Did you know that its easy to give up a business venture and say this business is not profitable at all? Last weekend I was invited by a ZBIN member who wanted us to help him with a tender application for major construction project. During the process of drafting the tender, we got to discuss about the current operating environment and impact on small businesses. Akati Munemo munyika hamuna mari, vanhu havana cash! Ndikati so who are you targetting? He said the local community had no cash, no disposable income. Yes hazvina kumira mushe we have challenges that need urgent address but in terms of his business there was one thing he needed to do and that has to do with who he is targetting in his business. We had an interesting discussion where i demonstrated how he can improve sales without a need to spend an extra penny. He had all the essentials in place but only that he was concentrating on the locals who obviously had limited disposable income.

I will share with you in detail next week the little things we did, for now allow ZBIN to share with you how to target new customers, below is an article which we found on Smarta.

How to target new customers

It’s typically much more difficult to reach new customers than to get existing ones to buy more. But because of that, once you have a wide, established customer base, sales are going to be easier, more predictable, and easier to grow.

This guide introduces you to a range of techniques for targeting new customers. Which ones you choose to use will depend on your budget, timescale and logistical capability.

• Incentivise. Offer exclusive deals and discounts for first-time users. This has a double advantage in that to ensure people can only be a ‘first time buyer’ once, you need to take contact details – thus building on your store of customer data.
• Show them what it’s all about for free. Give out samples of your product, either outside your premises, online (which would enable you to collect data and contact details for future use) or in locations where your target customer is likely to be. Ensure anyone handing out samples is wearing a branded T-shirt.
• Hold ‘open evenings’ or ‘open days’ where new customers are able to wander in to your premises and try your services out for free as a one-off (this won’t suit every business, of course, but some, particularly gyms, use it to great effect).
• Create offers structured around giving a first taster of your services or product for free, but then the customer needs to pay for the next time.
• Target new customers through your existing customer base. Incentivise your existing customers to bring their friends to your business by introducing ‘refer a friend’ schemes – discounts or special offers for the person who has convinced a friend to register an account with or buy from your business.
• Introduce gift certificates (where appropriate) – the person who receives them may potentially be a new customer. Apparently approximately 20% of all gift certificates are never redeemed, 80% are redeemed for more than their value, and 40% are redeemed for more than twice their value – they’re practically a license to print money!
• Use everyone you know. If you haven’t already, you need to get friends and family to sing the praises of everyone you know. Make sure they understand what exactly your business does, and make sure you sound excited and passionate when you talk to them about it – you’ll inspire them to want to help you further your hopes for the business. Ask them to tell people they know about it – promising you’ll return the favour somehow, one day!
• Advertise. To make any ad spend worthwhile, you need to carry out some detailed research on who your new target customer is going to be.
  • As targeting new customers can be somewhat hit and miss, you may want to reduce costs by trying co-operative advertising – where you team up with another company to produce an ad.
  • Some websites will allow you to list yourself for free – try placing a free as on Gumtree or Craig’s List, for example.
• Get yourself in relevant directories. Getting listed in a directory such as Yellow Pages for a year can cost as little as $100, but can be a quick-fire way to drawing people who definitely want the service you offer to your business.
• Take out classified ads. In much the same way as directories work, with classifieds you know the people are looking for the service you offer if they find you – that’s a gold mine – you don’t even have to try to sell to them!
• Trade shows and expos. They can be expensive to attend (think a few hundred pounds for a stand, plus the additional cost of producing marketing material and flyers, as well as taking at least a day out of your schedule). But if you know there are going to be hundreds of potential new customers there, it can be worth the cash.
  • Find out normal attendance numbers before you pay for anything to make sure it’s worthwhile.
  • Check out who else is taking a stand, so you know you’re in the right company, and so that if a huge number of the other stands are your larger and more popular competitors you know it’s either pointless taking a stand or that you really need to put on a great display.
  • Go armed with loads of flyers, marketing material, product and sample, banners if possible, and other things to decorate a stand with – and of course hundreds of business cards. You want to be the brightest most appealing stand in the hall, not the one everyone looks past. Sweets or wine, while simplistic and fickle, are also consistently effective in drawing people to a stand.
  • If you can’t afford a stand, just go and network with as many people as you can to tell them about your business – this can still be highly effective.
• Flyers can be a good vehicle for lots of information, but they often get chucked straight into the bin.
  • It’s usually best only to hand them out with free samples, or at least a sweet or something similarly enticing to encourage people to actually look at what you’re handing them.
  • That said, if you can get a good deal at the printers and don’t mind standing around for a few hours, the scattergun approach of flyering always produces a few results – just monitor how much return you get on the time and money investment to see well it’s worked for your business.
• Do PR. Either use an agency (read more in our guide on *how to use a PR agency*) or do it yourself (get advice on that from our guide on *how to get your business into the press*).
• Promotions on other sites. Asking another website to promote you to drive traffic to yours can work well with sites who cater for a similar audience but who are non-competitive.
  • Offer to promote them on yours in blogs and on the pages they prefer in return.
  • Getting another site to include links to your website has the added advantage of upping your Google rankings, which are dependent on other websites linking to yours.
• Creating an eBay shop (where appropriate) gets you exposure to a potentially massive audience nationwide (or even internationally).
  • It can also be a nice little extra revenue stream.
  • You can brand your shop, so getting the word out about your business.
  • You can also direct traffic to your business website, so drawing more people closer to your brand.
  • Just make sure you always deliver on time and to the standard promised, else you risk doing damage to your brand.
• Competitions. Giveaways in trade or relevant magazines and websites and a good way of getting the brand name out there, reaching a specific demographic and showcasing your product. A highly favourable description and a nice big picture of a product never did anyone any harm – in fact, you’re essentially getting an advert for free.
• Social media. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Smarta, YouTube, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo – is free and can potentially open you up to a nationwide or even international customer base.
  • Each site has its own etiquette, and each has certain sneaky ways for your business to reach as many people as possible.
  • Read all about how to use it to your best advantage in our social media section.
• Draw customers away from a brand they already use. Undercut the existing brand on price, out-do them in quality or offer customers a deal they can’t refuse, then make your advantage over the competitor abundantly clear in your marketing communications with the new target customers and/or your advertising.
• Sponsor events or awards.
  • If you know your target customers arelikely to be there at an event can be a good way of getting your brand name out there.
  • You may also be able to give samples out at the event.
  • It will, however, be expensive – from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
  • Speak to event organisers in-depth about their usual demographic and attendance numbers before handing over any cash to make sure they align with yours.
  • Assess whether the people attending are influential enough in their social or work circles to make the money per head it would cost you to sponsor worthwhile in terms of how many people they’re likely to tell about your business as a result of sponsoring.
  • Sponsoring smaller scale events and awards in the local community can help position you as a locally-liked business and brand, one that’s supporting the community, and make you look both professional and, potentially larger and more established than you actually are.
• Cold calling.
  • Many consumer are resistant to cold calling, as it can be seen to very irritating, and, in some cases – particularly for older people – very unsettling. So think very carefully before you do it.
  • It is also very time-consuming and can be incredibly disheartening – you may spend days on the phone only to have one or two people interested, if that (there’s quite an art to phone sales and it’s a lot more difficult than it sounds).
  • Make sure you are always polite, never pushy, and try to focus on the advantages to the person on the other end rather than just explaining what you’re selling.
• Door to door.
  • Many consumers are averse to door-to-door selling, and it can be very annoying. Then again, it must produce some success, or else people wouldn’t try it.
  • We’d recommend leaving it as a last option, as it could do more harm than good to your brand and reputation – it can look fairly desperate and some people find it intimidating.

Monitor your results

• As always with marketing activity, you need to measure results carefully to ensure everything you do is producing enough benefit to your business to warrant any money and time you spend on it.
• Ask new customers how they heard about you when they place an order to monitor this.
• Adapt your strategy for getting new customers accordingly by focusing on the most effective channels and dropping the least effective ones.

Here is good news for investors-The Tourim Sector is expected to grow in 2017. The number of expected tourist arrivals is expected to continue on an upward trend in 2017. New airlines have entered the Zimbabwe market with Rwandair expected to start direct flights to Harare on the 3rd of April, the Victoria Falls Airport is complete and soon there will be direct flights from Kenya. ZBIN hopes to carry out a comprehensive study of this area and find how our members can benefit. In the meantime, we have divided the sector into the following 8 categories:

1. Accommodation

2. Adventure Tourism and Recreation

3. Attractions

4. Events and Conferences

5. Food and Beverage

6. Tourism Services

7. Transportation

8. Travel Trade

We will analyse developments in each of the 8 categories above looking for trends, competition, opportunities and future outlook. This evening allow us to tackle  a new concept of something that has already been happening-our brothers and sisters returning home four tourism-Diaspora Tourism! No readily available data exists about this sector but we believe that this is an area worth analysing with the view of coming up with packages targetting this sector.

‘Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.’ Miriam Beard

Tourism is the world’s fourth most valuable export, after fuels, chemicals and automotive products, while for many developing countries it is the number one export category. Diaspora tourism has created a significant market niche for itself in recent years, marked by the intensification of globalization and transnationalism. The homing desire of various diasporas has become a marketing target for various players in the tourism industry. Even those who do not have direct links to Ireland nurse the desire to visit the land of their ancestors. Diaspora tourism can be divided into three distinct segments – heritage, residential and festival:
1.Heritage tourism is predominantly driven by diaspora tourists who wish to discover their ancestry and heritage.

2.Residential tourists encompass diaspora members who live and work abroad and who have invested or plan to invest in property in their country of origin.

3.Festival tourists include diaspora tourists travelling back for important events and festivals such as Easter, Christmas, weddings and christenings.

Tourism has an importance beyond its direct economic impact, and to reduce the significance of diaspora tourism purely to an economic niche would mean denying it of its real worth. Tourism is essentially an advertising voice to the world, an empathetic connection to the world, an ability to bring back the diaspora, getting them to consider buying more produce from the homeland, coming back for further visits, buying a home in the homeland, investing in the homeland, returning to the homeland full-time. It should be looked at through a variety of angles, among them the context of promoting the identity and culture of the homeland. Some countries are targeting their diaspora for inbound tourism. One such example is Scotland who designated 2009 as Homecoming Scotland. For further information on diaspora tourism please see the insert by Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute entitled ‘Diaspora Tourism’.

Genealogy can also promote diaspora tourism to the home country. According to Fowler genealogy is ‘the account of descent from ancestor by enumeration of intermediate persons; the investigation of the pedigree of a particular person or family.’88 Genealogy comes third as the most popular subject on the internet. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence points to the existence and potential growth of genealogy tourism, alleged to be one of the fastest growing hobbies in the world.

Genealogy diaspora tourism is a great way to engage the ‘baby boomers’ in the diaspora. When thinking about the future and indeed diaspora strategies, it is natural that we tend to focus on the next generation. In doing so, however, we sometimes forget the baby boomers. In the US there were 77 million people born between 1946 and 1964. They are now turning 60 at the rate of 10,000 a day.90 By 2030 there will be more people aged over 50 than under 18. They are the healthiest, wealthiest and best educated cohort in the history of mankind. As they enter into their ‘third act’ these ‘young old’ are not buying into the old retirement ideal, and after their working careers are over they are having a temporary pause before taking up the next challenge. They are curious, keen to travel and want to try new things. They want to learn. They are conscious of their good fortune and want to give back to society in a meaningful way. They are the segment that shows most interest in researching their ancestry. Just as the next generation needs specific strategies of engagement so, too, does the ‘grey’ market.

Diaspora conferences A recent feature of other countries’ disapora strategies is the extent to which governments are organising events in the home country and inviting key members of the diaspora to attend – and they are responding. An invitation from a government or head of state seems to carry more clout than if from a regular disapora organisation. As previously noted, countries such as Australia, Israel, Scotland and Ireland have organized conferences in the homeland to engage diaspora members. Examples of other such conferences include:

India – Pravasi Bharatiya Divas In 2003 the first major Indian diaspora conference was held which attracted more than 2,000 overseas Indians from 63 countries. The Conference was co-sponsored by the Indian Government and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and was opened by then- Prime Minister Vajpayee. One of the main focuses of PBD 2011, which was attended by over 5,000 delegates, was on the young overseas Indian. In an endeavor to connect with and engage the younger generation of the overseas Indians with emerging India, a plenary session on ‘Engaging with the young overseas Indian’ was organized. There were also parallel interactive sessions on topics important to the diaspora including: (a) industry round table: interaction between diaspora and Indian industry leaders; (b) information, communication and entertainment; and (c) celebrating the Global Indian. PBD conventions provide a platform for exchanges of views and networking to overseas Indians on matters of common interest and concern to them. They also help the Government of India to better understand and appreciate the expectations of the overseas Indian community from the land of their ancestors and more importantly, acknowledge the important role played by them in India’s efforts to acquire its rightful place in the comity of nations. Regional PBD’s are also organized overseas and have been held in New York, Singapore, South Africa and The Hague.

Barbados – Inaugural Barbados Diaspora Conference In 2010, the Government of Barbados organized the Inaugural Barbados Diaspora Conference. Themed ‘Strengthening the Bonds that Unite Us’ the conference explored ways to realize national objectives pertaining to the diaspora, which are under the remit of the Council for Investment, Exports, Foreign Exchange and the Diaspora. It also gave Barbadians and Friends of Barbados residents abroad the opportunity to discuss ways in which they can make tangible contributions to the development of the homeland. The conference was attended by over 300 delegates. Speaking at the opening of the conference the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Senator Maxine McClean, stated that ‘while not every overseas Barbadian intended to return they were all anxious to find avenues to contribute to our national development’, and he recognized that ‘we needed to create a comprehensive structure to embrace the Barbadian Diaspora as an integral part of the economic, social and cultural development of Barbados.’

Cameroon Diaspora Economic and Trade Forum In 2010, the Cameroon government organized the first-ever economic and trade forum that brought together home-based development stakeholders and 300 key members of the Cameroon diaspora to brainstorm on how the diaspora could contribute to the country’s economic development. Many agreed it was a milestone in efforts to promote economic growth by encouraging cooperation between the government and its citizens living abroad. The government has stated that the forum will be held annually and is part of a plan to raise Cameroon to the rank of an emerging economy by 2035.

These conferences provide an important forum for home countries to listen to the diaspora and provide them with an opportunity to voice their ideas for ways they can engage with the homeland and home institutions. It is important that countries remember that conferences should not just be a networking event for diaspora members. In order to maintain the enthusiasm stemming from these conferences, countries must implement reporting and follow up mechanisms to ensure that ideas generated at the conferences become tangible and real initiatives.