Nigeria’s technology space accommodates business marketing

Nigeria’s advertising market has recorded a massive level of development in recent times due to the explosive growth in mobile technology. This has resulted in the increased popularity of the use of the online space for business advertising and marketing, experts say.

Industry analysts say that most entrepreneurs and organisations that place business growth as major priority are certainly aware of the steady growth and trend of mobile advertising.

Speaking at the Nigerian Information Technology Conference  (NITEC) 2016, themed Trending Technologies in Lagos, yesterday, Juliet Ehimuan-Chiazor, country manger, Google Nigeria, said mobile had become the centre of marketing around the world, as Google revealed that more searches were done on mobile than on desktop, and with the growth of telecoms in Nigeria, mobile had become an important factor for digital advertising and marketing.

“In Africa I’m 2020, it is expected that we will have 600 million internet users and 500 million of those users will be on mobile, so everyone is coming online really fast. We no longer talk about going online, we now live online. It is a very real tread and global brands are taking advantage of opportunities in the digital space,” she said.

Traditionally, organisations will engage with the masses by creating messages and broadcasting it to a mass audience through television, radio or newspaper, but now with the advent of social media platforms, users are a lot more empowered and more engaged.
“You have more power to actually give feedback to organisations and get almost immediate response, to establish your preferences and consumers are now more dynamic so marketing models have to shift from broadcasting to dialog and consciously thinking about including and involving the consumer in the journey and taking into consideration the client’s feedback in a very active way,” Ehimuan- Chiazor said.

According to Ehimuan- Chiazor, social media advertising has taking over the digital advertising space for most brands, as most people accessing the internet through mobile phone are members of at least one social media platform, and so social would continue to drive a lot of internet activity.

A new measurement research by Oracle for Snapchat advertisers finds that 92 percent of digital Ad campaigns on the social media app saw positive offline sales increases.

According Eric Roza, senior vice president of the Oracle Data Cloud, the Oracle Data Cloud released new research analysing the in-store sales lift from 12 CPG campaigns run on Snapchat for leading cosmetic, personal care, cleaning, packaged food, and beverage brands.

Findings revealed that 92 percent of the Snapchat advert campaigns drove a positive lift in in-store sales, Snapchat ad campaigns exceeded Oracle Data Cloud norms on all key metrics with sales lift being the primary driver.

“We worked with one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in history to help Snapchat advertisers understand and improve the effectiveness of their campaigns,” Roza said.

“This research shows that Snapchat is more effective at driving sales for advertisers,” he said.

Regarded as the fastest growing sector of the Nigerian economy, the mobile telecommunications industry has recorded over $32 billion investment, over 152 million mobile subscribers and close to 100 million Internet subscriptions according to available statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the industry regulator.

As a result of growing statistics in the industry, most entrepreneurs, brands and business organisations are looking more towards digital mobile advertising.

Kim Macllwaine, CEO, Africa and Middle East, TNS, said digital marketing, especially on the mobile, would continue to grow exponentially in Nigeria going forward.