If you don’t stand out, you’ll never be found.

The Weskus Distrik strategic marketing drive is gaining momentum. CFO Dr Johan Tesselaar provides feedback.

The intent of the drive was not only to serve Weskus Distrik’s needs to position itself as one of South Africa’s top performing municipalities (just achieved its 14th consecutive clean audit) but also to support the efforts of the five local municipalities in attracting investors, funders and semigrators to the Weskus region.

“We started by understanding what investors needed to know, and structured our strategic brand architecture accordingly. Brands need to be honest and authentic, so we checked whether what we offered was backed by truth and reality. We were never tempted to design a new Weskus Distrik logo because frankly, that would be wasteful and would miss the point. Investors are not attracted by a logo. And a logo is not a brand”.

“The next step was determining which markets we needed to reach, and which platforms were appropriate. Our primary strategic marketing channel is LinkedIn as it is the premium B2B platform, allowing for accurate targeting and reach. Generally, our investment and semigration audiences are the same people. We create about thirty posts per month, with each tested against one or more of our brand values for relevance – the traits that can attract our audience to the Weskus”.

An aspect that was new to the Weskus Distrik team was the importance of meeting agency deadlines to ensure consistency and frequency of messaging. Given how busy the Weskus Distrik team is, a turnaround review and sign-off time of a full month’s campaign is mostly one day, and never more than two days. This level of commitment indicates how seriously Weskus Distrik views their drive, no doubt fuelled by Executive Mayor RW ‘Boffie” Strydom’s call to ‘Laat Waai’.

The campaigns achieve extensive reach to the right people and places, and are now also attracting organic reach among influential followers.

Is the campaign panning out as expected?

“We are not marketing the Zero Interest Rate Home Loan as, given the challenges of local government in South Africa, it is a difficult market to work in. And few brands are overnight successes. However, there are pockets of stability and therefore opportunity in the local government space, and we need to compete in those areas for investment and favourable association. The analytics suggest that our route to market is on point, and we have attracted enough solid opportunities to justify our strategy. It’s really a question of standing out or differentiating in the right places so that the right people will find you easily enough”.

Dr Johan Tesselaar
CFO
Weskus Distrik