Is your marketing turning into a jhalmuri packet?
Acknowledgment – A big thank you to Shenjuti Zaman (Trainee, Copywriting), for her amazing support in composing this article and doing the research. It would have been difficult without your help.
“I have a small restaurant in Dhanmondi but I am not doing any sort of marketing on Facebook for it,” my jaws remained open as I heard one of my uncles saying this to me. This is a statement that you rarely get to hear in Bangladesh. It is seen as a crime if your business doesn’t have a Facebook page. To further investigate I asked, “So how are you doing your promotions then?” He replied with a slight smirk on his face, a few months back he designed and printed a few thousand leaflets from Nilkhet and got them distributed near local universities and colleges. I thought to myself that at least he got the TG right. According to market research done by Notionhive back in January 2018, it was seen that mostly between the age of 16-24 went out to eat on a regular basis. Mostly they are seen in cafes, fast food shops or small restaurants. I asked if the business was running well, to that he replied: “so so on weekdays but low on the weekends.”
Why is feedback important in marketing promotions?
I was really not surprised at his response. After all, can you really expect more from a promotion done quite a long time ago? You can’t really blame him either. Very few people understand how marketing promotions actually work. In this case, what he failed to grasp is that people would look at a leaflet maybe once (or twice if you have an amazing design or an offer they can’t refuse), but they won’t carry it around. You can’t really hold on to their attention with this form of communication, rather, you will just plant the thought in their head. Not following up on that would be less effective and would just remain as a thought (which will soon be forgotten), and likely end up as a jhalmuri packet in our hands.
Promotion is not just a one-time thing, you need to constantly remind people of your existence in the market and what they’re missing out on when they’re not availing of your products or services. Even if it’s a big brand like Coca-Cola, why do you think they need to come up with new ads every now and then, stay active on various digital channels or even launch new campaigns? You may think it’s impossible for people to forget about such a prominent brand, but funnily enough, if Coca-Cola stopped promoting, their sales or top-of-mind presence will surely hit a low. More competitors will emerge or existing competitors will continue promotion and connect with audiences more, diverting the attention from Coca-Cola, which eventually will hamper their sales.
Creative ways to attract customers
My uncle didn’t know why he was getting a different number of customers on different days of the week. He missed out on something vital. In my 3 years in the marketing world, I have gained a few insights that I was glad to share with him. How to attract customers, retain and develop a sustainable relationship with them, crafting effective marketing strategies, and all that. So, here are my two cents on how to leverage a social media platform to market a brand. Amongst all the popular social media platforms I’m going to focus on Facebook today. Why? Because, believe it or not, out of the total number of Internet users in Bangladesh, a staggering 88.13% are active on Facebook! People from various demographics are present on one common platform continuously liking, sharing, and tagging each other away. More so it is seen that people login into the Facebook app multiple times each day compared to other social media apps and also spend considerably more amount of time browsing through it than others.
Do Facebook promotions really work?
The most important thing to remember is, Facebook promotion is NOT something you do just once. The effects of a single campaign can never last a lifetime. Opening a Facebook page is easy but maintaining and leveraging it is the challenging part. With the various tools and options, Facebook provides, you have to design your page in a way that captures your target audience’s attention. You have to constantly monitor the activities, the responses and regularly update your page or it will get lost in the hundreds of new pages that emerge every day. And keeping brand consistency is key to make your brand identity and having a high recall value. This is not applicable to only your Facebook page, but your overall business as well. You will have to go through the stages of awareness, consideration, and conversion to build a brand. I won’t go in-depth with these, I’ll leave that for later. Just know that you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities if you’re not already using Facebook as a marketing tool.