4 Strategies To Grow Your Business Beyond WhatsApp in 2023
Think different is not reserved for Apple. It is a clarion call to all ventures venturing to capture profit, build equitable brands, and proliferate wealth. It is the bedrock of sustainable relevance and market dominance.
It is ludicrous, however, that the same generation that keenly agitates for self-determinism and evolved differences chooses their default destinations for business as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Snapchat and remain as devotees for as long as they retain their little shell and never really make a difference with their ventures.
No doubt, WhatsApp is a fairground to kick out and test the waters in a safe mode. But it is not the endpoint. It is not even the middle out.
Like in chess, after the openings come the mid-game with tactics and positional maneuvers, which will then snowball to the endgame. WhatsApp is a good opening, but you need to go beyond the cradle, shell out, take risks, and play for big wins.
If you agree with me here is your little roadmap to break ties with WhatsApp and its peers and storm out to do better on the scale that matters.
1. Prioritise Reach
It’s not always the best products or services that win, it is often the most known.
Marketing is first about getting known by your potential customers. It’s because of the Indomie of Noodles and the Maggi of season cubes.
At the core of marketing is the need to reach as many as possible audience. Marketing is more like a lottery pool, the more tickets you buy the greater the chance of winning.
The vast majority of your market exists outside WhatsApp and Snapchat buddies. I strongly doubt you can reach 1% of your target market via WhatsApp unless you sell courseware to 300L students who happened to be your coursemates.
Uncapped Reach
Successful businesses are built on unregulated, unmetered, uncensored, and uncapped reach. It is how Apple sells millions of iPhones, MacBooks, and iMacs per year. WhatsApp is restricted to those who already know you and gives a linear room to increase that list. At best, you need an external source of traffic before you can expand that pool.
Capped Reach
Capped platforms are limiting. They get you stuck in an infinite loop of getting the same number of views or even reduced reach in some days. The growth is either linear, non-existing, or snail-slow.
Go Beyond
If you desire great things, you have to go after them. Uncapped reach opens a world of immense possibilities and makes your business ventures more thrilling, progressive, and exciting.
If our message can not reach them, we cannot expect sales from there.
Organic Reach (Not so Free)
Organic reach can be massive, rich, and viral. But it is not free. It takes a different level of content creation to attain an organic reach that can build a brand and increase sales.
You can generate organic reach by writing long-form helpful articles or making top-notch documentary-style YouTube videos like James Jani. Either way, the production of high-quality content demand varying level of financial and intellectual commitment.
Paid Reach (The Real Deal)
You can serve any piece of shit on your paid reach. Paid reach is your most trusted route to great brand building.
Regardless of your fat budget to blow ads, you must create great content and manifest killer offers and not just blow dollars on mere impressions.
2. Sell Or Be Sold
Nothing happens until a sale is made.
At the core of all outreach is the necessity to make sales. Going beyond WhatsApp entails making sales outside the comfort zone of chit-chat. It calls you to take sales to a world where the majority are not your friends, colleagues, or classmates. Where there are tons of skeptics and angry birds flying around the web to ruin your marketing efforts, tarnish your products, label you as a fraud, attack your customers, and sabotage your campaigns.
Be warned.
Below are different pathways to scalable reach and how to make the most of them.
1. Selling on Instagram
Think of Instagram as the platform of raw gold and effete diamonds. To a novice, Instagram is coloured by fake life. Effective marketers see this as the perfect opportunity to command sales on impulse.
The most effective brand strategy for Instagram is to appear rich and offer luxury. Anything short of such high standards will not drive results. It accounts for why trendy content creators on IG need to flash new Benz, a pile of dollars cash, nice dresses, and new houses.
You have to appear as a baller too, heck nobody gives a fuck about your hustlers brand.
2. Influencer Marketing
Sign Your Davido
When Bitsika signed Davido, he posted them across his socials and they got so much traffic to crash 10 servers. Like most businesses, you can’t afford to sign Davido, but you have to know this for sure, social media especially Instagram is a world for influencers and you need them to push your brand. It is a bloody battle of who garners the most influence through influencers. OctaFX, 1XBet, Asiwaju Herbs, and Fekomi are the de facto mentions in most comedy skits on Instagram for a reason.
3. Outbound Marketing
Your case is always different, but trust me, I have been in your shoes before as a fresh entrepreneur with zero budget, just raw skills, shining ideas, and products.
Here is your solution: offer your services or products for free to a credible influencer on an established premise to mention your business or at least once post you in their stories!
4. Content Marketing
Start with Free
Storytelling is a long but sure game. Content creators become rich by telling stories for brands. Great brands are built on stories, it is your turn to take the baton to share engaging stories. Be patient enough to build trust, credibility, and familiarity, then watch the market shower you with money.
5. Guerilla Marketing
Try Madness
You can’t be posh starting! If anything is going to work for you, you must work it out. Curate contacts from profiles to cold calls, bump into DMs with reasonable offers, drop ‘spam’ but relevant comments under engaging content, and try anything other than nothing.
Sell More With Kitcart.net
A fully functional e-commerce website is the beginning of scalable digital selling. It opens the door to an array of strategies, tactics, hacks, and tricks to attract, nurture, and convert strangers to leads, leads to customers, and customers to raving fans.
It is easy to get overwhelmed with the nuances of setting up a sales engine -a website that drives sales. Kitcart.net is the only e-commerce platform that prioritises sales and makes it super easy for anyone to get started in less than 5 minutes for free, with built-in tools that help you scale from the get-go.
1. Search Engine Marketing
Answer Queries
People google everything, and anything minus who you are and what you are selling. I want to assume this is the lie you sold to yourself to justify your lags.
People will not only find you via searches when you have a website, detail your Google Business profile, write a lot of high-quality blog posts, make headlines, and run Google Ads, they will buy from you in troupes.
2. Contact Marketing
Sell me this pen
Contacts are the most valid asset in sales. When you own a large enough email list, phone numbers, and (FCM) tokens, you are in contact marketing.
People have permitted you to reach out to them with your best offers, which makes sales easier at scale. This door opens up to sellers with landing pages, sign-up forms, checkout forms, and every other data collection medium.
3. Affiliate marketing
Sell With Others
Selling through others has always been a big leap for businesses at any scale. Nike, Apple, and Tesla attain critical mass adoption via strong distribution networks.
For most businesses, distribution channels are lucid dreams, until the internet became a thing and websites acted as the hubs for affiliates that spread products to four corners of the world.
4. Dropshipping
Open the Floodgate
Dropshipping is the new cool in e-commerce. It creates a surplus for both suppliers and retailers.
If you have strong strength in making products at affordable rates, dropshipping opens the door for marketing geniuses to brand up your products and sell them on their platforms while the fulfilment goes through you.
Dropshippers enjoy the freedom not to handle inventory, shipping, and customer support, while suppliers sell with zero marketing budgets. It’s often a win-win setup.
What Is Scalable?
Most businesses cannot scale. It is one thing to know this truth, it is another thing to admit your business is one of those that can make the promised land.
If entrepreneurship is a journey to freedom, only 3 out of every 10 athletes ever get to the finish line.
Quit Being A Loser.
In Nigeria, business is what you do when you are unqualified to get a job. In better economies, business is what you do when no job can satisfy your drive.
We decided to buy this oppressive narrative that keeps us as paupers in the global context. The truth is: no country in the world will survive 2 years without commerce, businesses are vital, crucial, required, and important.
Closed Economy
A Trap & A Bait
Closed economies argue for equality of outcomes. Government must provide jobs for everybody, and everyone should be middle class, the rich are greedy, and similar lies atop the manifesto of every closed economy. They are propaganda to keep you poor, don’t buy it.
Free Economy
Go Beyond
In a free economy, the pathway to freedom is to build a scalable business and cash out at the price of a lifetime.
When you build an equitable brand that scales you get to sell your company or take it public on the stock exchange.
This is the single most efficient formula that drives all leading economies and that should be your aim.
1. Scalable By Product
Innovate To Lead
If you are yet to get the gist, the reason every big buck goes to tech is that it has the most scalable products. One piece of software can serve 10 Billion customers at the same time, and buying Instagram ads today doesn’t mean you won’t pay tomorrow.
Such solutions are inherently scalable by product. The margin cost is almost zero and the availability is almost infinite and its demands don’t wane.
2. Scalable By Branding
Get Known Or Get Lost
Most people don’t know the business they are into. If you are in any space with enough established players, the only thing worth scaling is your brand: how well you are known, and how large the market you command. Service-based businesses need a whole lot of branding to be relevant.
3. Scalable By Commitment
Till Death Do Us Apart
Few businesses ski to freedom. These are businesses that need one or two customers per year.
If the customer pays huge enough for 1 year of service that it can serve 4 business years, and they have no easy exit point, you are in the league of the few scalable by commitment businesses. Ride on.
Plantair is a software company by Peter Thiel that top government security agencies like F.B.I. use on a subscription basis and the company holds contracts for as long as 20 years.
Final Thoughts
To scale is to attain freedom. Most of the lessons in this article are shortened so you proceed to do your research and find the truth for yourself.
If you are committed to breaking out of your comfort zone I believe this article has done justice in pointing you where to look.
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