Whose Today’s Guest?
Mwila Kasonde Anamela is a dynamic performance driven professional with growing experience in Sales, marketing and customer relationship management. I am committed to quality and service excellence with aptitude for delivering effective solutions that drive company growth and technology innovation.
3 Effective Ways to Build a Steady Local Market For your products
- Marketing and Selling to Local Customers
The first thing that you need to do is define your target market (your customers). Look at the product that you have, the cost involved in manufacturing it. Looking at these aspects will help you determine who the customer that you are trying to convince is. Will it be someone that will appreciate the product or someone that won’t?
- Define Demography
In most cases businesses fail to sell their product or service because they fail to define who their customers are and they are taking their product or service to a different target market and in a wrong place.
This means that in order to market to local customers, there is need to define the demography, identify where these customers are found. Determining where clients that will appreciate your product or service will enable you to determine where to set up base as a business, either in the marketplace or at a mall.
- Create a Brand
In order to market and sale to local client, one needs to create a brand that speaks to those local clients, one that is attractive to them. Create a brand around the products that you produce and grow it, further more ensure that it reaches your targeted customers.
Strategies to Implement
The quickest way to get your product out there is by making it visible and desirable. Let’s imagine your products are meant for the fashion industry and you want to make these products visible, you could achieve this by approaching a celebrity. Offer them your product and allow them to take pictures with your products and post those images on their social platforms.
This will help you tap into their audience and followers, most of them would want to associate with products that their idols uses or has. If you don’t know any famous people reach out to you friends and try and make such connections, build those relationships because the business of a business is relationships and your network defines your net-worth.
But other than having influencers on your side, one can also venture into collaborations with other experts in the industry. These could be people that complement the product that you provide, enabling your product to be seen by the right people.
Branching Out In to International Markets
It is important to state that before you start thinking of branching out into other countries it is important that your brand is locally known and appreciated, this is because customers based in other countries will be interested in finding out your local standing of your business in the country of its origin and its brand following.
It is important to have a strong foundation for your brand locally as this will have a lot of benefits when you decide to branch out to other markets at an international level.
How to Branch Out
The best way to do this and shield your business financially is to create connections and networks with people based in other countries. One common way of doing this is through the use of social media platforms. There a lot of social platforms created by Zambians, for Zambians based in other countries.
One can make an effort to be part of such platforms and conduct their research on buying patterns of people based in those countries, the client behavior and the response to products like yours. Once all that information has been acquired, you can then go on to venture into partnership with an individual or company based in that country. This will be a cost effective method and the research would be done.
Key Insights:
- Define your target market/customers base, you need to know who you are selling your products to and who they are for.
- Know your demographics, this will help you know how best to distribute your product.
- Be creative and innovative.
- Understand the market, the market trends and how to adapt to them.
“The business of a business is relationships, and your network defines your net-worth.”
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