Importance of Creating A Social Media Plan for SMEs in Africa
“Every business that wants to create global footprints must have a clear social media strategy.”
When we have a product or service to offer, we have crossed the first line. The second obligation is to find the channels to effectively and efficiently market our products or services.
Many people use digital marketing and social media interchangeably. However, digital marketing is the wide variety of activities performed on the internet to promote goods. Social media is only one of the components of digital marketing. We will discuss social media in this post to enlighten small business owners about its functionality and use.
The Transition
Before the advent of social media, businesses depended on traditional marketing to reach customers to promote products and services. These methods included radio, television, and print media. All these methods were appreciated as they helped business owners to reach large audiences over long distances.
All of this changed with the introduction of the internet. There were many questions traditional marketing could not answer. One of them was how to reach a particular group of people within a specific time frame. Another was how to monitor the number of people listening or watching an ad per time.
Asides from this, digital media proves to be cheaper than traditional media. What is spent on traditional media to digital media is about 1:3. This ratio is for Facebook but could serve other platforms as well.
With digital media comes flexibility, a plethora of choices, and opportunities to target specific groups. The targeting could be by location, age group, sex, hobbies, and interests. Also, you can ascertain the clicks and impressions on a particular campaign, whether organic or paid. You can tell who clicked what, their location, and the overall impressions.
All these pieces of data help to plan better and reach an audience with exactly what they want. This introduced us to “personalized marketing.” Personalized marketing resolves the issue of sending one message to many customers. Thus, saving businesses from sending spam messages.
Explaining Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites. It helps create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share such content with their social networks.
A corporate message spreads from user to user. As such, it resonates because it comes from a trusted source instead of the brand or company itself. This form of marketing thrives on the mechanism of word-of-mouth. The result of this is “earned media” rather than “paid media.” Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and, often, improves customer service.
Emmanuel Otori, the writer has worked on the GEM Project of the World
Bank, Conducted training for entrepreneurs and professionals at the
Abuja Enterprise Agency and has over 8 years of experience working
with over 50 SMEs across Nigeria.
Please visit my LinkedIn profile here –
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emmanuelotori
