All you need to succeed: digital marketing for Rwandan businesses.

What Rwanda businesses are missing out

Digital marketing is a prominent determinant of whether your business will succeed or fail. Rwandan businesses today have to be aware that the majority of the marketplace will be based online in the near future. While you may run a small candy shop, the majority of consumers will be making their buying decisions by first exploring their options online through search engines, websites, and reading customer reviews. And now more than ever, more people are making their purchases online for home delivery through platforms like Kikuu, Vuba Vuba, and many others. Not only is it convenient but in the future, it will be mandatory.

 

How do to adapt

Digital marketing is the solution. Digital marketing refers to promoting your product using the internet through social media, websites, and other digital channels. If you’re thinking about transitioning from traditional marketing to digital marketing you are reading the right content. We are going to explore this new world of digital marketing together starting with the advantages.

Advantages of Digital Marketing for Rwanda Businesses

• Global Reach

Traditional marketing is restricted by geography and creating an international marketing campaign can be hard, expensive, as well as labor-intensive. However, digital marketing happens on the Internet, which means that you can reach out to people without having a physical presence.

• Local Reach

While global reach is a significant advantage of digital marketing, it also improves local visibility, which is especially important if your business relies on nearby customers. Local SEO and locally targeted ads can be beneficial for companies trying to bring more customers to their doors.

•  Cost-effective

Whether you want to promote your business locally or internationally, digital marketing provides you with cost-effective solutions. It allows even the smallest companies to compete with larger companies using highly targeted strategies. Most of these strategies won’t even cost anything at all to start with (such as SEO, social media, and content marketing).

•  Easy to Learn

While there are many aspects of digital marketing that you need to learn, it is fairly easy to get started. It gets more complex like the goals and the scale of the campaigns. However, it is all a matter of finding the right strategy that works for your business.

•  Effective Targeting

Even if you don’t have a clear idea of your target audience, digital marketing enables you to extract data to see which audiences will work best for you and optimize your campaign around them. There are many different options of targeting such as through keywords for search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), or demographic information on social media. 

Moving on, let’s look at how to create an effective digital marketing campaign.

Guidelines on creating a digital marketing campaign in Rwanda.

• Branding: Outline or use your brand guidelines to define your brand and how it’ll come through in your online campaigns. Think about your unique selling points (USPs), brand voice, and value proposition.

• Define your customer base: Determine who your business wants to reach with custom buyer personas. Think about user demographics, as well as the motivations that drive people to choose your company, products, and services.

• S.M.A.R.T. goals: Use specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals (also known as S.M.A.R.T. goals) to guide your strategy. Think about your organization’s short- and long-term goals for growth.

• Choose your digital marketing strategies: Pick the best strategies for your business. Focus on the techniques that offer the most value for your business and industry, versus trendy strategies.

• Set your digital marketing budget: Research digital marketing pricing to build a realistic budget for your business. 

• Brainstorm your strategy: Guide your strategy to success by planning your strategy. If you’re advertising, determine your ad spending. If you’re publishing content, build your content calendar.

• Launch your campaigns: Following your planning, launch your campaigns across channels. Ensure all your channels feature the appropriate tracking information. Your website, for example, should feature your Google Analytics tracking code.

• Track your results: Monitor and measure the performance of your strategies by tracking their performance. Use Google tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads to keep a pulse on your strategies and their return on investment (ROI).

Now that we understand how to plan a digital marketing campaign, it’s time we looked at digital marketing strategies. 

Digital marketing strategies Rwandan businesses

• Search engine optimization (SEO): this is the act of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. An effective SEO campaign addresses three key elements: your website, Google, and your audience. Google then ranks your site when a search query that matches your focus keyword is entered.

• Search engine marketing: also known as SEM or search marketing, refers to all the processes involved in generating traffic from search engines. SEM includes SEO (which to some extent is theoretically true), but practically, it is quite different. The core of an effective SEM strategy is paid advertising through platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads.

• Email marketing: According to research from Campaign Monitor, every $1 put into email marketing generates $38. Successful email marketing campaigns share relevant, timely information that is personalized to the recipient. Segmentation is an essential component of email marketing; it ensures that you’re reaching the right people at the right time.

• Content marketing: Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience–to drive profitable customer action.

• Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms as channels to reach large audiences. On social platforms, you can grow an organic audience of followers or you can use paid social advertisements to reach your target demographic.

• Digital Advertising: Digital advertising can also be referred to as paid advertising. It refers to every strategy and process involved in generating referral traffic to your site via paid digital display ads

• Mobile Marketing: Mobile marketing, as the name implies, is a digital marketing technique that involves marketing strategies focused on mobile users through SMS. Research shows that more than 80 percent of internet users own a smartphone, so this is an important niche to reach out to.

Digital marketing is essential if you want your business to survive and thrive in the 21st century. It can be an effective way to convert customers to your brand without expending a lot of resources. But, to be successful, you need to understand what you’re doing by setting clear goals, choosing the right channels, and measuring your results.