Why you should fire your digital marketing strategist.

Well its time, yes its time to say goodbye to your digital team, right now. This sounds harsh but let me elaborate. Digital Marketing is the key to unlocking a lot of revenue, I mean massive revenue. But let me guess you are paying a lot of money to be on digital marketing. I mean your team comes with a report this month we reached 50 000 people and engaged with 80% of these people and yeah the usual our impression are 200 000 clicks. We are doing good on digital marketing. 

Allow me to tell you that, that is bunkos, you should fire your digital team, hell your firm should fire you too. Now do not get me wrong. These numbers are good, really good really impressive. But these are the sort of numbers that we give respect to in advertising wow you reached a lot of people and yeah you can measure. But that data means nothing to the bottom line of business. This is essentially how marketers have found a way around the negatives of print advertising. There is no difference between being told 20 000 vehicles pass by your billboard in a weak, and 20 000 people viewed your post on Facebook. That means nothing, ok maybe it means people have seen your brand. But where is the revenue? That is the key question.

If your digital marketing team has not convinced you to have a website,to have an online store, if they have not pushed for you to have a way of receiving payments online. If you are not making revenue online in this day and age, You have to think real hard about your digital team. Because soon you are going to be extinct. By soon  I do not mean 10 years from now,I mean in the next three years. In Zimbabwe. People will prefer buying online compared to buying in physical store.

Such a bold statement will sound atrocious to many, but know this, 5 years ago the most efficient means of communication was mxit and 2go. Text was also popular, voice was expensive. To day over 50billion messages are sent on WhatsApp a day, calling is now virtually free.In Zimbabwe you can call for free. Ecocash well Ecocash is now winning global awards. So ask yourself how is your digital marketing team preparing you for the future. Has your brand built the effective foundation it will need in three years time. Or are you still taking it slow with digital.

Ending Poverty in Africa: Passion vs Poverty

A lot of successful people say that in order to succeed you need to have passion for what you do. This is true but then it depends on how you define success. For myself and many other people we define success as having lots of money, cars and the ability to afford better opportunities.

We are very passionate about different avenues in life, some are passionate about sports, some are passionate about philanthropy, some are passionate about religion and some like me are passionate about music. To be honest with you the most successful people in the world are passionate about what they do, Warren Buffet began investing at the age of 11 and he says he dances to work, Bill Gates is passionate about technology and philanthropy. Our very own Strive Masiyiwa is passionate about business and owns a lot of them.

Yet you and I even though we are passionate about the things we are passionate about we hardly are making an ends meet out of it. The funny thing about passion is you can be passionate about things that have no profit (if there is such a thing) you can be passionate about something you are not good at, (have you seen star bright or south African idols the wooden mic) we can be passionate about the things we are good at, look at Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi or Serena Williams the list is limitless.

By looking at this I am left to question myself out of the billions of people in the world, why is it that only a few people are successful I mean in terms of money. What makes them so different is it the people they know? Has God blessed them all more than us? I keep on asking myself these questions why, why, why. Now I know why?

Success is really about passion, but then how you define passion is where most of us fail. From the dictionary passion is…………………………………………………………………………………………….. However in reality being passionate means willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. That means spending time, money, getting educated however most importantly creating the opportunities for yourself. The difference between me and Dr Dre, is he created his own opportunities, he chose to be a dj when I chose to get a degree, and he became great at it and learned how to run a business through practice whilst I learnt how to run a business through theory.

No matter how passionate you are if you do not create the opportunities for yourself no one will. There are people that can play soccer better than Messi, however they have no opportunity to prove their skill. However if you do your research every successful person created their own opportunity and remember fortune favours the prepared, just because you want something in life does not mean you will get it. In order to get whatever you want in life you have to become it, for in life you do not get what you want, you get who you are. If all you do is complain, that’s why you get things to complain about, bad service from your service providers, high costs of living, cheating partners. Life hands who you re, the things you are really passionate about.

Africa it is time we become passionate about things that matter, instead of complaining let’s start solving. Change begins with you, the governments have failed us, and it’s now up to you and me to make a difference. Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.