Digital marketing in Kenya has become the go-to strategy for business owners looking to grow a customer base affordably & consistently. This can be attested to the increasing number of Kenyan consumers going online since the 2019 pandemic. A strong customer base is crucial, especially to a business owner or a business whose success relies on the growth of your business. Whether your business is new, emerging or an established brand, your customers are the oil that keeps the wheels lubricated.
Many business owners focus on growing the number of customers and ignore the already existing customers. This is a serious mistake because a company’s existing customers contribute highly to its bottom line. A business has an over 60% chance of reselling to its existing customers, while it stands a 5-20% chance of successfully selling to a new prospect. This tells you how important your existing customer base is; therefore, you should do everything it takes to keep them.
In today’s business world, despite the powerful and modern marketing tools, techniques and
methodologies, businesses still have a hard time retaining and growing their customer bases. This guide will help you to successfully and efficiently gain and retain a productive customer base to help take your business to the next level. We will explore effective ways to attract online customers and get them to buy what you are selling.
Table of Contents
1. Get to know your target customers
How well you know your customers is vital to the success of your strategies in digital marketing in Kenya. If you harness your target market, soon it will become your core target audience online in Kenya. One thing though is true, that your products and services serve some people’s needs. Therefore, ask yourself who those people are, why they choose your offering, and find the best ways to serve them. Also important is knowing who else they turn to while you are unavailable or unsatisfied with your services.
Not everyone is interested in your offering; you need to know who it is, without which the cost of your digital customer acquisition can go high than anticipated. Knowing your target customers fast will save you money, time, and effort. So how do you do this?
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Identify your target market
The target market for your business is a group of customers who are most likely to subscribe to your products and services. Therefore you must appeal to them and earn their trust by understanding their needs. This can only be achieved through extensive market research with surveys, data analysis, and focus groups to learn their purchasing behavior and demographic details. It pays to look at your competitors, find out how they cater to their customers, and try to bridge whatever gaps could be underserved in the current market.
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Analyze your customer base
Review customer data for trends in your customer relationship management (CRM)program. After that, come up with a segment of customers who often purchase from your business and determine what characteristics they share. Besides using a CRM program, surveying your most loyal customer and identifying their needs is vital. Find out what products or services that interest them the most. The process could be easier if you use analytics software to source the findings quickly. You will be able to spot trends effortlessly. Now combine your findings into one resource, such as a spreadsheet or a document.
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Observe your competitor’s client base
A competitor’s analysis tool will enable you to identify your customer’s customer base ad how it compares to yours. Find out whether there could be some customers you are not reaching that your competitor does. If there are, determine if it is worth it to go after them or not. n
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Craft a customer profile
The information you have gathered from these processes will help you build a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-functional profile of your target customer. Having a customer profile in place will assist you when considering marketing strategies and new products. These are also used as a point of reference to ensure your proposed initiatives will address your customer’s pain points. It also could be that you have multiple customer segments. It could help if you create numerous ideal customers for specific products or services. Customer profiles can be broad or just precise. Among the typical details that you should include in the customer profile include
- Demographics: gender, age, and income
- Psychographics: Personal traits, lifestyle, and values
- Behavior: Spending habits and buying patterns
Competitor analysis
Understand who your competition is and how they engage their customer base. Identify whether there are gaps you can take advantage of or if there are industry standards you might have missed out on. You might also find out that there could be some mistakes you have been making that could have been avoided. There is a need to research your competition when engaging in digital marketing in Kenya. You do not have to reinvent the Wheel but figure out how to stand out. A few pro tips on how to stand out include:
- Check their websites – Become the customer now and try to gauge your competitor’s website for user experience to get a feel of what works for them. You can also use free digital audit tools to audit competitor websites and their landing pages. Whatever you find out is lacking should be your strong point. Implement it in your site and outdo them.
- How about their social media presence? – Here, you will check what strategies they are using to promote stuff, what they are promoting, and how active they are on those platforms.
- How are their advertising efforts? – Search for all the relevant keywords in your niche and find out if your competitors appear in the sponsored listings of search engines. Several third-party tools, such as SpyFu, will help you determine your competitor’s advertising activities, including the strategies for digital marketing in Kenya that work for them.
- Online reviews and citations: You can look at your competitor’s website’s reviews and determine their reputation online. By looking at this, you will know what they are doing right and where they are going wrong and avoid such mistakes.
2. Build a Website that caters to your customer’s needs
As a business, your website is your priced asset as is equal to a physical store online. You do not necessarily need an entire site dedicated to order but only a specific landing page within an existing site. This brings your visitors and customers to a place where they will learn more about you and what you offer.
Among the things to consider before you set up a business website is whether to hire a programmer to build it code by code or use a content management tool to build it. Examples of the best content management tools you can use today include Wix, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more. You don’t have to be a pro, but at least be a little knowledgeable. Also, before you embark on developing a site, first identify an ideal website domain and hosting company in Kenya.
3. Rank better on Google with SEO
Search engine optimization is among the sustainable ways to generate leads for any business with an online presence. These days, buyers search online before purchasing a product or service. Therefore, suppose your site is inactive on SEO; it will be left out and miss a great deal that could add value to your overall business. The modern consumer believes online platforms as an essential part of their shopping. Whether shopping in a brick-and-mortar store or over the Internet, they go online to learn more about the product before purchasing it. Therefore, you should know the importance of SEO.
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What are the principles of SEO?
SEO describes a strategy that includes website building and developing quality content. When all is done the right way, your site offers an enhanced experience to your visitors while at the same time boosting your brand trust. SEO plays a vital role in showing search engines the value of your site. Only when search engines recognize your site’s value will they rank it highly for questions relevant to your business.
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Keyword optimization
There is a need to optimize relevant keywords for your webpage. Using the correct keyword phrases helps prospects and customers find your business between thousands of results.
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Optimize your website for mobile devices
SEO won’t be complete when your website is not optimized for mobile devices. According to Google, many searches are conducted over mobile devices compared to other sources. Therefore, your website needs to be mobile-friendly to increase the rank of your search engine result. Your site ranking increases by optimizing your web content for every device, optimizing easy navigation on mobile devices, and reducing page loading time. Also, try as much to reduce unwanted pop-ups for a good user experience.
When these factors are optimized, you will be assured of an improved website SERP ranking hence huge website traffic and conversion. The goal for any marketing channel is lead conversion and sales revenue. With a well-optimized website, you will discover that it is one of the highest revenue-generating channels.
4. Build a business blog
Blogging is the bloodline of your business’s social media marketing in Kenya. If you want to grow your customer base, you must start here. The height of the blogging opportunity peaked a few decades ago as a form of activism to vent out; it remains one of the best ways to build your business online. It can alter your profit margins too. With it, you can use your content marketing efforts to reach new leads while keeping your existing customer base engaged. Enterprises across the globe are using blogs to keep customers informed about the changes happening in the industries.
The benefits of blogs include increased traffic to business websites through sharing and search engine visibility. Blogs make brands appear authoritative and strong, increase SEO leading to brand visibility, and help develop better customer relationships. Create a blog and keep it updated regularly, as this gives your business relevant connections with your leads. Readers online will find your blog and share it, which increases traffic to your site.
Today, blogging is less common than it used to be, but if used correctly, it will be a staple for your business’s future. Blogging should combine social skills, textual context, accessibility, a standard for internet content, and user-friendly knowledge.
5. Ask Your Customers for Testimonials
Customer reviews are critical, and there is a significant difference between one that utilizes it and one that doesn’t. When visitors tour your business website in Kenya with the intent of purchasing a product or service, the first thing they will search for before they can make their purchase is customer reviews.
Therefore customer reviews are inevitable for your business to run smoothly. Customer testimonials also allow you to know the desires and needs of your customers and act decisively. As a business owner in Kenya, it is essential that you focus on Google and social media in your quest for customer reviews.
Always understand that some reviews won’t be helpful when using Google for reviews. From there, you should find out something about your customers, such as who your regular customers are and which ones seem more satisfied with the products and services you offer, before you go on asking for reviews directly. There is no need to worry when you get negative reviews as they are essential because they allow you to make adjustments where you are wrong to cater to many more customers. After all, customer reviews are all about the connection your business has with its customers. Therefore, if they have a negative outlook on your brand, find ways to make your services better for them so they can be comfortable and confident doing business with you next time.
6. Collect Email Addresses From Website Visitors
Having an email database goes a long way in helping you develop your brand and connects with your visitors. It also helps you maintain your customers. Today more businesses in Kenya are involved in purchasing consumer emails, not knowing that the people who receive those emails may have yet to hear about your brand in the first place. Therefore that method delivers vanishingly low returns in the end.
Instead, finding organic ways of building your email list is the best strategy for digital marketing in Kenya that can see you grow your customer base and retain your loyal customers who deliver revenue. But how do you do this?
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By using opt-in forms on your site
Your site needs an opt-in form for users to enter emails and subscribe to your communications. The form or signup page should be quick and straightforward for visitors to leave their email addresses, with some apparent user benefits such as exclusive content and promotions. Your forms should also have visual pops to catch your user’s eye.
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Offer specific content or resources to email subscribers
It will help if you create informational content that reflects your audiences’ professional interests. These could be a white paper, ebook, free software trial, webinar, etc., that offers your customers helpful information.
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Use modals, pop-ups, or overlays
Also, today, many companies in Kenya are increasingly using models or pop-ups which open when they complete a particular action on their websites. These actions could be, for instance, exceeding a minimum browse time, reading a blog, or accessing a particular webpage.
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Create an interactive discount “game”
You can also start collecting emails by creating games such as the Wheel of Fortune games that reward your visitors with an incentive when they opt-in for an email list. The visitors win a great deal when they put their email addresses.
7. Expand with Current Customers
It is too costly to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one. Businesses must strive to maintain their current ones while looking for ways to expand their customer base. For this to happen, you must examine how your customers already use your existing products.
While at it, find ways to prolong their engagement. For instance, customers use many services to fill gaps in offerings. Therefore you should increase your services so they can get what they need under one roof.
If you realize your customers are making irregular purchases, you should create a loyalty program that promotes more frequent purchases. And, if the customers subscribe to your lowest plan without upgrading, then offer more affordable custom plan options to get them to pay got the tools they use.
8. Keep Track of Your Performance
Through benchmarking, your business gains valuable feedback about its performance. It compares the measures like cycle time, cost productivity, and the quality of a particular process.
When you keep track of the performance of your business, it helps you understand where you are as a business. The results obtained are used to determine the actions for improvement. Various benchmarking tools enable you to see how your enterprise compares to your competitors.
Strategies for digital marketing in Kenya can also be scrutinized to understand how effective they are in bringing in new customers and strengthening your customer base. You can use output measures of performance tracking to understand various business aspects such as the number of new customers, the number of new products or services developed, customer satisfaction, return on innovation spending, employee satisfaction, and much more.
9. Invest in YouTube Video Content
YouTube does a better job of spicing up your content for your business. Today, people are more attracted to visuals than written content. Excellent videos are a better way to add visuals to your content for your prospects. A business person needs to tap into YouTube’s massive audience, given that there are several billion video views daily on YouTube. Businesses should learn how to create YouTube accounts for their businesses. These could enable them to easily tap into a vast hoard of potential prospects as many videos are watched daily.
Also, the videos can be easily shared with just a simple link. Businesses with YouTube accounts can reach their customers easily as they are already in a single place. You can even make yourself much more noticeable by advising on other people’s videos. YouTube is one of the biggest video-streaming platforms. When you upload your business video content here, you are confident of finding a group of people who will turn into your raving customers and fans.
10. Give Something to Get Something
Freemium offers have proved to be a great way to grab the attention of potential leads. With it, businesses give away something of value for absolutely free in exchange for customer information. You can choose a freemium product to give away; it could be as interactive as free prototype software or as simple as a PDF downloader. When a company gives freemium offers, the customer is not required to pay anything to use the tool.
However, they must supply an email address and sometimes create an account with the business. Until they do this, they can understand how valuable that tool is to their business. The business can then analyze the product usage report for the users who have benefited from the free tool and create a personalized customer service and sales offer, depending on the tool they use.
11. Create an Affiliate Program
In affiliate marketing or program, the business owner pays an affiliate, a blogger, an influencer, a website owner, or another business a commission for sending them traffic. The affiliate gets traffic to the business owner through product integration, website, or social media content. In return, they are paid a commission based on the number of new users they send to their partner site or those who perform a specific action, e.g., purchasing, downloading an application, or signing up for a free trial. You can also partner with influencers, businesses, individuals, or your customers to attract more customers to your website. Affiliate programs are the preferred technique of digital marketing in Kenya, given that it is a low start-up cost technique with low risk. You can only disburse payment to your affiliate marketer when a conversion is made.
12. Device a Customer Referral Program
Refrain from seeing your customers as a source of sale. Customers can aid your company in more than just being a source of sale; they may be an extension of your marketing efforts. Hence you need to develop a referral program that rewards buyers whenever they introduce a new business. Start by determining an incentive. Find out what motivates your customers the most in your line of business. You can consider incentives such as discounting your services, offering a free product, upgrading your customer’s plan, etc.
It helps to create a tracking system that rewards your customers quickly and accurately. You will be surprised by how quickly your customers lose interest when the reward takes too long. Pay extra attention to the results of your referral program and adjust your policy when needed. For instance, you can improve participation by offering discounts when a new customer comes on board via a referral code. Take caution, too, because if the incentive is too generous, it can hurt your sales; hence you might want to reduce it.
13. Engage Customers With Live Chat.
After practicing all the above ways, you will find out that still more needs to be done, and one of them is using live chat as part of your customer engagement strategy. First, live chat helps you connect with your customers around the clock. It offers your customers an open window to connect with your business whenever needed. It lets you offer them 24/7 support and engage with all their queries and engagement.
It also reduces the cost of your engagement strategy, unlike calls where the customer support agent can have hours of conversation with only a single customer at a time. With it, you can engage with multiple customers and manage multiple people chats simultaneously. A feature like multiple chat windows will help reduce the chat queue and enable the agent to engage with many customers simultaneously.
It also allows you to monitor visitor behavior in real-time proactively. Based on their browsing activities, customers can chat with your agents. Chat tools like ProProfs enable you to initiate a chat manually or through greetings. Therefore if an agent can identify an opportunity where a customer is likely to engage based on the activity on the site, they can start a chat and personalize and easily personalize engagement.
Do the following, therefore, to improve chat engagement with your visitors:
- Customize and place chat buttons properly
- Add conditions for triggering automated messages
- Track chat analytics to know the key areas that require improvement
- Reply to your customer’s queries quickly with canned responses
14. Redefine your target
The good thing with digital marketing is that you can quickly redefine your target demographics using accurate information. Digital marketing also helps reduce marketing costs when redefining the right audience.
It gives you access to analyze campaign results through analytics. Always count on it for a continuous turning of the campaign until you realize the best results with the least investment. Use free tools such as Google Analytics to gauge the performance of your business website and how it is hitting its target prospects.
15. Gamify Customer Experience
Gamification means adding playful elements to daily procedures and tasks to make the process more engaging and enjoyable. Today, gamification is applied across every sector, including in business, to attract new users using gamified elements that enhance customer experience. The idea of gamification in business is to have the customer enjoy and keep using the product since it is similar to a game or hobby.
Conclusion
Creating and building your customer base is a hallmark of the early days of any business. The work never stops there, even after many funding rounds and establishing a foothold in the industry. Customer-driven businesses indeed foster growth through all business stages. The above tips can work for small and big businesses if implemented effectively. It can take time to realize a fast-growing clientele.
Nonetheless, it would help to exercise these strategies for digital marketing in Kenya to see your business naturally become famous and recognized by customers all over. As a business owner, always ensure you are on your toes with the latest strategies that have been tried and proven to help grow your customer base. Use them and learn from experts, and your business will succeed.
