranking algorithms by introducing high-quality content to the company’s online marketing initiatives. Holiday accommodation is an incredibly competitive arena on the internet. By appointing a leading thinker in online marketing strategy, Capsol, slowly crept up and passed their competition in search engine rankings in a relatively short period. Being at the forefront of internet marketing enables the company to remain 6 – 12 months ahead of any advances by competition, an enviable position.
Here you go. People may simply not come across your business because they don’t know you exist and you are not visible to them online. But what would change for you if you’d suddenly end up on page 1 of Google search engine rankings for particular key words. Exactly! People would suddenly see you, click and visit your site in the hope that you can solve a problem for which they are – right now- seeking a solution. This audience is made of your potential prospects and you can then turn those into customers or clients.
As the South African example also demonstrates: The main strategy for this at the moment is content marketing, which means the regular and continuous provision of relevant quality content or posts focusing on your particular niche – published on your website. It is a concept that focuses on ‘giving genuinely’ (for example useful advice) before winning trust and paying customers. This is precisely, why many businesses have blogs on their websites these days:
One, it allows them to follow a growing trend where personal interaction and engagement is preferred over passive, scientific, or corporate language. And two, Google will recognize the quality content – as it wants to remain a professional search engine – and rank you higher with time.
Now there is some good and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news: You will need to make quality content available on your site regularly –once a week, twice a week or more often. It can be your own written content or the aggregation of content from other sites in your particular African niche on your site….you could then publish that as a blog, as news, or as educational material. So you have to invest some time into this.
The other bad news is that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is really a science in itself and there are other things you need to take care of to rank high, but I think it can be confidently said that quality generic content is one of your best strategies these days. Well, that and social media marketing linking back to your site – Facebook is still the strongest social media platform in Kenya for example and enjoys similar popularity across Africa – so you got to promote your business there, even if you are a dentist!
Now the good news I have for you is this: There are simply not that many high-quality Africa business sites or blogs out there. Most Africa business related search engine keywords (use Google Analytics) rank low or medium in regards to competition. This means that overall you will have greater chance to make it into the top of search engine rankings if you are persistent enough. Yes, this is why even South African Holiday Rental group Capsol managed to get soon into the online top in a competitive holiday market.
Fact is that Africa currently sees a 40% increase each year in e-commerce, yep a 40% increase, that’s huge! And Africa has the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world with most Africans accessing the Internet through their phones. Here you go, Africans ARE selling and buying online and this will grow exponentially in the next few years. Get ready and make sure, your Africa business is visible online – the large amounts of your prospects will not access your services or products because they passed by your office or found you on yellow pages, but because they follow you on social media and find you on the first page for Google rankings.
I think this is not just following a global trend, it is very much an African trend in the making and you should step into that!
And still. Let’s be defined what dosage in this case approaches most of all. There can be it cialis 20mg or something another. To me I think it isn’t necessary to choose for you necessary. Think. Perhaps suits you cialis 20 mg It is much better.
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Thanks Dr Harnet for sharing this awesome article. Very informative indeed..