5 Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses in Africa
Every small business owner in Africa needs access to digital marketing tips to thrive in the digital space. Our world is fast becoming a global village, thanks to the internet. Businesses are now learning to take advantage of this opportunity to promote their brands, attract leads, and convert them into consistent customers.
As an African entrepreneur, you must step into this space and take advantage of the boundless opportunities for brand awareness and recognition. This post will provide you with some digital marketing tips to help you set up efficient marketing campaigns. Let’s dive straight in.
What is Digital Marketing?
A perfect place to begin our discussion is to find out what digital marketing means. Investopedia defines digital marketing as using digital channels to promote a brand’s product and service offerings.
Digital marketing involves reaching customers through websites, social media, mobile devices, and search engines, to mention a few. While this type of marketing occurs on the internet, it utilizes some traditional marketing principles. Because of this, many companies mix both digital and traditional marketing strategies during their marketing campaigns.
Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses in Africa
Now that you know what digital marketing is let’s share a few digital marketing tips to help your brand.
Reach out to your customers
Building an efficient digital marketing strategy requires a lot of work. However, you must build all your work on the foundation of communication with your customers. Your strategy should help you meet your customers’ needs better than anyone else. How do you know their needs without communicating with them as frequently as possible?
You shouldn’t base your digital marketing campaigns on guesswork or pre-existing knowledge. Instead, speak to current and potential customers to find out their pain points and their preferred communication channels. Run surveys to understand the market better from different standpoints. Reaching out to your customers provides the information your business needs to thrive in the digital space.
Improve “Google My Business” Listings
Google is the biggest search engine in the world. Your reputation on Google plays a key role in how easily your target audience finds your brand. Many people search Google to find what they need these days. This means that you should pop up easily when they search for information about brands within your niche.
Thankfully, Google has presented businesses with an easy way to do this through “Google My Business.” Using this platform gives you more control over the information people can access about your brand online. Here are a few common “Google My Business” mistakes you should avoid:
- Not being up-to-date with your information.
- Misusing your business name.
- Duplicate listings.
- Creating unnecessary listings when you change addresses.
Once you can avoid these mistakes, Google My Business should be a great avenue to promote your brand online.
Work with professional visual content
We are in a world where the human attention span has reduced drastically. Because of this, people are less open to reading long content. They prefer to watch videos, scroll through images, or check out infographics. In essence, the more visually appealing your content is, the more likely your target audience will appreciate it.
One area that is growing in popularity is video content. More businesses are taking advantage of video content to attract engagement and improve brand awareness. Here are a few video content stats that you should know:
- 87 percent of marketers credit their increase in leads and sales to video content.
- 94 percent of marketers believe that their target audience understands their product and service offerings better because of video content.
- 86 percent of businesses employ video content to market their products and services.
Do you know that YouTube, the biggest video search engine, has more than 2.5 billion active users monthly? This means that businesses are understanding the impact of professional visual content in digital marketing. Take a cue and join the bandwagon before you get left behind.
Invest in email marketing
Some entrepreneurs are of the opinion that email marketing is “old school” or “outdated.” This notion is wrong, as email marketing is still one of the best ways to market your brand. For starters, email marketing presents the best ROI of all digital marketing channels, beating social media and video marketing.
To invest in email marketing, there are a few things that you need to know. Some of them include:
- Finding the right email marketing platform for your brand.
- Understanding the legal aspect of email marketing.
- Building your email lists.
- Learning what the competitors are doing.
- Writing attractive subject lines.
You can check out different articles online to find out about these important pieces of information. We advise gathering as much information as possible before diving into email marketing.
Don’t neglect social media
The role of social media in digital marketing cannot be overemphasized. Every business should have accounts on different social media platforms. You should first find out the platforms where your target audience is most active. Set up accounts on these platforms and regularly churn out exciting and insightful content.
One thing you must understand about social media marketing is that you must be consistent. Erratic posting of content doesn’t get you the desired results. Find out what your target audience wants and what the competition is posting. Create content in these areas and ensure that your content is exciting and relatable. Doing this attracts attention and followership.
Conclusion
That’s it for our digital marketing tips for small businesses in Africa. Do you have any questions? Kindly drop them in the comments section. You can also check out other digital marketing articles on SME360.
