Image courtesy of Google.

Now that SMEs no longer have an excuse to miss an online presence thanks to Google’s  www.kbo.co.ke initiative, other offline actors can contribute to the long-term success of this project.

First, Kenya Power has to speed up both the rural electrification programme and the generation of other energy sources such as solar and geothermal power. It’s scandalous for rural SMEs to be left behind just because their owners lack access to electricity. The much hyped mobile Internet phenomenon is not conducive to this project because of a lack of a mobisite option.

Second, ISPs have to design SME-friendly Internet access pricing products. The overused line of ‘Government has to grant us tax breaks first’ won’t wash. Did Safaricom ask for tax breaks before launching M-Pesa?

Third, SME website owners should ensure they keep their content up to date. The world won’t do business with Kenyan SMEs whose websites rival government websites in terms of outdated information.

Fourth, Parliament should enact harsh laws that elevate vandalism of underground cables, manhole covers, transformers, and other Internet marketing support infrastructure to the same level as robbery with violence crimes. This action will stop courts from viewing vandalism as a misdemeanour.

Fifth, government, being the biggest buyer of goods and services, has to consider web presence and activity as an alternative method of verifying SMEs’ existence instead of insisting on a physical location as the standard benchmark in the scorecard before awarding tenders. Alternatively, the presence of a website should result in a discount in the price of physically registering an SME. The inefficiencies and corruption at the AG’s Chambers should not deny web savvy SMEs an opportunity to bid for State business.

Two recent incidents in Lamu have proven that tourism is similar to politics: perception is everything.
Thanks to the murder of British national David Tebbutt and the abduction of his wife Judith by suspected Al-Shabaab rebels on September 11, and an encore by the same suspects following the kidnapping of French citizen Marie Didieu on October 1, Kenya is now generally regarded as an unsafe tourist destination. This reputation threatens an industry that made Kshs40.5 billion in the first-half of 2011.

SME owners shouldn’t presume that reputation management isn’t part of their Internet marketing strategy. For SMEs it’s even more necessary to be armed with online reputation management tactics on stand-by because it’s more hazardous to their cash flows to engage in long-term damage control than it is for corporates. Another reason is that SME owners can’t afford to be distracted away from building their businesses because most times they play multiple roles, unlike corporations who can afford to hire PR agencies.

The first step to managing your reputation online is to monitor what your customers are saying about your brand, both positive and negative news. While you can easily monitor and respond to sentiment through your customers’ emails, Facebook posts, tweets, etc, it’s also important you check other online sources such as blog posts via a tool such as Google alerts. You don’t want to be dumbfounded when someone asks you a question like, ‘Is it true what I read about your company on this blog…’. Second, always respond to potentially explosive situations before they explode. Even if you don’t have a ready answer, say something like ‘We are aware of the problem and we will get back to you by tomorrow morning’ (and stick to that deadline). Third, don’t exchange words online with customers if the problem escalates. Offer to call them and settle the issue offline instead, particularly if you’re dealing with bloggers. Fourth, if you have built a loyal online fan base due to your excellent customer service, request one or two of your most fervent fans to act as your brand ambassadors by saying that the problem that arose was an exception, not the norm. A community endorsement should convince your people not to defect. Fifth, offer your wronged customer a discount, a freebie, heck, even tickets to a football match like tomorrow’s Harambee Stars vs Uganda Cranes. Anything to make up for the transgression.

So as you endeavour to build your SME, don’t forget to include online reputation management as a top, daily to do priority in your Internet marketing menu.

photo courtesy www.greenbeltmovement.org

In a space of just 10 days, two icons who left indelible marks both on their fields and on humanity have died: Wangari Maathai on September 26, 2011 and Steve Jobs on October 5, 2011.

Even as we mourn their passing and celebrate their achievements, there are a few lessons SME owners can learn from these iconoclasts. One, doing the unconventional can produce remarkable results. When Wangari successfully protested against KANU’s bizarre idea of constructing a 60-storey building at Uhuru Park in 1989, she by extension marketed the Green Belt Movement that she had founded in 1977 to the rest of the world without spending money on traditional advertising. When Apple opened the Itunes store in 2003 and priced song downloads at US$ 99cents a piece, that action did not only help American music labels slow down music piracy, it also helped accelerate the uptake of Ipods.

Second, despite their celebrity statuses, Wangari and Steve knew they would one day die, so they surrounded and delegated responsibilities to other people so that they could, pardon the cliché, concentrate on the bigger picture. One result of this succession planning is that the Green Belt Movement and Apple will continue functioning without experiencing the power struggles some companies go through after the demise of their owners. Indian billionaire Dhirubhai Ambani died in 2004 without leaving a will, sparking off an unnecessary feud between his sons Mukesh and Anil Ambani.

photo courtesy www.economist.com

Third, they ensured their companies stood for a specific purpose anyone could understand: Green Belt Movement for a green planet through the preservation of forests, Apple for elegantly designed products.

As an SME owner you should not only learn from them, but do one better.

Testimonials are a great way of lending ‘street cred’ to brands, and that’s why celebrities get paid big money to endorse every category from cars to fast foods to shoes. That trend has picked up in Kenya of late, with athlete David Rudisha and musician Jua Cali endorsing a shoe polish product and a mobile phone service provider respectively.

As an SME owner you salivate for that kind of mileage for your business, but are discouraged by the exorbitant endorsement fees you would have to pay such celebrities. However, you are overlooking an authentic source of testimonials that could significantly boost your brand and better yet, their services are free: that’s right, your customers. Below are several ways of encouraging your existing customers to act as your unofficial spokespersons.

First, request your customers to fill out a brief customer service satisfaction form on your website. At the end, ask a question like, “Can we please use your name and comments on the website?” Second, ask repeat and satisfied customers if you can use their names and comments. Some may even be willing to do a video or audio recording to sing praises of your SME at their expense that you can upload on your website and social media spaces. Third, when you are prospecting for business instead of saying “I do quality work…”, say “Miss Y was so happy with our service, and here is what she said…” Fourth, if your SME wins an award, ask your customers to comment about it, not forgetting to request them if you can use these comments on both your website and social media spaces.

Never underestimate the power of a satisfied customer to invigorate your Internet marketing efforts.

Despite the landing of undersea cables in 2009 that were billed as the panacea to slow Internet speeds and expensive access costs, and other incentives such as zero-rating of computers, Internet penetration in Kenya is still shallow. According to a July 2011 Study on ICT Access Gaps in Kenya  undertaken by the Communications Commission of Kenya, there are only 4.7 million Internet subscriptions in Kenya, with broadband connections standing at 84,726. These are disappointing statistics for e-commerce take up and sustainability. However, the same report states there are more than 25 million mobile phone subscribers.

As an SME owner, these statistics underscore the importance of including mobile marketing in your Internet marketing strategy because a significant number of your potential customers access the Internet via their mobile phones.  This means that they are searching for goods and services using their mobile phones. How do you ensure your SME benefits from mobile Internet searches?

One, you will have to build a mobile site, also known as a mobisite. A mobisite is a website specifically designed for mobile phones and its URL is yourSMEname.mobi . Second, your SME’s mobisite layout has to be simple and the navigation easy. Mobile phone consumers lack the patience and time to wander through mobisites looking for information. Third, customise content for different interactions such as sound and text. Avoid adding videos because your most of your consumers will quickly exhaust their airtime watching them. Fourth, use keywords in your content to give your mobisite a high chance of appearing in search results, and measure your mobisite’s performance for insights into what’s working and what isn’t.

A well-designed and functional mobisite is a formidable addition to your Internet marketing arsenal.

Now that you have created a Facebook profile for your SME, the hard work begins of wooing and keeping fans who will build your business. Below are some basic building blocks.

Occasionally complement your official statuses with personal ones. For example, if you viewed the wildebeest migration at the Maasai Mara recently, post those photos/videos, etc. Doing this will provide you an entry point through which to ‘break the ice’ with your fans who will see the human being behind the SME. Post such content on the weekends or public holidays when most people are in a relaxed mood.

Second, post content that is both entertaining and informative. This encourages your fans to continue visiting your page. And while you are at it, remember that content also includes audios, videos and photographs.

Third, respond to your fans’ comments and suggestions on your past update before you post a new update. Two-way dialogue is always better than carpet bombing your fans with messages. Also encourage fans to interact with each other on the page to create that family environment.

Fourth, create a competition or a promotional offer that rewards your fans for recommending your SME to people they know who would be interested in your product or service. Contrary to myth, this option isn’t reserved just for corporates.

Fifth, monitor your progress regularly to know how your fans are interacting with your content. You can use tools such as Facebook Insights or Crowd Booster to track metrics such as the number of people who viewed and interacted with the content you posted on a particular day. These results will let you know what’s working and what isn’t.

Ok, now go build your SME’s Facebook fan base.

Mark Zuckerberg began it in 2004 as a way for Harvard students to keep in touch over the Internet.  It was a movie subject in 2010 and it currently boasts 800 million members worldwide from students to politicians to entertainers to NGOs.

Yes, you guessed right, it’s Facebook.  Such is the social networking site’s stickiness factor that most companies have reacted by banning their employees from accessing it using organisations’ resources. While this reaction may be justified on grounds that Facebook distracts employees’ concentration (they can now also access it using their mobile phones anyway). As an SME owner, you have no choice but to market your business through Facebook even if it’s for these reasons that it’s free to set up a page, over 1 million Kenyans are Facebook members and gigantic brands like Coca-Cola are already using the site to connect with their fans. However, just like any social media marketing campaign, you will have to build a foundation.

First, what do you want to achieve by joining? Is it a conduit to your website? How will you evaluate your success? Is it by the number of new fans your SME page gets, how many people respond to your promotions, etc? How often will you evaluate progress? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Who will be responsible for activating the page and keeping it active? Will it be you or will you outsource that task to someone else who has the time and experience in social media marketing? If you choose the former option how much time will you allocate to Facebook vis-à-vis your other duties as an SME owner? If you select the latter, how will you measure the consultant’s successes in meeting your objectives?

Once you have answered the above questions, you can confidently open a Facebook page. The next blog post will recommend some tactics to acquire and keep loyal fans.

Image courtesy www.art.com

When we hear the word ‘content’, most of us often link it to writing only. That’s probably why you will find many websites long on text but short on photographs, video and audio content.

You may have observed that large corporates, especially those in the FMCG sector, advertise their products or promotions on radio, TV and newspaper so as not to just reach as many people as possible, but to cater to different tastes. For example, a consumer will react positively to a TV ad because it engages his senses and his emotions better than a static newspaper ad. If you have a Facebook account, you agree with the observation that your friends don’t just update their statuses using words, they also post links to video, audio and photo content.

You should borrow these tactics and apply them to your Internet marketing campaigns. If you own those high-end smartphones that can record sounds, videos and take high-quality photographs, use those features. Alternatively, download free voice recording software such as Audacity from the Internet and buy a camera and a camcorder. Thanks to technology, these gadgets’ prices are now palatable.

However, don’t upload all these content at the same time on your website and social media accounts. Schedule a timetable such as 8am is for photographs, 10am is for audio, etc. This way, your traffic won’t suffer from ‘bloating’ from too much content consumption. Ensure you take high-quality photographs and record high-quality audio and video content before uploading them.

Complementing your text with audio, photo and video content will not just sustain your current fans’ interest, you will also attract new members who respond better to content in different formats. It will allow you to be more creative and give you the motivation to continue doing Internet marketing because let’s face it, writing is not everyone’s dish of ugali. And don’t forget that content is about your business, not about your personal life.

Of all obstacles Kenyan SMEs currently experience, from unstable cash flows to the inability to afford a high-calibre workforce to power rationing to complying with a maze of central and local government regulations, nothing probably keeps their owners awake at night than how to market their businesses.

The available advertising platforms such as radio, TV and print advertising are expensive.  It’s also next to impossible to measure their return on your investment. Other alternatives like exhibitions (registration fees, stall rental fees, etc), and sponsorships will also cost you dearly.

Scratch your head no more because there’s a cheaper (bandwidth prices are dropping though not as quickly with the arrival of undersea cables such as EASSY) medium you should use to market your SME. The good thing is that you are already using it and what’s more, the results are easy to measure. That medium is the internet.

Begin by building a website for your SME which will contain information about your products /services, your contact details, your mission and vision, etc. You don’t even have to pay a designer to do it to you thanks to Google’s recent initiative that lets SME owners build and host their own websites for free. Popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter also allow SMEs to create their own free accounts.

Once these sites are running, you can begin your internet marketing efforts by employing tactics such as such search engine optimisation and social media marketing. The advantages of internet marketing to your SME include: the ability to update content round the clock, the potential to ‘spy’ on what your competitors are up to by visiting their websites and then seeing how your business can differentiate itself, the ability to target specific customers by using keywords in your content, and the joy of measuring the precise return on your investments by using tools such as Google analytics.

Therefore, don’t fret because you can’t afford to market your SME via the usual suspects, the alternative is staring at you from your monitor and screaming, ‘Use me!’

In the internet marketing arena, search engine optimisation is the continuous process of tweaking your website so as to ensure that when your potential traffic searches for your goods or services, it’s either the highest-ranked page or among the top pages to appear in a search engine’s results pages. Optimising your website involves these basic steps.

First, your website has to be accessible by search engines’ spiders. Search engines’ spiders crawl through the internet searching for content to add to their list. If they encounter barriers when they visit your site then your content won’t be indexed. Picture your competitors being listed in a directory and your business missing in action. Scary, isn’t it.

Second, your website must be easy to navigate. Nothing puts off and encourages visitors to leave a website more than an architecture that looks like it was designed more for extra terrestrials and less for human beings. Even if you score high marks for ease of navigation, visitors have to find what they are looking for. If you sell Kenyan tea on your site but the link they click on when your site comes up on search engines takes them to an empty page, they will leave. Your pages must load quickly, though this is one area you have no control of because it will depend on your ISP. SME owners usually sign up with the cheapest ISP because of budgetary constraints, but if their speeds are slow you will have no option but to sign up with a more expensive ISP who gives you quicker speeds, especially if you are targeting foreign traffic who have little patience with slow loading pages.

Third, update your content regularly because search engines treat stale content like you would treat yesterday’s newspaper: the news has lost value, so they downgrade your site. If you attend a fair, talk about it. If you add a new product or remove an existing one, put that information. If you have researched on your industry and want to share the findings, upload that information and request your visitors to download it. If you agree/disagree with a new government policy that will affect your business, share your views and encourage your visitors comment. If you experience disappointments like power rationing that might delay product delivery, post this information. Don’t forget to use keywords in your content that relate to your industry because keywords are the guide dogs that lead potential visitors to your site. So if you operate a car hire business, put ‘car hire’ somewhere in your content.  While you engage in updating content, ensure your grammar and syntax are excellent. You can get away with ‘kizungu ilikuja na meli’ if your SME does business only in Kenya, but if you want to attract foreign clients, that attitude won’t wash.

Fourth, give attention to your site the same way you do to your car. Check for broken links and if you find them, repair them. Experiment with different colours and fonts.

Fifth, search engines sometimes announce changes in the way they rank websites which can suddenly make your website lose a few positions. In such cases you may have to do a pay-per-click campaign that will restore your website to its original position.

Sixth, monitor your website for statistics such as where your visitors come from, how much time they spend on your site, what they buy the most, etc. You can use the Google Analytics tool for these analyses by implanting a special code on those website pages that you want to mine data from. This information will not only make your overall internet marketing efforts easier, but they will also allow you to know what keywords to optimise your website for.