Marketing has truly developed into a huge confusing mess. There’s a new marketing method or channel popping up every day and a battle to understand and utilise them to the fullest. Online marketing is presenting us with new platforms and methods regularly and in the attempt to grasp the new we can end up underutilising some existing methods. You see, using something poorly is just as good as underutilisation. So let’s look at 5 online marketing methods or channels that are going underutilized by many small businesses and how you can take advantage of them.

Forums

Back in the day, before the internet went mobile there were these very popular spaces on the internet called forums. They were perhaps the predecessors to group chats which have been popularised in WhatsApp and Telegram. They were basically discussion platforms in which people with similar interests interacted. Forums did not die but social media did change them. The social media version of forums is something like Reddit. Looking at Facebook groups which are more popular in our territory you can gain great mileage and exposure by participating in these forums. For example, a computer hardware technician can find forums or groups where people tend to ask questions about computer hardware and answer questions while referring people to her business or just getting awareness.

Social media

The idea above can be applied to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and many other social platforms with a little know-how. The idea is to find places where people tend to discuss such issues and regularly help people with questions in those areas. If you pay any attention to social media you will know that the practice of asking for recommendations has become so popular Facebook created infrastructure around it to offer it as a service. People are very happy to recommend people who have been useful to them in times of need. Ultimately your business’ goal is to help as many people as possible

Online Classifieds

Classifieds services once a mainstay of the newspaper have transitioned beautifully to online platforms. I refer to both online classified platforms here. They are still a place many people will look at and don’t cost that much if anything at all to get yourself on. Classifieds are however a long game. It’s not impossible to succeed with your first classified advert however you generally get results from posting regularly and staying visible in the long run.

Blogs

Blogs represent the most versatile of the underutilized marketing channels on this list if not overall. To illustrate imagine a business that launches a product that needs a lot of explaining or perhaps has some complexities around it. You can use a blog as a method to demystify the product, communicate with existing and prospective customers and explain the product better. But this is not the only application, a flour miller could use a blog to share recipes for their flour. An accounting service can use blogs to explain the effects of new tax law or the latest monetary policy on their clients. The applications are almost limitless with this channel. Before you go and start a blog for your business remember not to make it about talking about your product however you approach. Talk to the customer about the customer. You can read more about this in this article.

Influencers

As I went to great lengths to emphasise earlier on using something poorly is equivalent to underutilising it. So before you bark at me in the comments about how there’s too much influencer marketing in Zimbabwe consider how well it has been done. Influencers can be looked at as storytellers and as such influencer marketing is marketing through stories. Having an influencer post a picture of your product is good but in the words of best selling author Jim Collins, “good is the enemy of great”. A great idea is to show the journey an influencer goes through using your product in real life. And that is just one possible application. It’s important to find the right influencer for the target market. A mismatch is just as bad as not bothering with the campaign.

All the channels mentioned are long term channels and while results can be acquired in the short term they are about long term growth. It’s a good idea to try all of them but you will find it is best to master one before moving on to try the next one.