image courtesy: www.mycarpentry.com

John Wanamaker (1838-1922), an American businessman, wouldn’t have known his now famous statement, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half;” would profoundly change traditional advertising after the Internet’s arrival.

But even before the Internet gave TV, radio, print and billboard advertising a panic attack, traditional advertising once enjoyed a ‘bling’ era that birthed and celebrated its ‘owners’ like David Ogilvy, James Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett. Brands, especially fast moving consumer goods, believed they had to advertise, and spend heavily at it, if they wanted to gain traction. Prices soared as everyone from agencies to media houses to the government salivated for a meaty piece of the dish. Advertising effectiveness wasn’t judged on return on investment, but by awards ceremonies such as the Cannes Festival of Advertising . If you weren’t a Fortune 500 company with a deep wallet, you couldn’t afford to promote your brand/s, especially on TV during sporting events such as the Super Bowl.

The Internet attacks Adland’s comfort zone

Then cracks began appearing. Billboards were labeled a source of pollution, leading to Sao Paulo banning billboards in 2007. Pay-TV remote controls came with ad skipping options. Fast food advertising was blamed for rising obesity cases in ‘first-world’ children. Then Google happened! The company was formed in 1998, giving advertisers eyeballs, options such as customized budgeting and best of all, analyses that enable you to calculate the return of investment.

One feature that characterises advertising in Kenya and hinders SMEs from exposure, is the high cost of traditional advertising. Observe the billboards as you drive, the TV ads in-between the news, the radio ads, the full-page advertisements on the major newspapers: almost all the brands are either multi-nationals, NGOs or the government.

The Kenyan government has implemented policies that have enabled the easy adoption of ecommerce by both businesses and consumers: from zero rating of computers to lobbying Internet service providers to reduce Internet access fees after the arrival of underneath cables such as Eassy that have improved speeds (though ISPs contend they have to first recoup their investments in these undersea cables before they reduce prices) to establishing the Kenya ICT Board in 2007 whose roles include ‘positioning and promoting Kenya as an ICT destination.’

Facebook and Google inducements

Google recently launched Kenya Business Online, an initiative to fast-track SMEs’ establishment of a web presence. You already know about the search engine’s vital statistics, so we won’t bore you by repeating them. However, we will outline its Google Analytics feature and how it helps you track the effectiveness of your ad spend on its Adwords platform. You can track: sales and conversions (number of people who buy your product or service from your website), email campaigns and banner ads, and trace transactions to keywords and campaigns, among other numerous benefits.  Visit www.google.com/analytics for more information. To sweeten the KBO offer further, Google is offering you a free Kshs5,120 Adwords voucher.

Facebook, Google’s advertising  competitor, already allows brands to create free pages. It too plans to offer free advertising worth $50 (approximately Kshs5,000 at the current exchange rates) from January 2012, but it’s unclear whether SMEs outside America will enjoy this benefit.  It’s unfair to Kenyan SMEs because slightly over one million Kenyans are active ‘Facebookers’. Facebook also allows you to measure your advertising effectiveness courtesy of its Ad Manager feature.

Google and Facebook founders owe Mr. Wanamaker a drink, don’t you think?

Second, stick to your core message. Your email is competing with other distractions particularly social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. If your email is about ‘how to eat healthy despite the falling shilling,’ don’t digress to the topic of today’s start of KCSE examinations.

Third, paste the most important part of your email on the body instead of forcing your readers to download the file and open it on another window or software. You can then list the rest of the files as attachments.

Fourth, allow your readers options such as opting out of receiving further emails, forwarding it to friends and replying. This gesture will prove that you are ‘democratic’.

Fifth, proofread your emails before hitting the ‘send’ button. Ideally, you should let someone else edit the content if you write it. Often, our eyes can’t spot our own mistakes.

Finally, track the results of your emails for metrics such as open rate, database growth, number of emails forwarded and delivery and bounce rates, Facebook shares and Twitter links and tweets/retweets.

Email marketing is hard enough without adding the uncertainty of not knowing whether or not you are meeting your objectives.

Please call our sales team on +254732353355 or visit http://pamojamedia.com/services/ for an obligation free quote on our emarketing services.

image courtesy Google

In the current Internet marketing climate, email marketing isn’t getting heavy rotation as SEO, paid search and social media marketing.

Two reasons could be the cause: due to the spamming menace as you need permission from your potential customer before you deliver your email into his inbox otherwise your email marketing message will land in the spam folder. Secondly, email requires much writing and rewriting and editing before getting it right and in these days of pressure to meet and exceed profit targets, most Internet marketers lose appetite to include it in their Internet marketing menu.

However, with the right strategy and tools, email marketing is not only cheap to implement, but it can pay handsomely on return on investment to SMEs’ Internet marketing efforts.

First, you need to build a database. You can do this by putting a sign-up form prominently on every page of your website and posting the links on your social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. To assure your recipients that you are not a spammer, you should declare on your sign up section that you won’t share their email messages with third parties. Add an incentive such as a discount or a gift to persuade people to sign up. Your database contacts should contain information such as name, title and company.

Second, you need to identify the objective of your email marketing campaign. Do you need your recipients to download research, make a purchase or subscribe to your company’s newsletter? Make ite clear in your call to action.

Third, depending on the quantity and duration of the emails you plan to send out, you will have to either write and send them yourself, or outsource distribution to email providers such as www.mailchimp.com.

Tomorrow’s post will examine the ingredients you need to add to your email marketing campaign to increase its chances of succeeding.

Erik Hersman talks with Joshua Wanyama, Co-Founder, Pamoja Media.

White African writes, “Joshua Wanyama found himself in a bind. He had just moved back to Kenya after growing a successful web firm in the US.

Now he wanted to put Pamoja Media on the map in Africa, and he realized quite quickly that there was a major knowledge-gap in the interactive marketing space. How could he sell the connections that his ad network gave him if the very people he was selling to didn’t have an online strategy at all?

This realization caused him to change his strategic direction of the Kenyan operations to gain a customers. He changed it from being just about his ad network, and added on 5 more areas of expertise that would really give his clients positive returns:

• Interactive strategy – how to scale a company’s operations and marketing online
• Creative Development – Interactive ads, landing pages, enewsletters & micro sites
• Placement – We run ads on the Pamoja Media Network, Yahoo, Google and Facebook network of sites
• Social Media Marketing – This works for clients seeking long term social engagement with customers. We handle blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other accounts for such clients
• Online PR – We also handle online PR for companies seeking to grow their reputations outside of advertising African Market online”

Display and search are directly correlated, judging by a Specific Media study of comScore data. Brand- and segment-related searches (for cars, automakers and vehicle classes) jumped by more than 100% in several categories after consumers were exposed to display ads for those brands.

“Display advertising significantly impacts search, site visitation and engagement,” said Chris Vanderhook, COO at Specific Media, in a statement.

Search clickers exposed to display advertising were 22% more likely to produce a sale than those who were not exposed, according to a September 2008 study of Microsoft’s Engagement Mapping system by Atlas Solutions.

In a ClickZ article, Microsoft’s Young-Bean Song said the study results suggested that search alone was not a cure-all for customer acquisition.

“The issue we have with navigational search is that it completely obliterates the value we’re creating from other digital marketing we’re doing,” Mr. Song told ClickZ. “The idea that search is this magical fountain of customer acquisition—in many cases it’s not.”

David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer, agreed that display can boost search.

“There is a connection between display and search ads,” he said. “Marketers know this intuitively. Often it’s not the search ad alone that gets consumers to act, but the context of all the marketing that preceded it.”

eMarketer predicts that search and display ads will retain the highest share of online ad spending formats through 2013, and will be the only formats to maintain double-digit share through that period.

comScore has found that banner ads actually have similar impacts to print ads. The report states that readers are 46% more likely to visit an advertiser’s site within four weeks of seeing its ads online than if they did not see the ads. The percentage of site visits are higher the closer it is to the date of ad viewing.

The data also pointed out that web surfers are 38% more likely to search for an advertiser’s name with a search engine like Google within four weeks of seeing an online ad. Even without clicks, display ads are driving traffic to an advertiser’s website.

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This in turn means that banner advertising are actually more effective than previously thought. This is good news for both publishers and networks as they seek to improve the value of their product.

The Kenyan media landscape is no longer what it was in the 1990s; holding a television screen in your palm is now a reality; the Internet continuously keeps online readers updated with breaking news at every turn. The digital era has led to renewed competition, as consumers look for comfort and speed.

Business Daily Africa reported that after many years of trailblazing modern media, television globally seems threatened; especially the free-to-air that heavily relies on advertising to survive.

In a bid to stay ahead of the curve, more than 200 African broadcasters and filmmakers met in Nairobi last month to ponder their fate in the imminent digital shift and particularly to discuss ad-spend in the digital era.

Even though David Campbell, the producer of television drama Makutano/Junction is convinced that TV advertising makes more sense— in comparison to other Kenyan media— global statistics show that the big money is shifting to online media.

Ndesanjo Macha at Global Voices writes:

White African writes about Pamoja Media, an ad network created to serve advertisers looking for a one-stop-shop for publishers in Africa, or that reach Africans in the diaspora.

Emeka Okafor writes:

White African profiles Pamoja a new Advertising network…

Pamoja Media: An African Ad Network

Erik Hersman of White African has just published an article on a new vertical ad network geared towards the African market. Pamoja Media makes it easier for marketers to reach the highly fragmented African market within the continent and in the Diaspora. This is achieved by partnering with the largest African media houses and premium niche sites that carry unique content and a faithful audience. By advertising on these online properties, advertisers access highly appropriate and targeted consumers for their products within any geographic region in the world.

Started by Joshua Wanyama and Benin “Mwangi” Brown of African Path, the network will serve African publishers by offering their inventory to marketers world wide. This will include large global brands and smaller companies within specific geographic regions.

White African writes:

Publishers

Pamoja is brand new, and just starting to get going. That hasn’t stopped them from gathering an impressive list of publishers with a total of 10 million impressions dedicated and another 10 million more confirmed impressions if ad inventory is filled. That’s impressive, but more interesting is to see some of the names on their list of publishers, including: Mail & Guardian (South Africa), the Daily Nation (Kenya), Modern Ghana and Stock Market Nigeria.

Other publishers are welcome to apply, as long as they meet the following requirements:

· Be focused on Africa, or the African diaspora

· An Alexa ranking of 250,000 or better

· Have a minimum of 2000 pageviews per day

· Be aesthetically pleasing (or at least not embarassing)

Advertisers

as whoever has been involved in this knows, getting publishers on board is the easy part. Everyone of them is happy to go with the media outfit that will provide them with a solid amount of advertising income. Getting advertisers is the hard part, and that’s where Pamoja Media is focusing their work now that they have the initial 20 million impressions. Current advertisers include Pingo, PoaPay, Accents Telecom and Zain.

Advertisers joining so far have come in because they’ve seen the brand name portals available through the network. Pamoja can get them on board at a better rate for a smaller advertiser than if they go to the Nation or M&G themselves, because they do a bulk buy with multiple advertisers. As the network grows with other large portals giving up excess inventory, Pamoja will become even more attractive than it already is.

A qualifying publisher can join the network from here

An advertiser can inquire and place ads on the network through this link