What Kaymu and WomenX are trying to achieve with Online Marketing Workshops

Kaymu.pk and WomenX are collaborating to conduct an “Online Marketing Mix & Mingle” at the Kaymu office for women entrepreneurs in order to educate them on the 4P’s, Positioning, Photography, Pricing and Promotion.

Kaymu.pk is a popular online retailer and marketplace in Pakistan while WomenX is a World Bank initiative to promote entrepreneurship among the women. With the recent growing trend of home-based women starting businesses via the internet and the birth of online-selling marketplaces like Kaymu and the women-specific Sheops, Pakistani women have started to realize the true potential of entrepreneurship and it has given them an opportunity to make waves across the virtual world from inside their homes. Slowly, online buying and selling has creeped into our routines.

One can look around the internet and find tons of stories of people using the internet as their primary source of livelihood, but there is little talk about how one can effectively reach their customer and sell their products or services. To tackle this problem, Kaymu and WomenX have partnered to educate women by conducting sessions on making their brand distinguishable, garnering greater activity and engagement on their Facebook page or getting a better rate of conversion from their online marketing ad postings.

The audience members for their first meetup included around 60 women entrepreneurs who are selling products across various categories – health care, home furnishing, jewelry, handicrafts and fashion apparel – through their Facebook pages, or across websites, or marketplaces like Kaymu, and were eager to learn some techniques on how to position, photograph, price and promote their product via the internet and reach their customers. Questions posed by the three speakers, Nazish Chagla of Neco’s, Maliha Rao of Fashion Pakistan Council and Imtiaz Noor of Kaymu included,

• What you want to charge vs. What you can charge
• How your product is perceived vs. how you want it to be perceived
• Would you buy the product if you saw the photo?

Bringing businesses online is surely convenient but not necessarily simple when it comes to creating awareness about your brand and marketing it effectively. It requires thought, creativity and the will to learn and experiment. Only the first of many, the session left women asking for more techniques and will soon be followed up with trainings on how to use Social Media effectively as an unpaid means of promoting one’s product/ brand.