Banking giant, First Bank Limited has tasked small and medium enterprises (SMEs) on the use of the social media to propagate their businesses, connect with customers, increase brand awareness and drive sales.
Acknowledging that this is a long-term investment, and will takes time to establish a solid social media presence, requiring patience and consistency, the bank, at the FirstBank SME Connect webinar, held recently, urged SMEs to use social media platforms to promote and create content strategies to ensure business growth and success.
The theme of the webinar was “Leveraging Social Media for Business Success: Best Practices and Strategies for Building Your Brand and Growing Your Audience.”
Speaking, Founder of Digital Marketing Skill Institute, Tobi Asehinde, urged business owners to collaborate with large platforms to increase brand visibility while using social media to grow their brands.
According to him, business owners must build a credible brand on social media in order to earn trust.
He identified four types of credibility that business owners can use to build their brands. These are presumed credibility; third-party-reference reputed credibility, surface credibility, where SMEs can high-quality images to engage customers; and earned credibility.
First Bank’s Head of Digital Marketing, Chinwe Bode-Akinwande, also urged business owners to nurture the link in the middle of their sales channels by creating quality content that would attract customers to their brand.
She also noted that there is a need for individuals to have a business calendar, choose content formulas, research the latest trends on social media platforms, and monitor the performance of content.
Head of Growth, Cashaam, a social commerce platform and marketplace for micro-entrepreneurs, Michael Olanrewaju, shared three secrets on how SMEs could effectively run Facebook ads on WhatsApp and Amazon.
In his words: “So, the first secret to revolutionizing your business is targeting your ideal customer, this means understanding their needs, interests, and pain points and creating the content of your advertisement that speaks directly to them.”
“So by doing this, you will be able to attract more of the right customers to your business.”
“The second is optimizing your ads for conversion, using a particular objective called sales or conversion, which involves constant monitoring and tweaking your ads to make sure they are performing at their best.”
“Thirdly, it’s the campaign budget optimization; when you run out a campaign, you have to set up a budget for your campaign which is the total amount of money that you are going to spend on your adverts”
