For the last few years, Nigeria’s largest and best-known companies have included online components in their major advertising campaigns – in the 21st century, a major campaign without an online presence is like a television commercial without sound.
This move to embrace online marketing makes perfect sense when you review the numbers. More than 48 million Nigerians use the Internet. Put simply, the large population of Nigerians online is getting even larger!
Small businesses have been understandably slower to join the digital economy. Getting online can seem daunting when you lack technical expertise or budget, and there’s a whole new language to learn – it’s a world of pay-per-click, click-through rates, and unique visitors. But while the Internet is not the core business of many SMEs, it can help your business grow. It lets you reach new customers and turbo-charge your business in a flexible way while controlling costs. Here are ten things business owners should keep in mind to make the most of this online opportunity.
- If you are not online, get on.
It is estimated that only about 40,000 Nigerian SMEs have a website- a surprisingly low number given the Internet penetration in this country.
Perhaps more SMEs would get online if they realized that a website does not need to be complex to serve its purpose. Above all, it should be easy to read, cleanly designed, and contain all the information your customers might be going online to look for – things like contact details, opening hours, parking instructions and answers to frequently asked questions. For companies that already have a web presence, think about how you’ll help visitors close the deal. A secure payment facility will let people purchase directly from your site without having to pick up the phone or hop in the car.
- Make sure people can find you
The web keeps growing, with more than one billion documents being added to Google’s search index in the past 12 months. Customers are looking for needles in an ever-growing haystack, and you can make it easier for them to find you with a few simple techniques. For example, it makes sense to investigate all of the free business listings available on the web, such as Google+ Business Pages. Any business can create a page which will be shown if a customer searches for their business.
By being easily ‘found’ online, small businesses can win customers outside of their traditional markets.
- Once you’ve moved to where your customers are, get inside their heads.
Nigerians are spending a lot of their media time each week online. But what are they doing there? According to a 2013 study by BRIU (BusinessDay Research and Intelligence Unit) 84 percent of Nigerians are online for information gathering purposes. The Internet is the first port of call for many people when they set out to research, compare, and ultimately buy, products and services. Searches for local businesses are getting more popular – in fact, more Nigerians are searching for hotels and bars than for Justin Bieber or Tiwa Savage.
Armed with this insight, small business owners can use search marketing to reach customers when they are looking for these local services.
- Manage your ROI
This concept is not unique to online marketing, but it’s far easier to manage with online tools. The internet provides marketers with unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability. Advertisers can bid to appear only against specific users’ search queries, so they are sure to be targeting a relevant and interested audience. Most importantly, with search marketing, an advertiser only pay when a user clicks their ad, meaning the model is fully accountable.
- “Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.”
Or so says US-based marketing-guru Seth Godin. This phrase expresses very well the ability of online marketing to connect you with your customers at the right time. Search marketing is particularly suited to this – by bidding to have your ad appear when someone searches on a keyword related to your business, you reach someone with a self-expressed interest in the goods or services you are selling.
- Write ‘must-click’ ads
Just because you’re marketing online doesn’t mean you should lower the standard of your advertising. The Internet is not the wild west of early days; flashing lights, pop up ads and horrible punctuation are a thing of the past for most web sites. To attract the right kind of customers to your business, you need to be writing the right kind of ads – those that will make them feel they must click on your ad to learn more. The tried and true rules of advertising apply – convey product benefits clearly, get to the point, and include a strong call to action.
- Work out your goals, and market accordingly
Once you have a clear sense of your business, stay focused on how to reach your customers. You need to know your ultimate goal – be it increased traffic to your website, conversions, or brand awareness – so you can measure success.
- Good marketers measure
As I mentioned earlier, online is an incredibly powerful medium for tracking the impact of your marketing. Free tools like Google Analytics allow you to track visitor patterns so you can better understand and serve your customers, telling you how they arrived, where they clicked, and how they departed. You can make sure you’re paying for results and improve your site and check-out processes until you’re getting the results you want.
- Test and adapt
Many marketers are stuck in the old-media mindset that once they’ve invested in setting up a campaign, they should use it until it has paid back its initial investment. But the online advertising environment is dynamic, and you can pause, cancel or resume campaigns at the click of a mouse. Use this to your advantage and continually review what you’ve set up, keeping in mind that there’s always room for improvement and that you should be responsive to what is working and what isn’t.
- Embrace the nature of the web
It can be easy to bring an offline mindset to online marketing, and miss out on some of the greatest benefits it has to offer, like its truly global nature. Depending on your kind of business, you could create marketing campaigns in different languages, or ones that target particular countries or cities.
If there are still questions in your mind about whether online marketing is for you, pause for a moment and think about your own media consumption. Where do you get your news? Where do you get your entertainment? Chances are, a large part of it comes from online sources, and the same is true for your potential customers. Given the 48 million Nigerians who are regular Internet users, marketing online, and doing so intelligently, is too big an opportunity to miss.
