Marketing & Selling

Looking after your health and becoming fit, is very closely linked to looking after your reputation. You need good health to get you through life, and you need a good reputation to support you through your company’s journey. Building your reputation can be learnt from physical fitness.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has declared a national state of disaster amid the COVID-19 virus outbreak. While many areas of life are being impacted as the virus spreads, it also presents challenges for many business owners.

The relentless drive towards digital banking is making banks ‘invisible’, leaving customers looking for more value, human engagement and diversity of transactional channels according to the South African Customer Satisfaction Index (SA-csi) for banking.

Even though user experience (UX) is hardly a new concept, attention has recently shifted to delivering solutions more closely aligned to customer expectations than ever. This has resulted in an environment where UX becomes fundamental to successful application delivery.

Where did all the toilet paper go? Snapshots of empty store shelves, low levels of storable staples like rice and noodles and city-states raising emergency levels has served to escalate panic buying and even shop-raiding in some parts of the world.

Whether they like it or not, all business owners engage in some form of marketing, but many neglect to adopt a strategic approach. It’s not surprising then that marketing was highlighted as the area in which most business owners feel they require skills training, according to the most recent National Small Business Survey by the National Small Business Chamber.

This equation has been true in the media game for years. In theory it all makes sense. Editors and producers are incentivised to make content that appeals to the pallet of the majority of the population. Media owners pay top dollar to get the best writers, producers and editors who have the closest feel for what works in the world out there.

Digital marketers need to be on their toes this year as a range of new tech tools takes hold and consumer behaviour moves ever faster towards instant communication and results.

You’ve built a website for your small business, and you’re justifiably proud of how professional it looks, how well it tells your brand story, and how wonderfully it showcases your products and services. Now, the next step is to get as many people as possible to visit it so that you can start engaging with them and grow your business.

The future is bright for those who respond the fastest to shifting consumer expectations. We hosted the third annual RCS Retail Summit that took place in Cape Town and Johannesburg towards the end of 2019.