• Thursday, March 28, 2024
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BusinessDay

Redwire educates SMEs, entrepreneurs on measuring returns on social media investments

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As social media continues to be the new business driver, helping businesses to create brand awareness, connect with customers and boost the sale of products and services, Redwire Marketing Group has shared insights on tools and methods that will help businesses measure returns on social media investments.

At a panel discussion session held Thursday in Lagos, in collaboration with the Social Media Week, participants, including conglomerates and start-ups, had the opportunity to gain knowledge on suitable social media platforms for their businesses.

Themed ‘Measuring Returns on Your Social Media Investments –tools, methods, case studies’, the session raised and answered questions relating to influencer marketing.

Social media is one of the areas with the highest growth rate and more Nigerians are now leveraging on it for digital marketing purposes while also increasing opportunities for brand-consumer interactions across all business verticals.

Nigeria had 57.7 million internet users in 2014. This figure was projected to grow to 76.2 million internet users in 2017. However, in 2018, a report, ‘Digital Trends for Nigeria in 2018’, conducted by Terragon Group placed the total number of internet users in Nigeria at 100.5 million people, with some 22 million of them actively using social media for a whole lot of activities.

Many are, however, perplexed as to the efficacy of how clicking a mouse or tapping the screen of a smartphone could translate to patronage.

“A lot of businesses come up today, and you still hear people tell you things like: ‘Why should I invest in social media?’ ‘How far is social media going to take me?’ or ‘If I am pumping money into an ad, am I going to get sales immediately?’” said Doyinsola Ajayi, marketing strategist, Redwire Marketing Consulting, while speaking to BusinessDay.

“So, we decided to do this event to answer the most important questions that people have. We saw the need to actually address social media issues, and we decided to collaborate with Social Media Week, being an internationally acclaimed event, to make this happen. So we brought stakeholders, SMEs, business owners, entrepreneurs to the same room to address possible social media issues that they actually have,” Ajayi said.

Temitayo Eyitayo, creative director, 24 Apparel, said the only way to connect social media marketing to sales “is you tying it back to your initial objectives, and sometimes you also have to be careful the kind of product you are selling”.

“Some products have instant sales. For some products, it will take a few months before you start selling because of the type. So with that, it just comes down to you looking at your business and products and then determining how long it should take. So there is no blanket response that if you spend 10,000 online, you’ll start getting response by day two, and by day seven, you will have sold out, no. It’s more complex than that,” Eyitayo said.

Chiamaka Ogbuekwe, founder/CEO, Social Prefect Tours, advised start-ups to grow organically and put in work to provoke sales, adding that Instagram offers better tools for business growth.

“Whenever you start a business, you know that it takes time to actually grow. So you need to be consistent, you need to take your time, and keep putting out quality content with good images. You have to put in the effort to do proper branding. It doesn’t happen overnight,” Ogbuekwe said.

“Instagram is very effective in driving sales for SMEs and I see that because it really depends on how your brand is perceived, and how much work you put into your branding, and there is no overnight success,” she said.

On the flipside, Demola Adetona, founder, Expose Nigeria, argued that despite the slow reception of information on Facebook, its enthusiasts can stand out if only they can invest in good content and make more collaborations, which he described as ‘the new competition’.

“You can stand out on Facebook through collaborations and investing in your content,” Adetona said.

 

Desmond Okon