Small traders have taken advertising of products to the billboards

Small traders have inked a deal with outdoor advertisers in a bid to market their products to a wider consumer market.

In the next one year, the traders will test the impact of advertising on the billboards to gauge its impact. Through the SME Support Centre, the traders signed an agreement with LiveAd Limited to beam their products on the outdoor advertising spaces.

The move will thrust the small traders into the deep end, an area that has been a preserve of big brands such as Safaricom; airlines, banking institutions, food and beverage  manufacturers among others.

“The deal is basically to get the SME segment to start to appreciate outdoor advertising,” SME Support Centre, Chief Executive Officer, Linda Onyango told People Daily.

She noted that primarily, most of those SMEs have always looked at outdoor advertisements; billboards, signage among others as the domain of big companies such as KQ, Safaricom, and EABL among others.

“However, we are now coming in to change the consumer behaviour of the SME side. For us, because we are an SME support centre, we picked LIVE AD and negotiated a discounted cost to have SMEs also get to be visible out there, on what they have to offer the consumer market,” Onyango pointed out.

Although there is no existing proof of success, She revealed that the agreement paves way for the small traders under the umbrella of SMEs to test the commercial move. “We are optimistic it will get traction,” she added.

At LiveAd Limited, the advertisers who boast of close to 500 billboards across the country are optimistic the move will bear fruits.

Daniel Kilonzo, Marketing Consultant at Live Ad Limited narrated how a small company has seen tremendous growth in a short time, after spending years marketing academic programmes of foreign universities in Kenya through leaflets and brochures.

“After several months of persuasion, we managed to get the company to take a risk by pushing their marketing strategy on the billboards. Surprisingly the Sh110, 000 it invested had a handsome turnover of more than Sh2 million. This happened in a very short period,” he recounted.

At first its proprietors were shy when they were approached to try outdoor advertising, but eventually gave in.

LiveAd Limited was instrumental in getting the firm to advertise on the billboards. Alando said that within a short time, the firm managed to get 20 students to apply and secure admissions abroad.

“The move had a huge turnover for the firm and it prompted them to add three more billboards in Eldoret and one in Westlands,” Kilonzo noted of the company which has an office in Westlands, Nairobi the size of a small company’s boardroom.

He pointed out that this company is not a market leader in the game, but from that one step they now believe outdoor works.

“They now believe that it is something traceable because they were able to track the calls from potential students who were calling, and able to convert them into sales,” he added.

So it is possible that SMEs can also take a lead in the market, he pointed out.

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