Experts in digital marketing have urged Small and Medium-scale Enterprises (SMEs) to take advantage of the various social media platforms to promote and sustain the viability of their businesses.
The experts gave the advice at Firstbank SME Connect webinar with theme, “Leveraging Social Media for Business Success: Best Practices and Strategies for Building Your Brand and Growing Your Audience’’, on Thursday in Lagos.
The founder Digital Marketing Skill Institute, Mr Tobi Asehinde, urged business owners to grow their audience by letting people to know about their brand on social media.
He said that for customers to be more aware of their services on social media, there’s need for business owners to be a strong and credible brand on social media that people could trust.
He named four types of credibility that business owners could leverage their brand to include presumed credibility, reputed credibility (third party reference), surface credibility (use quality pictures to engage people) and earned credibility.
He urged them to also begin collaborate with other social media platforms like Instagram life, to show their faces or products on their brands.
He said that by the time people see their brand on those platforms, they would not be seeing them as a new business.
According to him, this automatically boost their businesses and trust that people have in them.
Mrs Chinwe Bode-Akinwande, Head, Digital Marketing at Firstbank, urged business owners to nurture the link in the middle of their sales funnel by creating quality content that would attract customers to their brand.
“No matter how small your business is, you need these tips to create a content strategy- define your target audience and identify them, their interest and the type of content they consume.
“Define your content marketing objective, determine what you want to achieve.
“Do you have a calendar as a business? If you don’t have this you will not know what to publish tomorrow and you will not be able to even do your content scoring.
“Choosing your content formula will allow you know what type of content you want to create and also spying is allowed, research the latest trends going on social media platforms.
“Doing all of these will keep you relevant in your own space and have a voice as it is very important in creating a content,’’ she said.
Mr Michael Olanrewaju, Head of Growth, Cashaam, a social commerce platform and marketplace for micro-entrepreneurs, shared three secrets that SMEs could effectively run Facebook Ads on WhatsApp and Amazon.
Olanrewaju said the big idea behind running Facebook adverts that converts on WhatsApp and Amazon was very simple.
He noted that could be done by targeting ideal customer, optimising adverts for conversion and using the campaign budget optimisation.
Olanrewaju, therefore, shared the secrets that entrepreneurs needed to significantly increase their skills and grow their business.
So, the first secret to revolutionizing your business is targeting your ideal customer, this means understanding their needs, interests and pain points and creating your adverts contents that speaks directly to them.
“So by doing this, you will be able to attract more of the right customers to your business.
“The second is optimising your adverts for conversion, using a particular objective called sales or conversion which involves constantly monitoring and tweaking your ads to make sure they are performing at their best.
“Thirdly, it’s the campaign budget optimisation; when you run out a campaign, you have to set up a budget for your campaign which is the total amount of money that you are going to spend on your adverts,’’ he said.
