Why Marketing Is So Important For Your Business

From creating a business plan, to a network strategy, lots of small and medium enterprises continue to fail and close their doors. Often times, this happens because of bad management or not having an audience targeted marketing plan to actually bring revenue to the company. In this article, I am going to walk you through the basics of marketing that all entrepreneurs and business owners should master to hopefully reach the goals and growth needed for their business.



What Is Marketing?There are tones of definitions to the word marketing, and in the fast-moving world of business, it’s understandable that definitions rarely stay the same. But in short terms, marketing has been described as the process of interesting potential customers and clients in your products and/or services.
As a practice, it consists in coordination of four elements called 4P's:

• Identification, selection, and development of a Product,
• Determination of its Price, 
• Selection of a distribution channel to reach the customer's Place, 
• Development and implementation of a Promotional strategy.

The marketing concept is a philosophy. It makes the customer, and the satisfaction of his or her needs, the focal point of all business activities. It is driven by senior managers, passionate about delighting their customers. It is founded on the belief that profitable sales and satisfactory returns on investment can only be achieved by identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer needs and desires.

Why Marketing Is So Important?
Are you starting a business, or are you already an entrepreneur? Either ways, if you are serious about building a brand and achieving success for your organization, you have to start marketing you business if you are not doing it yet. Marketing is a very important aspect in business since it contributes greatly to the success of the organization. Production and distribution depend largely on marketing. There are lots of benefits in having the right marketing strategy for the good product and not pushing more some products and disregard their wants and the value they can really bring to the customer. Here are some important reason why marketing is important:

• Marketing Promotes Product Awareness to the Public: You cannot afford to just let people find out about your business themselves. You have to advertise, promote and educate the public about the goods of your business. This is why a company must invest in marketing so as not to miss the opportunity to be discovered and sell its products. It’s good to have a great product but if nobody knows about it, you will make no profits. 
• Marketing Helps Boost Product Sales: If your company aims to increase the sales percentage and double the production, the marketing department must be able to come up with effective and strategic marketing plans. This is critical not only to generate sales, but also to build a brand and a strong reputation for a company.

Business Marketing Plan
The most effective way to grow and expand your business is by focusing on organic growth. And basically, you can increase organic growth in four different ways. They include:

• Acquiring more customers
• Persuading each customer to buy more products
• Persuading each customer to buy more expensive products or up selling each customer
• Persuading each customer to buy more profitable products

To achieve all these goals, and bring your business to success, you need to develop a proper business marketing plan, and then gauge its performance for your business growth. Here are some points that your plan should have:

• What Are Your Business Marketing Goals:This is simply what you want to achieve through your marketing plan. It can be sales, growth, reputation or something else. 
• What Is Your Target Audience: It is important to have and know the target for you marketing campaign, this will not only identify the scope and range of your marketing but also prevent you for marketing your product to the wrong audience and therefore wasting your money and not getting the results that you have set for you business marketing. 
• What Business Marketing System To Use: Internet has made business marketing a whole new concept, apart from the conventional advertisement systems in newspapers, magazines; internet or online marketing is the most used marketing system, since it is inexpensive when examining the ratio of cost to the reach of the target audience. In fact, companies can reach a wide audience for a small fraction of traditional advertising budgets. Internet marketing ties together the creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including design, development, advertising, and sales; it includes Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, email marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies like social and mobile applications.

Famous Internet Marketing StrategiesIn the variety of solutions that offers the web, and depending on the marketing goals and target audience, these forms of marketing prevail:

• Search Engine Marketing: It is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages through the use of, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion. It is different from Search Engine Optimization which aims at "optimizing" web site pages. Other parts of SEM are Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO). 
• Affiliate marketing: Where a third party advertises products or services on behalf of a retailer in return for an agreed commission for a sale or lead. This method has proved very popular due to its' "pay for performance" model which allows a large number of affiliates to be taken on, but only rewarding those which return results. 
• Email marketing: It is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. It involves sending email messages, adding advertisement in email messages. 
• Pay Per Click: It is an Internet advertising model used on websites, where advertisers pay their host only when the ad is clicked.

One last important thing is to not forget to track your marketing efforts. You will be spending money and energy on your marketing so its worth the investment to make sure everything is working as planned. If not don’t be afraid to change your strategy and make some adjustments to your marketing plan.

Read More

Entrepreneurship in Africa (Problems / Solutions)

Business creation is not a new thing in Africa. Indeed, history teaches us that Africans were big traders. Time has passed and entrepreneurship has not really changed. But as you know, set up a business in Africa, large or small, is sometimes a long and difficult road to walk into. It takes knowledge, resources, tools, and ideally a mentor or a sponsor to support you and give you that helping hand to progress into this administrative and financial jungle. Often times in Africa, the lack of financial solution prevents young business and management students to follow through their ideas and create profitable businesses.

There is no doubt that the creation of small businesses would allow economic recovery of certain villages, cities, and would offer to youngsters the opportunity to stop the exodus in search of an imaginary Occidental paradise and work for the development of our continent. But, for this to happen we must first, create an environment conducive to entrepreneurship.

Problems Encountered
Indeed the issue of entrepreneurship in Africa is a problem we must address at the core. As an African proverb says, "The construction of a house, always start with the foundation"; thus develop entrepreneurship at its core and base concepts. And that can be done by addressing the factors that hinder the development of entrepreneurship in Africa. Here are a few:

• Low entrepreneurial culture in Africa: Young Africans face a socioeconomic environment that does not promote the spirit of entrepreneurship. We must educate the public about the benefits of entrepreneurship which in principle is the key to Africa’s development. The lack of support and mentor to young entrepreneur is also a problem to solve.
• The lack of access to adequate financial services: opportunities for business financing are very slim. It is difficult to find an appropriate financial institution for adequate and long term funding. This funding problem does not arise with the same intensity for all genres or regions of the continent, entrepreneurs need a financing for working capital, financing for advances on markets, project financing (investments). Many entrepreneurs here have to resort to the tontine system as found in Africa. It is a savings that could be called informal and is often used and invested directly in the small family business or craft and substitute bank credit to finance the informal sector; Thus Africa’s financial systems must be adjusted in order to address these deficiencies. Basically we need to multiply the institutions of venture capital, to increase tenfold guarantee funds, to improve the financial market and diversify funding.
• Cumbersome administrative procedures and Justice: The process of business creation is complex and distributed among several agencies or institutions. With the scourge of corruption in some African countries, we must "put hand in pocket" if we want the process to be accelerated. In general we have to wait long enough and put the price in order to finally open a business. At this level the politics must allow the centralization of administrative procedure, lower legal steps and cost to reduce the time to create a business.
• Lack of skilled workforce for business management: Business and management schools are increasing in Africa, but there are not many young people who are capable of managing large firms and assert themselves as entrepreneur. We have to reform our education system to have even in science major, courses in business management, marketing, sales and economy. Because most of our graduates are skilled but don’t have any knowledge about money and business management.

Examples of suitable financing
Despite all these difficulties, it would be incorrect to say that entrepreneurship is dead in Africa because there are hundreds of successful private companies in our soil and some whose sponsors had faith in them and were able to find good financing suited to their projects here is a partial list:

• SITRAFER: rehabilitation of the railroad in Madagascar.
• 3T: specialized in transit, has raised funding from IFC leasing.
• TUNDE Group: First printing craft, became a structure involved in the printing industry, transportation and agribusiness through Cowrie Investment.
• Ecobank: Deploying the west and center, plans to open a subsidiary that specializes in investment (IFC).
• People Input: IT, West Africa and Central Africa.
• Les Moulins du Burkina: privatized mills, viable structure with the support of EBID.
• TRADEX: imports petroleum products, distributes petroleum products, made the "bunker" at sea.
• Niger Milk: industrial manufacture of milk derivatives by BOAD and Cowrie Investment.

The development of entrepreneurship in Africa will require the creation of an African concept of entrepreneurship and not necessarily an exact copy of what exists abroad. We must combine the best practices in Western business creation with African context and concepts. The concept of African entrepreneurship is based on the value of African culture but also on the joint development by highlighting the socioeconomic environment.

Think African entrepreneurship is also up to resolve once and for all the problems of finding adequate funding and the cumbersome procedures, the development of local initiatives such cooperatives in the countryside and village groups.

Read More

What Is Entrepreneurship / Qualities Of A Good Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship is the act of creating wealth and / or employment through the creation or acquisition of a company. An entrepreneur is thus a person who is engaged in an effort to transform his knowledge, ideas and innovations concepts in economic goods. This may lead to new organizations or perhaps to the revitalization of certain branch of an existing organization in response to a perceived opportunity.

In fact many definitions of entrepreneur can be found in the literature, another broader definition by the French economist JB Say (1800) says "The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of lower and into higher productivity and greater yield."

Types of entrepreneurship
The most widespread form of entrepreneurship is starting a new business, but in recent years the term has been extended to include social and political forms of entrepreneurial activities. Thus we can distinguish three types of entrepreneurs that can be differentiated by their motivations:

• Social Entrepreneur: A social entrepreneur is motivated by a desire to help improve and transform society, environment, education system and economic conditions.
• Serial Entrepreneur: A serial entrepreneur is one who always has new ideas and creates new businesses. He is more likely to take risks and overcome or bounce back from business failure.
• LifeStyle Entrepreneur: These entrepreneurs put passion before profit when launching a business. Their motivation is a combination of personal interests and talents with the ability to earn a living.

Be or become an entrepreneur is not easy; indeed you must be highly motivated and fully determined, because it requires hard work, many sacrifices, dedication and perseverance. It is a profession where the risk of failure is very present; besides the vast majority of businesses (80%) fail in their first years. Apart from qualities in Business Management, a good entrepreneur must be a good leader. It must communicate its corporate vision, persuade his partners and his team members and boost their performances to ensure maximum productivity for the attainment of corporate goals.

Qualities of a Good Entrepreneur
It is clear that anyone can become an entrepreneur, but only the good entrepreneurs are successful and manage to get the fruits of their investment. There are some distinctive qualities that are required to be a successful entrepreneur. A number of these qualities are probably already built into your personality, while others may need to be worked and developed. Here is a list of some of these qualities:

• Passion: It almost goes without saying that to become a successful entrepreneur, you must be passionate about your business. This does not necessarily mean you have to build a business around something you love. You can (and should) identify a profitable market and grow your business from there. The fact that you love your company will also help you to persevere in your efforts in difficult times like the development stage (quite painful), and other obstacles ahead.
• Leadership: Although the definition of a leader is not easy, we recognize one when we see him in action. Basically, it's the ability to be in charge of people and guide them to achieve their objectives. A leader must be able to plan, motivate, coach and evaluate his staff. A leader must also have both managerial and interpersonal skills.
• Interpersonal skills: Business management is about managing people, you will therefore need to be good at communication if you want to succeed. Whether with customers, suppliers or employees, it is important that you learn to effectively communicate your entire message to ensure your business is run as smoothly as possible.
• Organization and time management: Time management will help you organize and make sure you do all your work as efficiently as possible. It is very easy to give in to procrastination when working alone, so you need to find ways to solve this problem. Maybe you can create a task list or use time management software to help you manage your workload and increase your productivity.
• Risk-Taking: A good entrepreneur must be willing to take calculated risks if he wants to succeed. Sometimes in business you will need to trust your instincts and walk on water, when you do not have enough information or time to make a rational decision. However, you will need to distinguish between craziness and calculated risk. Make sure you do your research and ensure that your business plan is feasible before starting the project. This may prevent you from having an unpleasant surprise in the future.
• Competitiveness: Competition is everywhere. Business is strictly based on out compete your competition. If you can establish your presence in the market, differentiate yourself from your competitors and surpass them by providing a product with better quality and affordable price, your chances of being a successful entrepreneur will be much larger. It’s a struggling game that you play to win, but never sacrifice your integrity for the sake of a few bank bills.
• Confidence: Confidence is a key competence for entrepreneurial success. It is easy to be demoralized or frustrated if you do not have confidence in yourself. Confidence concerning your capacity and performance. A successful entrepreneur believes in his abilities. He is not afraid to explore new areas or opportunities, take risks and make difficult decisions in very little time.

Ultimately, there is no substitute for hard work when it comes to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Most people choose the most simple and fast way when it comes to work. If you want to be successful, you must devote to persistent and productive work, leadership and rational time management.

Read More