Are you a business owner in Nigeria looking for an effective and low-cost means of communicating with your customers and clientele? Try Email Marketing! Email Marketing in Nigeria can allow you to sell your product or service to your customers through direct marketing.

Also, with Email Marketing you can inform or remind your prospects (i.e. subscriber) of the availably of a (new) stock. The main advantage of Email marketing over other forms of marketing like social media marketing is that it drives sales without having to spending so much after the initial setup fees and maintenance fees.

To profit from Email Marketing in Nigeria, you need to first of all build an email list of your customers. This will help you gain your customer’s unique information – what they like to buy, how often they buy, when they like to buy and how likely they are to buy what you have.

Besides, with proper email marketing, you can gain information on your customer’s purchasing strength, their demographic information, tastes and dislikes. You will use this information to sell to your customers whenever there is the need to do so.

This article explains in detail the reasons for using Email Marketing in Nigeria.

Email Marketing in Nigeria for for Business Growth

Why You Need Email Marketing in Nigeria for your Business

1.     Email Marketing Can Help You To Identify Your Customers Or Prospects Unique Needs

With an email list of your customers, you can determine your customer’s preferences and specific by sending them an email requesting for feedback. Based on the feedback, you can know if the product you have in mind to sell will actually sell. Email marketing is an information providing tool that decides the success or failure of your next product. The beautiful part is that you do this at almost no advertising cost to you besides the initial and recurring maintenance fees.

2.     Having An Email List Reduces The Cost Of Your Marketing And Business Operation

I have mentioned twice in this article that email marketing is comparatively cheaper than other forms of marketing like digital marketing. This is because it is true. Besides, it is always available to you to use compared with hiring an employee or office assistant to run your marketing.

While an employee will fall sick, need a break for holidays, demand employee bonus or insurance, Email marketing does not. It is always there for you at no additional avoidable expenses. So, if you are looking for a way to reduce your cost of marketing and do away with some of the troubles of human labour, try Email marketing.

3.     You Can Sell/Rent Your Email List

Leave your local business for a moment and think global. Do you know that individuals and big corporations are currently looking for businesses with harvestable PDI (public domain information to work with? Yes, this is true. Email marketing is one of the most-sought after PDI tools. If you have a list of thousands or millions of targeted buyers on a given niche which investors are willing to buy, you can sell (or rent) this and make huge profits doing so.

4.     Email Marketing Can Give You International Connections.

You can connect with multinationals and internationals globally and expand your business reach seamlessly. Multinationals are looking for effective email lists to source domain information about customers whenever they are entering a new business terrain. They are always glad to connect and pay a juicy sum to whoever has a promising email list. The question is, will that be you?

5.     Effective Email Marketing Can Help You to Make Quality Business Decision Quickly

Why I say it helps you to make the best decision on time is that with your email list you can get buyer’s feedback and leverage this anytime of the day. This is a follow-up to what the first point I mentioned which discussed the customer information acquisition aspect of email marketing. This one discusses one of the key benefits which is the ability to make quick business decisions based on the information you gathered from your customers in your list.

Knowing what informs your (potential) customer’s choices and why they purchase more of a particular product is vital to a business’s growth. But that’s not the best part. The best part is having this information almost immediately to make the best decision quickly!

Growth in business is a function of quality, timely decisions. The more quality decisions a business makes and on time, the more it is likely to experience tremendous growth. This is made possible by email marketing.

Some of the outcomes of prompt business decisions which email marketing in Nigeria can give you are:

1. Improvement in your business’s overall manufacturing strategy
2. Improvement in the production capacity (input and output) of your business.
3. Reduction of your business’s turnover time.
4. Determination of a better profitability margin for your business.
5. The use of better machinery, tools, advertorial, etc. in your business

Conclusion

Email marketing in Nigeria has many benefits and this article has explained them. If you want to give and gain more from your customers and prospects, then go for Email marketing. It always helps. Yes, it does.

Promoting a business no longer thrives on business cards, shared flyers, billboards, and the like alone. With the fast-growing digital market, nowadays you can promote your business online with ease and from the comfort of your home, office, or remote location. You may make as much money as if not more than promote your business offline. Webinars are a go-to on the subject of e-marketing. Not only are they easy and cost-effective, but they also provide a platform to share valuable content to a large audience within a short timeframe.

This article will help you explore the benefits of adding webinars to your business strategy, learn how to host a successful webinar, and discover how they can help you grow your business in the long run.

How to Promote your Business Online Using Webinars

So, What is a Webinar?

In its simplest explanation, a webinar is a virtual seminar; a web-seminar if you will. It involves participants attending via a webcast which can be viewed using a Personal Computer (PC), a tablet, or a smartphone. Webinars are usually broadcast live and can be recorded for future reference. They are used to provide educative information about a product or service. Also, you may use webinars for sharing entertaining content. As a business, webinars can help you build your repute as an expert, establish a lasting relationship with your audience, and entertain new customers or leads.

Webinars are mostly used for:

1. Information sharing (i.e. creating awareness).
2. Learning (i.e. skills acquisition, online training).
3. Promotion (through product presentation, persuasion, selling).

The 3 Golden Methods for Promoting your Business Using Webinars

Promoting your business online through webinars requires a potent blueprint for publicity. It goes beyond providing great content. An effective strategy will involve proper timing, sending out pre-webinar and post-webinar emails, deciding on a great topic for your webinar, and so forth. That said, here are three (3) methods for promoting your business online using webinars today:

Method #1: Maximize the Questions and Answers (Q&A) Session

Feedback is the heart and soul of webinar marketing. You need to have a session where you can identify the participants’ problems, clarify their grey areas, solve their queries, and so forth. Remember your purpose for hosting a webinar is to share knowledge about your business. Therefore, answering a question with authority marks you out as an expert on the subject. While answering the participants’ questions, you have ample opportunity to recommend your products and/or service(s) to them. This is a novel way to promote your business using webinars.

Method #2: Re-Market through Email

It’s a good idea to connect with your leads through email before and/or after a webinar. Once registered, you may need to send a confirmation email to each participant (and this is where a co-producer might come in). You might need to send a reminder a few days to the webinar and other emails after the webinar have ended.

This marketing and re-marketing strategy can help you to generate an appreciable volume of sales, make your business known by more people and warm up your prospects to buy in the future. The essence of collecting leads when people register for your webinar is to remarket to them. So, ensure that you ethically maximize this opportunity to your business advantage.

Method 3: Create Room for Interaction and Cash-in on It

What differentiates a webinar from a talk show is the interaction the participants usually enjoy. To ensure the webinar is not one-sided, it is important to make it is interactive. That way, you can tailor your content, products, and services to meet their needs. When the webinar is interactive, it builds trust, creates comfort, and may make your webinar attendees want to buy what you are offering on the spot or later.

So, there you have it…

Webinars are a great way to help spread the word about your business and bring it to the limelight. It provides great benefits from capturing leads, increasing sales, boosting your revenue, and ultimately growing your business. They are recommended for small businesses that need to establish connections, build their network and advertise to the world. If you are yet to and webinars to your business marketing arsenal you are late. You should not hesitate any further. Utilize the information in this guide to take the first steps.

To start with, we have to know what digital marketing is and why it is very important to integrate it into the building of your small scale and medium sized businesses.

Digital marketing is an avenue for promoting products and service through the internet with the use of web-based or web-enabled/enhanced digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media platforms.

Every business whether small-scaled or medium-scaled need digital marketing to grow. The use of digital marketing in business can help to drive brand awareness and tell people more about a business thereby drawing customers’ attention and making sales. Digital or Online marketing can be done through platforms like social media, a business’s (i.e., company’s) own website, search engine rankings, email, display advertising and other kinds of incentivized advertising strategies done with ICT tools or via the internet.

Digital Marketing 101 For Small And Medium Businesses In Nigeria

The knowledge of Online marketing is vital for businesses and aspiring business owners must make effort to include it right from the kickoff stage of their business. Just like new students offer 101 (i.e., foundation) courses to introduce them to the basics of their course, business startups and startup founders need to get the proper orientation on digital marketing for managing and making good turnaround in their businesses. This is important whether you are a small business, a medium business or a big/large business. The knowledge of digital marketing is one knowledge that can (and will) surely help you to have a successful business.

Below covers some fundamentals of digital marketing and explains the reasons for digital marketing in business:

(1) Digital marketing Helps In Goals and Targets Setting.

Every business has a goal and target it wants to meet in say 5 to 10 years. For instance, as a business owner you might want to reach a million customers in 3 countries in 10 years. This is a big goal and only digital marketing can help you to achieve this.

This may not be your goal but every business has similar goals as this. To meet them, you need to apply several strategies of which digital marketing comes top.

Before now, when we had to send letters to friends and family or business partners and the rest, we used post offices and these letters and messages did not get to them until after days. Also, people only did their businesses within their immediate environments and only few people knew about it which eventually brought very little sales and profits.

Now, you can sit at the comfort of your office or business location and reach customers thousands of miles away from you by the help of social media, emails, search engines and advertorials on blogs, websites, and forums. This is what we call digital marketing. Goals which looked unattainable to people and businesses decades ago can now be achieved through the help of digital marketing with ease.

(2) You Need Digital marketing To Create Awareness and Potential for Your Business.

Digital marketing can help you to discover the potential of your business and how big it can get. It helps you to determine how much your business can generate and how far it can go.

With digital marketing, you can easily know and have a better understanding of your target market, online audience and people who are searching for and need your product(s) or service(s).

Adequate knowledge of online marketing is what businesses that have gone big use in improving and expanding their reach and evaluating their strategies. You simply won’t know your online audience and market place without effective digital marketing.

(3) Digital marketing Assists to Beat the Competition

You can keep up with competition when you apply digital or online marketing to your  business strategy. You will find out that you can reach more customers too and expand just like other businesses can.

(4) It Helps You To Maintain Relevance in the Market

Most contemporary businesses that stay in the market for a long time and become successful used digital marketing to do that. The world is moving very fast and everything is going digital so only businesses that go digital too stay relevant.

A lot of things have gone from manual to automatic. Not many people still go to stores to buy goods or services. Rather, because more people now spend most of their time online, they can easily see product and/or services they need online, order them and get them delivered to their doorsteps.

If your business has an online presence, you can sell to targeted buyers online too and make good profits with less stress. On the contrary, you will keep selling only to the people who can sacrifice their time to come patronize you physically. Of course, the number of people who fall into this category these days is getting fewer.

Now that you know the importance of Internet marketing in businesses growth and success, the question could be, “How Do I Implement This Digital Marketing in My Business to Make It Grow?”

It starts with deciding on the digital marketing strategy or platform that you wish to use. This is essentially choosing the areas of digital marketing that would be best to use for your small-sized business or medium-sized business.

Top 4 Digital Marketing Options to Choose From

There are many options that you can deploy in your online marketing endeavor. However, I am of the opinion that the following are the pivot on which the majority of other digital marketing strategies hang:

1. Social Media Marketing
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Content Marketing
4. Email Marketing

Let’s see what each of them entail in detail:

(1) Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use if social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your business/brand, reach wider audiences and increase sales.

Social media marketing is a great way to start digital marketing as a small business owner. It is easier and mostly free to use. It only comes with charges when you intend to further expand your business by leveraging paid adverts to reach wider audiences.

Let’s take a look at what you can do yourself in social media marketing your business yourself.  Facebook is a very popular social media platform for marketing. First, you open a page that talks about your business. Then, invite your friends to like the page and post your products there for them to see. You can also post in groups you are in and also on your wall and get a team that will help you amplify these posts.

Some groups have been built by social media influencers into potential market places. Some of those groups with over 50,000 members can be good to post about the goods and services you render. What you just do is contact the administrator of the group and negotiate for a front page allowance for a period of time. You can also apply this strategy to other social media platforms and even forums with constant visits. This is a great way to increase sales and traffic for your website.

(3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engines nowadays are almost the number one gateway to many websites because when you search for something online on a search engine like Google, the websites with arguably the most relevant information displays. This is as a result of search engine optimization done by the owners or administrators of such websites. Search engine optimization simply means carefully arranging your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. This can lead more people to your site and convert this traffic (i.e., visitors) into (repeat) paying customers.

(3) Content Marketing

This is the creating, publishing, and distributing relevant content to help target audiences. You can do this by guest-posting (i.e., guest-blogging) on other blogs/websites, placing valuable contents on forums, sharing contents on social media, advertising on digital magazines, brochures, yellowpages, etc.

(4) Email Marketing

Email marketing is the type that help you keep customers aware of you products and services. You can read more about email marketing strategies for better conversions here. If you are new to email marketing and you wish to know how to go about it, g ahead and read this article. It will surely help you to kick start your email marketing on the right footing.

Conclusion

This article shared the basics of digital marketing. It explained the concept of digital or online marketing and covered the importance of it. Furthermore, it explained the different digital marketing platforms and strategies available and how to choose them for your business. Beside the ones mentioned here, understand that there are other digital media marketing tools out there. This include Voice SEO, video marketing and Pay Per Click (PPC) Adverts. These have their peculiar advantages and I invite you to leverage them also for the success of your business.