Firm empowers SMES on social media investments returns

AS social media continues to be a tool to boost businesses, Redwire Marketing Consulting, have organised a workshop, to empower Small Medium Enterprises (SMES) with tools and methods that will help businesses measure returns on social media investments.

The event, themed: “Measuring Returns on Your Social Media Investments – tools, methods, case studies,” which held recently in Lagos, was aimed at helping businesses create brand awareness, connect with customers, and boost the sale of products and services.

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

However, from a report, ‘Digital Trends for Nigeria in 2018’, conducted by Terragon Group, the total number of internet users in Nigeria rose from 57.7 million people in 2014 to 100.5 million people in 2018, with some 22 million of them actively using social media for different activities. Speaking, the Marketing Strategist, Redwire, Doyinsola Ajayi, said many people are ignorant of the input social media could contribute to their business, which gave rise to the collaboration.

She said: “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?” In her remarks, the Founder, Social Prefect Tours, Chiamaka Obuekwe, urged start-ups to grow their businesses organically, and run sponsored advertisements simultaneously, and put in work to provoke sales, adding that Instagram offers better tools for business growth.

According to her, Instagram is effective in driving sales for SMES depending on their brand perception and efforts put into the brand, adding that as a vanity social medi- um, which heightens people’s expectations, quality content and pictures should be invested to achieve the desired sales.

In his remarks, the Chief Executive Officer, 24 Apparel Limited, Temitayo Eyitayo, said the only way to connect social media marketing to sales is to relate it to business objectives, and largely dependent on the type of products sold.

He stressed the need to identify the types of products on sale in order to have the right expectation on returns, noting that the possibility for high sales is largely dependent on the amount of likes one gets as people look out for what others have endorsed through their reactions online.