The World Bank and African Development Bank reports that there are 650 million mobile users in Africa alone. This number is growing exponentially. This implies that more people are adapting to the usage of not just mobile phones but migrating to the use of smartphones and social media.
It is an “inside secret” that when you run social media adverts on Facebook, you not only target smartphone users but even specific devices and operating systems like the IOS or Android.
As a business owner, what does this opportunity mean for you, and how can you use this to help drive revenue growth? The first thing to evaluate is if you need to go online and how much transitions, system or metrics would you use to measure results from extending your arms to the social media gang.
After evaluation, you need to do target audience whereabouts on social media. For example –
Where can I find them?
- YouTube etc.
What are they interested in or which hashtags are they using, which niche are they interested in, it is basically about their interest which is similar to creating a “customer avatar”.
Content Strategy
“Content is king.”
What exactly is content? It simply means expressing information on your product and services in different creative formats depending on the medium selected, ranging from Facebook to Google.
This content strategy will involve the following –
- Social Media Calendar.
- The type of content.
One of the biggest factor affecting the online business space, especially in countries like Nigeria, is the issue of trust. This is where your content has its highest impact because they have been informed and can make calculated decisions to buy from you.
Secondly, you have to develop your sales and marketing funnel for social media. Businesses who can account for their funnel strategies have grown more than 20% in revenue. The funnel maps the customers’ journey, including an end to end experience that can be designed by either your sales or marketing with the right resources and research.
Identify the source of your leads; is it through paid advertising or unpaid, which is organic through the use of your social media accounts. Paid advertising are those media channels we use such as Facebook, Twitter or Google ads to drive people to or businesses while organic is content that prospects stumble into either on your blog, through shares or individual post.
Once that is identified; pull out a spreadsheet (you can use Microsoft offices excel for a start) and segment the leads (i.e. that is those interested in your business) then group them into two and label them “hot and cold”.
The cold group is for people who are interested but don’t show signs that they would buy soon while the hot group are those that would buy immediately with adequate persuasion.
Then close these hot leads “immediately”, or you risk losing them and send the cold leads to the marketing team who then pushes content to them which can be done by setting up an email client service or a bulk short message service solution.
Some of these email services include Mailchimp (which is free for up to 2000 contacts), and it allows you to track:
- Open rates.
- Click through rates.
- Email drip campaigns and more.
The Mailchimp service can be used to convert email subscribers; statistics have shown that you can convert up to 10% of your subscribers to customers.
Marketing budget
How much are you willing to budget towards promotions and marketing activities? A well-drawn out budget enables you to evaluate your return on investments. For example, if you run a paid ad costing about N10,000 (around $25), the returns can either be –
Brand engagements – How many followers did our business gain?
Sales conversions – How much sales conversions did we make?
This allows your businesses to understand how much is generated and if it is smart to continue the current strategy or optimise. Combining both your online and offline strategies will help you exponentially grow your revenue in Q4 because it is a time most customers will be buying less because they would probably be closing books for the year, so you need to reach more people because sales is a numbers game.
Today’s currency belongs to the person who is most seen and not necessarily those with the best products. As a growing business you have to put your business out there; the more you are seen; the more the brand engagements you can receive and then leverage on.