A digital marketing strategy for small businesses in Nigeria is an important part in today’s world of the overall marketing mix of a business regardless of its size and whether or not it’s doing business online.
In the past where we had TV channels, some radio stations, a handful of top magazines, and a newspaper. A small business can’t reach its target audience. A small business that is doing most or all of its business online needs to embrace a digital marketing strategy that helps online users see it.
There are several main areas of online marketing that are of interest to a small business. Some of them are more important to local, offline businesses, while others are more effective for those exclusively operating online. Many businesses engage in multiple areas of small business marketing on the internet.
What Digital Marketing Strategy Is Best for Small Business?
Take a look at your customers and identify where they spend their time online. Your digital client base might be a different audience than you’re used to targeting. Your budget will be an important factor when deciding which digital marketing strategies to pursue. Some strategies can be difficult to measure, but be consistent with your method of measurement—one suggestion is to compare the company’s revenue during certain marketing efforts to the revenue generated while running other marketing campaigns.
Here are key digital marketing strategies that your business can implement to grow and increase revenue.
Use Google My Business
One of the most powerful marketing strategies for your small business is to use Google My Business to your advantage. For businesses targeting local markets, this platform is a powerful marketing medium. The listing appears at the top half of the search page ahead of the search results.
So, try to get your small business in the top listings. If your marketing team is able to get your business listings in the top 3 listings, you are bound to get an enormous amount of traffic, which solely can bring you huge business without spending much on ads.
Build a Great Brand
Branding is a way of defining your business to yourself, your team and your external audiences. Good branding is for everybody and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Especially in the digital age, there’s plenty you can do to make your business memorable for your clients and customers.
When it comes to branding and identity, it’s crucial to have a memorable business name, elegantly designed logo, eye-catching colours, beautiful and professional website and other elements that help communicate your strategic positioning to your customers. All of these pieces should work together to evoke a very specific tone and feeling.
Website
The importance of a website in the digital marketplace cannot be undermined, as a website is the web version of a physical brick-and-mortar store. The best part is the fact that it cost little or no money to set up, and attracts visitors (prospective customers) from across the globe.
Just like the brick and mortar store, when customers visit your online store (website), they develop an impression of your brand from the outlook or packaging of your website.
From the website, visitors will find out all they need to know about the products or services you provide, including the value you offer to consumers.
In other words, your website design must be on par with that of your competitors. It must be mobile-friendly, user-friendly, and compatible with all devices.
And, if you are a business owner without a website, start making plans to get one for your business, as it enhances your credibility.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating creative, informative and catchy content for your target audience. Give information about your brand and also about your industry. Every other competitor may focus on only sales. However, content marketing produces sales and brand loyalty. By steadily providing relevant information to your audience, you would create a sense of trust and loyalty from them. Content marketing includes website content, informative blogs, video content, and social media posts. If you’re worried about creating unique content for your brand, Chorddigital can help you with it. We have experts in Content creation that would create unique and catchy content for your brand on all platforms.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO is a series of tactics used by marketers to obtain higher placements on the search results pages of Google, Bing, Yahoo or other search engines in order to increase visits to their website. The good news? It’s free! The bad news is that it is also very tricky.
It can take a long time to start seeing results from your SEO strategies, but it pays off in the long run. One of the easiest things you can do now to increase your search engine traffic over time is keyword research. Keyword research tools will tell you what words and phrases your target audience most often uses when searching for information or products that your business can provide.
SEO isn’t only about improving the quantity of your website’s organic search traffic, it’s also about improving the quality of the traffic. When your contents are in line with topics your target audience is interested in, your business connects with the right prospects, who are likely to be interested in your brand’s service or product offerings.
Social Media Marketing
When Social Media Marketing is done right, it is an effective way for small business owners to connect with prospects and gain more customers for their brand. It can make sales skyrocket.
Social media platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media marketing is so effective some entrepreneurs run their business only on social media. You can attract a new audience, engage them and convert them to paying customers from your social media platform. A proper social media marketing strategy includes engaging and creative content, promotions, and consistency. You have to be consistent and active on your social media platform to engage your audience. Social media marketing would increase brand awareness and generate more sales for your business.
Pay-Per-Click Marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is running online advertisements where the business only pays if the ad has been clicked on. There are many different types of online ads including the ones featured at the top and sides of a search, promotions that run before videos, or ads that show up in mobile apps or while browsing online.
Some benefits of PPC marketing are that the business only pays for results, and that ads can be targeted towards a specific geographic location.
The cost of PPC marketing can vary significantly depending on how much the company is willing to invest in advertising. Pricing is based mainly on keyword competition—popular keywords that have high competition will cost more.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy for small businesses in Nigeria. It helps directly manage and communicate with your audience. Whether it’s an online store or a physical store, email marketing would help you stay in touch with your customers and improve brand loyalty. You can incorporate a pop-up on your website requesting those visiting your website to subscribe to your weekly newsletter. By compiling a mailing list, you can send automated messages to your audience. They can include sales offers, new information about your store or industry, and personalized birthday messages. Although growing an email list may take time, the results are exceptional for every small business in Nigeria. However, try not to send emails too frequently to avoid being marked as spam or making your audience unsubscribe.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the many kinds of performance-based marketing, where a business owner pays one or more affiliates for every customer that patronized the business through the affiliate’s marketing activities.
The business owner gives the affiliate marketer commission for marketing a product or deal. An affiliate is someone who promotes or markets a product in an attractive way that make buyers interested in the product.
People always confuse affiliate marketing for referral marketing, because both forms of marketing drive sales to the business owner through third parties. However, they are different, as they don’t drive sales the same way. While affiliate marketing drives sales through financial motivations, referral marketing drives sales via trust and personal relationships.
Mobile Marketing
A consumer’s experience nowadays is largely driven through a mobile device—whether they’re searching for the product or company, doing a price comparison, or actually buying a product.
Mobile marketing is aimed at reaching customers through their smartphones or tablets by using mediums such as text messaging, social media, website, email, and apps. Businesses can take advantage of technology that can target clientele based on time or location, like sending customers a discount code when they enter a store.
Video Marketing
As of 2017, Forbes rated YouTube as the second largest search engine after Google, with 3 billion searches per month. Most recently, YouTube has been the go-to place to learn new things, as there are thousands of video tutorials available for users to learn everyday. This is because videos are more engaging and explanatory than written content.
As a small business owner, if you’re not exploring this digital marketing channel, then you need to re-evaluate your digital marketing strategies.
If you have good content, be it a product, service, or art, you can advertise your videos on YouTube at a cost, because your video content will be viewed by millions of people around the world.
Perhaps the cost of the YouTube ad is not within your budget, not to worry, Facebook and Google also permit video ads, and they are cheaper than YouTube ads.
Therefore, Facebook and Google is the best alternative for a small business with a low budget, but wants to explore video marketing.
Webinars
A webinar is an online meeting, seminar, or conference, that can be in the form of a discussion, presentation, or demonstration. Webinars are mostly used as lead magnets for email marketing.
With the right topic, you can get lots of new subscribers added to your email marketing list. It is a useful digital marketing channel because you can showcase your products live and explain its uses, thereby capturing the interest and attention of your audience.
Webinars also help to build personal relationships with customers. Because it’s a question and answer session, your audience can relate with you and understand your salient points. If you follow up on them appropriately, it makes them feel you care about their needs, and they may want to patronize you.
Conclusion
We know that these digital marketing strategies for small business in Nigeria work not just because we use them, but also because our students use them. We’ve seen countless businesses succeed through these strategies.
Small businesses can take advantage of the marketing strategies shared in this article to collaborate globally and compete against big businesses.
If you have a small business, you need to take the above areas of digital marketing into consideration. Formulate a plan and combine it with your other marketing efforts. Some of these areas of marketing will be more important and effective, depending upon your business. You can have professionals help you or outsource if you don’t have the manpower to handle marketing obligations in-house.