When young investors get into business, it doesn’t automatically mean that they will find the ground for them. There might face two obvious challenges that are (a) competition and (b) marketing.
On competition, established business will always want to maintain their dominance of the market where the young investors would be setting up. Those already in the market will try by all means to protect their territory and leave nothing for the new ones.
The second challenge is that even if the young investors have a potential in getting a huge clientele base, the key to their success rest upon knowing the effective way of marketing their products and services.
Young investors might be equipped with formal education in how to run businesses but that alone won’t make them automatic success stories. Strategy is very important. What strategies can be employed to help young entrepreneurs to make good business?
There are traditional means of advertising that include direct marketing like the use of billboards, trade fairs, shows and door-to-door advertising. Indirectly, the use of mass media like television, radio, newspapers and magazine has been in use for a long time. While traditional marketing has it strengths, it has its own shortfalls.
Traditional media is relevantly expensive. Advertisements have to be met with direct cost like printing material and the inks themselves. For radio and television, an advertiser has to pay for each minute that an advertisement is to be aired. And such adverts are inserted in between programs that the advertisements end up disturbing the viewers.
This lead to the need for young investors to consider the current trends of marketing, the one based on digital platforms. Digital marketing is moving with the advancement of technology that has helped to transform people from different lands to live in a global village.
Digitalisation has enabled the use of gadget like cellphones, tablets and computers to help people reach each other in real time through text messages, social media like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Telegram and Titter. Also, via technology, global people can communicate using websites, blogs.
The current trend of people depend much on information - be it business or personal that is transmitted through digital platforms. Gone is the era when business people had to carry files and briefcases in order to communicate business matters.
If media forms like movies are being transmitted digitally, doesn’t this give young investors to consider seriously marketing their business on digital platforms?
Digital marketing is so effective since a prospective client can use Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) like Google, Yahoo, Bing, America Online and others to look for who provides products and services in whatever region of interest.
Prospective customers can also make payments online meaning that young investors can make business without even meeting the clients and this reduced overheads like renting of shop premises.