Episode 95 Transcript
Welcome to episode 95 of the Business in Morocco Podcast this week we're going to be talking about marketing tools and a target audience so basically
what uh what tools are available out there to
to help promote your business or your product or your service and when should you use them what type of audience requires what type of marketing uh so if you're listening to this uh on the podcast I encourage you to search morocco podcast or business morocco podcast on YouTube because I
do have some slides and other visual aspects to
this talk today this episode today that it just be more beneficial by being able to to look and see what I'm talking about for each of these uh social media platforms or other marketing platforms so talk about four general areas what is a target
audience or market what are marketing segments
what marketing tools are available and how to pick
the right marketing tool for your target market
so first you ask the question what is
a target audience or a target market
well uh you get some good resources here from
investopedia which has a lot of business resources
um a lot of information out there about various
business topics but they define it as a target
market refers to a group of customers to whom a
company wants to sell its products and services
and to whom it's direct it directs its marketing
efforts consumers who make up a target market
share similar characteristics including geography
buying power and demographics now when you talk
about target market we're not we're not talking
about um every potential customer we're just
talking about the majority of your potential
customers your most likely buyer your ideal buyer
you want to know about this and design that target
audience including where they live geography
you know how what's how much income do they make
what's their buying power other
demographics like race culture religion
habits all of these things can help you design
a target market a target audience and the reason
the reason that we do this is because if we
can accurately describe who our customer is um
typically they will they will these groups
will react to marketing in the same way
and that's what we're looking for we're looking
to make an impression with our marketing and
convince somebody to do something whether it's
sign up for a newsletter or download a free book
or buy a product online attend a conference go
to a restaurant buy a pair of shoes enroll in a
school these are all the things that we're trying
to get people to do through marketing and if you
can design an audience where where people have
similar needs or desires or wants and they respond
to marketing in the same way then you can develop
a marketing plan to to reach out to them and
uh hopefully they will react positively and your
marketing plan will succeed in the sense that
you'll convince people to buy a product or service
or do whatever it is that you're you're seeking
so it's very important to identify the target
market before you develop your marketing plan
because your your target market is going to
guide how you create your marketing plan because
different target audiences different target
markets they they have their attention is
in different places we'll talk a little bit
that more about that as the episode unfolds
if you don't spend time thinking about who your
your target customer is and i get this a lot from
my clients when i ask them okay who's
your who's your customer and they'll
tell me everyone everyone's my customer
well well no everyone is not your customer
it doesn't matter what product or service is
out there whether it's cars or couscous or
telephones or mobile service plans everyone is not
your customer not everybody drives not everybody
eats couscous and not everybody actually has a
smartphone there's a significant percentage of
moroccans who do not have mobile data plan so
even for things like orange or morock telecom
or other mobile service providers everyone
is not their customer so you need to decide
for your product or service for your
company who's the target audience you
need to make decisions about who they are so
that you don't waste the money and the time
spending money and time trying to attract
customers who are not going to be your customers
it's a big problem and it causes a lot of waste
and people businesses go go out of business
because they don't do a good job of of targeting
the right type of person with their marketing
one of the ways that we do this to get a
better idea of who the target audience is
is we we can divide the whole market into in
various segments you know it's as simple as
dividing the population into groups that can be
measured by characteristics these include gender
age income levels race education religion
marital status and geographic location now
what's interesting about this is that if you know
anything about a lot of the social media networks
platforms is that they specifically try
to get all this information out of you
they want to know where you were born where
do you go to school what's your religion
are you married are you in a relationship
what's your race how much money do you make
what's your birthday you know they want to
know your age they want to know your gender
they want to know your interests that's why they
ask you know what books do you like what movies
you know what are your interests what groups are
you a part of the whole reason that that facebook
asks you all those kinds of questions is because
that's what they're selling they're selling you in
general in the business world we have this saying
that that if you're using something that's free
then you are the product okay gmail hotmail
youtube facebook instagram tick tock
linkedin all these are free but they're not
free you are the product as the user you are the
product that is being sold and as a marketer we
understand that we understand these social media
platforms are selling access to specific groups
of people that's the only reason that they exist
is because they have all this information on their
target customers and so one of the ways of doing
this is to segment the market break it down into
different pieces so that you can better understand
it so here's an example this is a company
that i'm talking to right now called micro
and they produce transportation solutions
including scooters for kids for adults for um
trick scooters um for like skate parks and stuff
like that uh and also electric scooters for
for transportation i'm sure if you're you're in
some of the major cities in morocco you've seen
people on electric scooters moving around the
city they're becoming more and more popular the
reason i bring up these scooters is because even
for something like this there are many different
segments of the market for example kids kids could
be a segment children let's say under the age of
16 could be a target segment a marketing segment
for this product or parents parents who have kids
that would be another segment that buys the
product so you would want to market to kids or
you market the product parents who actually
have the ability to um to buy the scooters
and lastly grandparents so grandparents they love
to buy gifts for their grandkids and so they could
be another segment and the reason that we break
down segments for products like this is because
the way you would market to these three groups is
entirely different you know kids for example maybe
you would do youtube ads so you would do those
those five second pre-roll ads on youtube you know
all the ones that we were always skipping right
you find a video you want to watch on youtube
and you have to wait for this ad before you can
press skip well we can do some of those ads on uh
on channels or shows that kids like to watch here
in morocco and we would show our scooter in the ad
before a very popular cartoon for example that a
lot of kids like here in morocco for parents it
would be completely different if we were trying to
market to parents we would have different content
different images different videos different texts
different calls to action and we would do it in
different places maybe we would use uh facebook to
target appearance or instagram we could also use
youtube to target parents but it might be it would
be a different call to action we'd have different
video different voice over different images in
order to attract the attention of parents because
they are a completely different marketing
segment and lastly goes for grandparents
grandparents the older generation tends to be the
least sophisticated when it comes to technology
they're late adopters they're they're not spending
a whole bunch of time on their smartphones
they're not on social media they're not
um scrolling through instagram or facebook
they're they're not on tick tock these other
social media networks so reaching them would be
completely different maybe we would do um we would
hand out flyers or do a billboard or a radio ad
or a television ad in order to reach the older
generation and this is the reason that we break
it down into segments because the segments
will guide will guide the marketing plan
so let's talk about that marketing plan
what tools are available to us as marketers
to reach our target audience to reach
the segment that we were looking to reach
well today most of the tools that are
growing in popularity and are effective are
online their social media tools and here we can
see the monthly active users in millions or unique
monthly visitors to these platforms as of january
2020. so you look at facebook it's 2.5 billion
2.5 billion monthly active users monthly visitors
and it goes down from there youtube whatsapp fake
facebook messenger wechat instagram all the way
down to things like pinterest reddit snapchat
so these are some of the tools that you
can use and i'll talk about a few of these
um in the presentation um so let's
start with uh facebook and instagram
well it's it's the most popular social
media platform by far and it's actually
facebook and instagram are connected to whatsapp
so now on facebook you can actually have a button
that says on your ad your facebook
ad send a whatsapp message so they're
actually taking advantage of both platforms
the fact that you use facebook and you use
whatsapp they're saying you can contact the
business through whatsapp very easily and that
makes communicating with businesses and and
marketing a lot easier quite frankly because
you don't have to leave one of the two apps that
you use every day like facebook and and whatsapp
so there you go and some of the the things that
are valuable about facebook and instagram is
that you get very good analytics you understand
your audience you understand their behavior what
are they doing um how are they interacting
with the advertisement with the promotion
um you can set very clear objectives for example
do i want them to more people to engage the post
do i want people to go to my website to like the
page to send me a message you can have very clear
objectives for that you can also have them sign
up for a lead form so they can fill out a form
right there in facebook that gives you information
about them as a potential customer so facebook
is is good in that way and you really have the
ability to target your audience very specifically
and not just target them but retarget them so
let's say they they see an ad for your product
then they go to a website um your website but
later on they're gonna see more facebook ads and
if you combine this with google you can actually
make sure they're seeing your ads not only on
facebook and instagram but also on websites and
on youtube it's a way to coordinate your marketing
to get those impressions on people the other
thing about facebook is it's really easy to test
different content so if i have different
video different images different text
i can put a little bit of my marking budget
into maybe 10 different promotions and i can
do each one for a week for example at the end
of the week i can choose the best performing ad
and put more marketing dollars more
budget into that best performing ad
because quite frankly as as marketers we
we don't always know what's going to work
before we do it and a lot of times we're surprised
by the images or the videos or the text that is
ends up being the most popular or the most
effective and facebook does give you the
the option to to do um testing so here's an
example of some facebook and instagram ads
here we have one here in morocco it's not even
for a company okay it's for a non-profit and
they have an animal here and basically what
they're trying to do is is help out animals okay
they're trying to to give medical care and and
take care of of animals and down here they have a
button where it says fair and don't it's basically
you're you're going to make a donation so this is
a non-profit it's not even a for-profit business
but they are advertising on facebook in morocco
and their goal is to receive donations so that's
a perfect example there's something about me and
my facebook activity that leads them to believe
that i could be a donor to their organization
here's an instagram ad so this is uh for
workouts svelt training and it's about seven
minute routines and workouts it's sponsored on
instagram there was a video in there and again
through the algorithm instagram thought that i
would be a good person to see this ad based on
posts that i've liked in the past or websites
that i've visited other ways that i've interacted
with instagram or facebook and
they think they know me and i might
like this ad or be willing to be
interested in becoming a customer
so you know for these two platforms you know
you got 2.4 billion potential customers and
and 1 billion for for instagram it's a very wide
audience and and the algorithm is very uh powerful
and the next platform we'll talk about here is
google and youtube so google owns youtube and
they're very powerfully linked together so on
google everyone knows google you do searches
on google to find anything you can imagine to
answer any question that you have in the world
up until recently when they've been specifically
deleting um information about things that they
don't want you to know um but uh usually if the
topic is not political or related to coronavirus
you can have a good good uh high confidence
that the information on google is accurate and
helpful if it has anything to do with american
politics or coronavirus i don't believe
anything that comes up on the google search
because it's being completely manipulated but
that is a story for another
day when it comes to marketing
here's an example in morocco so i have a
search here international movers morocco okay
and it's showing me various um ads so this is an
analysis an ad for movers international movers
what you notice is it's all in english and
there are some key words in here moving movers
international okay but the reason it's in english
and the reason that it's saying things like
help you move is because um down here it
thinks that i'm in new york and i'll get
to that in a second because i use down here in
the bottom you see it says new york new york
i'm using a vpn so google thinks that i'm in
new york and therefore it's showing me ads
for movers international movers in new york
so that's one of the things that you can do
as a marketer is you can pick the location so i
can say i only want people doing a search in new
york for international movers to see my ads now
one of the things that limitations is that google
is tricked by the vpn so it doesn't know that i'm
here in morocco it thinks i'm in new york and it's
it's basically providing a false service to these
companies because they they would not want to
show me their ad because i'm not a potential
customer to them living in morocco they only
want people in new york to just see their ad
and yet google's showing them showing me their
ad and they are getting charged for it so but
the point about this is that that google can at
least try to know where you are when you're doing
your search so that it can show you relevant ads
youtube all right so youtube is closely linked to
google and i'm sure that you've noticed this you
go to google you type in a search and then you
start seeing ads on youtube for that product or
that service or things associated with your search
on google and the two are very closely linked in
fact if you want to do ads on youtube you use the
google ads platform to create those ads on youtube
and you can choose keywords um you can choose
certain channels or videos or certain types
of customers that have habits on youtube or
google search to to target people and there
are three basic types of ads on youtube
you can either do the the five second ad
okay which basically it goes for five seconds
and then over here on the right side it says
skip and you skip the ad and you get to watch the
video this screenshot that i have right now is
is the second kind of ad which is two consecutive
five second ads so a total of 10 seconds that
you cannot skip okay so this is a pretty much a
branding ad but they also have here this button
says shop now so apparently if i click on
this button there are places that i can
either buy kitkat or they're going to tell me
where to go if i want to buy the kitkat candy
and the last one the last ad that you see
is a 15 second ad that you cannot skip
so you have to sit there you wait for 15 seconds
it shows you the ad and then your video starts
so those are basically the three options
uh for the type of ads you have on youtube now
the way you pay is typically by impression you pay
per 1 000 1000 impressions and depending on the
keywords that you're doing and the location and
sort of the the audience that you're seeking
it's going to be more or less expensive
right now in morocco it is dirt cheap and that's
just a saying that we have it's it's not expensive
to do youtube ads here in morocco there's just
not a lot of competition but you try to do
some ads in the united states regarding let's
say weight loss or get rich quick or you know
money making schemes or invest in real estate how
to flip a house those are going to be much higher
keywords and and advertisements to to to
buy because there's a lot of competition
and the cost per click is much higher because
people are willing to pay more for those clicks
because they make a lot of money off of
people who uh who click on their ads so
again it varies but right now morocco
is really cheap and it's very good
way of reaching a lot of different people
and doing general branding marketing
you know and they have a lot of the
same tools as facebook in terms of
you can choose gender and race
and age and location in order
to to be targeting in your ads and very
specific in who you want to see your ads
all right the next one we'll talk about is
linkedin so linkedin is uh basically a survey
they asked marketers you know who do b2b marketing
which of these social networks do you use and
you can see that by far linkedin was number one
followed by twitter and then facebook and then
youtube and then way down here uh instagram so uh
linkedin is the leading social
media channel for b2b marketers
um and there's a couple reasons for that um
basically linkedin is the professional network
you're gonna be trying to sell
professional services it's for
it's for networking and recruiting and posting
your resume it's also for doing content marketing
and uh articles videos and basically having a
professional network and the reason that b2b
sales work on this is because you can you can
target specific people in specific industries
for example you could run a linkedin ad that is
only shown to people with the title president
or cfo or sales director you can you can choose
people's titles and then they will see your ads so
let's say for example you're
selling human resources software
well you could go on linkedin and and have
your ad show to only human resource managers
because hopefully they're the ones that would be
deciding what type of software to use in their
department and so that's one of the reasons
that b2b marketers use linkedin is because
it's a good way to reach the right people
now linkedin has about um 500 million
profiles and about half of that 250 million
and use linkedin on a monthly basis so yeah
pretty pretty good engagement on linkedin i'll
show you an ad that i saw today on linkedin
there's a screenshot it's from china.org.cn and
the goal of this ad is basically to get people
to believe that china is a hub for innovation so
if you if you actually click on this link right
here it'll take you to an article that talks about
china as being a hub for innovation and you know i
guess the goal is just overall brand awareness
but it could also be to target people with
managers or directors or investors to invest
in china and asia when it comes to creating
new businesses so this again would be the type of
b2b marketing that that linkedin is is good for
all right the next one we'll
talk about here is tick-tock and
if you're young you probably know what tick-tock
is if you're older you probably don't have any
idea but it is one of the fastest growing social
media platforms in the world it's based around
user generated content short videos um 15 seconds
30 seconds maybe maybe up to a minute and it's all
users and a lot of it is dancing and doing other
like magic tricks and all sorts of crazy stuff
but it has good user engagement and it has very
high growth so i'm not sure that they've actually
learned how to monetize it yet how to make money
but they're trying so typically there's there's
four different types of products okay you have
a general audience for these four products of
about 800 million users worldwide and almost
half of them are between the age of 16 and 24.
so we're talking about a very young group of
people and who typically do not have a lot
of money college students younger than
that who maybe live with their parents
but you know one day they will be the next
generation the working generation so you
know tick tock could be a platform where you're
trying to build brand awareness and brand loyalty
with the next generation so let's talk a
little bit about these four types of uh
of ad products on on tick tock so you have the the
brand takeover number one and basically that is
like an image or a gif or a video um that allows
a brand to dominate a specific topic for that
whole day so you're talking about um suggesting
videos to people or hashtags or other things
you your ad will lead a certain category a
certain keyword for for that topic if you pay
so that's one way you can create awareness
for your company on tick tock the other one is
next one number two is in feed native video
so you have about 9 to 15 second video ad
that shows up on the the for you page so
again these are suggestions and tick tock
is inserting paid content into the user contents
which is what every platform basically does i mean
if you're scrolling on facebook or instagram in
between the posts that are from your followers
you're going to get paid posts and that's
the whole reason the pat the platform exists
is because of those paid promotions and that's
the business model so it's that number two in feed
video number three is a little bit different
hashtag challenge it's basically you create
sponsored hashtags to encourage user-generated
content to engage users and attract influencers
so you basically create a hashtag and you
promote it and you're hoping that people
catch on and they start creating content based on
a hashtag and it goes viral so again it's another
way of encouraging people to to engage your
brand and promote your your products or services
uh last one was we have uh number four branded
lenses and i'm not too familiar with this one but
apparently you create 2d or 3d lenses that users
can try out for themselves um looks like you have
a dancing chicken there um basically uh you look
at certain videos and other images appear so you
know tick tock still experimenting they're still
growing i'm not sure if they're profitable yet
um but uh yeah it could be another uh avenue
another option for for your marketing plan
the last one we'll do is we'll talk about
traditional marketing traditional advertising
and you know this is legacy media it's still
pretty strong here in morocco you have things
like billboards television ads promotions right
so air jordan nike um ronaldo and fly emirates
um uh you have billboards up here for like in
wee and mcdonald's and then radio ads on like
on platforms like luke's radio this is typically
mass marketing you know billboard you're not going
to get any metrics on a billboard you're not going
to get any customer feedback you're going to have
no idea really how effective those billboards were
because you can't directly attribute the billboard
to a customer sale it's very hard the same goes
for celebrity endorsements like ronaldo yes
he runs around playing soccer with
the fly emirates on his shirts
but how many people decide to fly emirates
because they saw that i mean there's just
no way to quantify it i mean you could have it as
part of your overall brand and i suppose you could
if you had a really big budget and you had general
metrics you could you could see how effective um
campaigns like this to do endorsements
of of football teams how effective it
was over the long run if you change athletes
or change teams does it make a difference but
it's very hard to know what the impact is
from from these kinds of mass marketing
i mean i'm sure on the radio stations they
don't even really ever know how many people
are listening to their their radio at any
given time i mean there's ways of doing
you know surveys and questionnaires but i
don't know how accurate it is and and even
the same for the television um you know
there are some ways of knowing how many
people are watching a television program but
if your ad goes on television for a car or
um you know mcdonald's or air jordans or or rock
telecom it's very hard to measure the results
of traditional mass marketing but you know
in a lot of ways they still do it and it's
still effective because it's a way of reaching
customers certain customers that are hard to reach
older people people who don't use their phones or
get on the internet very often um you know using
this type of marketing it can be effective
and then it can also be just a general part
of your your overall plan because you know
normally to get somebody to make a buying decision
you need more than a dozen impressions
you know more than 12 15 impressions
before they actually make a decision to buy and so
mass marketing along with social media marketing
is a good way to to get there it's a good way to
to get people to do that and that's why you'll see
these companies actually doing a mix
of marketing on the different platforms
it's in order to to reach a wider
audience and create that brand awareness
so finally you know how do we
pick the right marketing tool
well i mean i sort of got into that but uh
just some general ideas facebook instagram is
if you have a well-defined target audience and
you know the location of your customer you know
their demographics the websites that they
visit you can use facebook and instagram to
to target them google google is typically better
for people you don't care about their demographics
you care about what they're searching for you
want you want to know their want or their desire
and you want to target them with your product
or service based on on their activity online
and what they search for and the videos and
other things that they're they're watching
linkedin typically b2b okay b to b sales
professional sales recruiting human resources
professional services all these
things is what you're going to use
linkedin for tick tock i think is
still unproven it's the new generation
i would use it mostly for brand awareness i'm not
sure i'm not sure how effective it is for actually
converting creating and generating high quality
leads and converting them into customers so
to be determined on tick tock and then
you have your traditional mass marketing
campaigns for things like soda mobile phones
internet cars grocery stores margin car for things
like this which is your traditional mass marketing
um if you're trying to reach a broad audience and
you don't have any other good ideas on what to do
with marketing you'll buy a billboard the bottom
line is that you want your marketing plan to be
testable meaning you want to be able to measure
the results you want to be flexible you want
to be able to change what you're doing modify
what you're doing and respond to the feedback
that you're getting and you want to be scalable
meaning if it works you want to be able to pour
more budget into that marketing plan in order
to dramatically increase sales so i hope this
was uh helpful i hope it was effective uh if
you have any questions or comments leave them
in our youtube channel on on this episode or
or send us an email at ryanmoroccopodcast.com
and we love to hear your feedback
