Have you noticed how small local businesses are being replaced by big budget chain stores and how it impacts the local community you are living in? Wouldn’t you want your local community to be more vibrant and lively?
We thought about that, and we came up with a solution to help local businesses keep their neighborhoods intimately bound, where small businesses can survive and continue to prosper.
Imagine there is a small local book store in your neighborhood, run by a nice and lovely girl. The bookstore has lost its spotlight to a newly opened giant chain bookstore (doesn’t it ring any bells?) Instead of falling in love with the owner of the chain store, which — fiction aside — happens only once in a blue moon, the owner of the small bookstore will most probably look for a solution for this predicament.
One solution could be using flyers and handouts that requires a considerable budget, hiring a professional designer, and a trustworthy person to distribute it in the neighborhood (and not throw most of it in the garbage). Even with all these considerations, this approach doesn’t promise any certain results. The flyers might not reach the potential customers, and even if they reach some small number, the shop owner cannot assess the causes of the inefficiency of this method. She might continue using it blindly, with outcomes far from optimal.
Frustrated and helpless, she obviously needs help. But who is there to help a low-budget business in finding a marketing solution to promote its sales efficiently?
You guessed right! That who is Weriz. Weriz offers low-budget small businesses like the example above an opportunity to become visible and heard once again in all the buzz their neighboring competitors create.
Weriz goes above and beyond a simple advertising platform by not only enhancing limited budget businesses with affordable ad campaigns by only exposing them to the most promising users but also supporting them throughout their marketing progress.
Aren’t marketing and advertising the same thing, you might ask. The answer is no, and we’ll tell you the difference in a moment.
Marketing Vs. Advertising
Marketing is a fuzzy and a not-so-easy term to define. If you ask experts about the definition of marketing and how it is any different from advertising, you might get a wide range of different or even inconsistent answers.
However, if we are to define it anyway, we could say, Marketing generally consists of all the activities that a business do to attain customers’ satisfaction and answer their needs while achieving its business goals. This end, if reached successfully, makes marketing a win-win approach.
Advertising is a much more familiar and widely known concept than Marketing, while Marketing is the broader, all-encompassing term. As marketers, our ultimate goal is to understand customers’ interests and find a product or service that matches them. Advertising works the other way around. It attempts to adapt customer’s interest to the product or service being offered. Yet, it might not always get the product or service appealing enough for the target audience and help businesses realize their purpose effectively.
In the same vein, marketing is not as explicit of a method as advertising is. While in advertising, we usually aim for an increase in sales directly, in marketing, we do research and define the Product in a way that it fits the needs and demands of users effectively, set the Prices where most of our target audience can afford it and Place the product where it could be easily accessible to its users.
These are 3 out of 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Place… and the 4th P is Promotion, which includes advertising, public relations, sales promotions, etc. Advertising, therefore, is only one of the components of Marketing and as a result, not at all enough for businesses’ success in the long run.
Taking all the 4Ps into account, Weriz, aside from advertising, works as a two-way communication channel between businesses and users, providing businesses with survey-taking options from local users and analyze their feedbacks to find out about the popularity of different products or brands in their region. In the example of the bookstore, the owner can take surveys about different topics (like fiction, self-help or philosophical books) to find out which are the most popular ones and include more books on those topics in the store. This is one of the marketing features of Weriz that comes in addition to its promotional components.
There is no harm in using promotions. Added to the other methods of marketing and used strategically, it could benefit a business. Of course in order to apply promotions strategically, one needs to first take care of the other marketing aspects of the business, in addition to the 3Ps that need paying attention to, he should take care of a Marketing Model known as STP.
Anyone who is familiar with Marketing has heard about the terms Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning (STP), with which the market is divided into different segments, then the most attractive segments are targeted, and after that the business position itself according to the needs and interests of that targeted segment in order to maximize its efficiency.
To implement STP in a business marketing plan, Weriz utilizes customer targeting: Addressing those among the audience that would convert to customers with the highest probability. Think of the bookstore example once again. If it wants to host a book signing event, it can use customer targeting by specifying the gender, age, and socioeconomic status of the users getting notified about this event, in order to maximize the chances of participation. By exposing the right advertisement to certain demographic and geographic segments and filtering out the rest, Weriz increases the chances of local businesses in effective marketing and successful ROI.
This is a different way of employing marketing, where marketing tools are offered to help a category of businesses, usually disregarded by the marketing and advertising corporations, due to their small scale and consequently small budget. Our vision is to enable the small local businesses like the bookstore in our example to prosper and in turn, revive our neighborhoods into the lively local communities they used to be, once again.
In the next article, we will explain the business side of Weriz in more details and how it combines different aspects of marketing to create an innovative approach for small local businesses.
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