Integrated Marketing
While most people in South Africa are familiar with the Eskom name and would be able to guess at the address of the company website, the same is not true outside the country. As part of overcoming this challenge, Eskom Enterprises, Eskom’s vehicle for international expansion, has retained MBendi to manage a website targeted at the large international business audience who use the MBendi website each month to find out about the global energy sector and the African business environment. The Eskom Enterprises logo and brief messages about Eskom have been placed on MBendi country and energy sector profile pages with links to this website. Eskom news releases are being included on this site, as well as being distributed in MBendi’s E-mail newsletters.
The website forms part of Eskom’s US$ one million campaign to position itself as something more than just a provider of electricity to South Africa. Spokesperson Zahn Matthee says the giant utility has decided on a shift in strategic intent. It now targets a global market, rather than one exclusively South African; it defines its business as electricity and related services, rather than just electricity and, most importantly, it positions itself as a catalyst to kickstart the African economy. Already Eskom is positioned to be a key player in the telecommunications sector.
Country Knowledge
The Lex Africa network, which is run by Werksmans Attorneys, provide business guides that give an overview of the legal, business and fiscal conditions in African countries. If you go to MBendi’s Ghana country profile, for instance, you will see how information from our clients can be seamlessly accessed from this page…often by visitors delighted to find information and keen to do business with the providers!
News Releases
News releases are a powerful way for companies to bring their activities to the attention of potential investors and joint venture partners, something that is well understood by listed upstream oil company Energy Africa. Both companies have used MBendi’s News and Views software so that their news releases can be seen on their websites; on the MBendi website; and in MBendi’s E-mail newsletters. Visitors can also request the news releases be sent to them by E-mail, allowing each company to automatically build a database of interested parties. If you go to MBendi’s Equatorial Guinea upstream oil industry page, you can see how this company’s website can be accessed via a range of links. And when we included a mention of these companies in our monthly E-mail newsletter to registered users, usage of these companies’ websites increased by an average of more than 50%!
Conferences
The World Bank and the CWC Group run great websites on which they provide information about their activities. However when it came to advertising their specialist African conferences, they came to MBendi so that visitors to the MBendi website could be made aware of the events. We did this by including a description of the events on relevant industry and country pages and in our monthly E-mail newsletter.
Information Partners
BMI-Techknowledge publishes a comprehensive African Communications Technology Handbook which is an essential reference for many of the companies using the MBendi website. And what better way to market the Handbook on the Internet than to use material from the Handbook to create a jointly branded African Communications and IT website inside the MBendi framework?
Using MBendi’s Database
London-based CDC Capital Partners is one of the biggest investors in the developing world. Because the MBendi website is database driven we are able to record details of the companies and projects in which they have an interest in the database so there are links between the pages generated from these database entries and the CDC Capital Partners website on the MBendi server. The more links…the more relevant traffic! Mobil Oil also uses this technique to provide links to their agents and distributors.