A Digital Marketing and Communication Professional, Mr. Stephen Naasei Boadi, has urged young entrepreneurs to leverage on digital marketing to reach their target audiences amid the COVID-19 crisis.
He said regardless of the business one is in, it is possible to leverage on available digital marketing channels to reach your customers.
Mr. Boadi was speaking on the weekly CoRe Hangout hosted by Mrs. Comfort Ocran.
The virtual hangout is part of the COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Programme (CoRe), an initiative of the Springboard Road Show Foundation in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation and Solidaridad.
The programme is supporting over 692,000 young people across the country.
He was speaking on the theme ‘Business in crisis; cracking the digital marketing code’.
“Digital marketing knows no boundaries and opens limitless and timeless opportunities for businesses. The beautiful thing is that its more data-driven, which gives you the opportunity to be more accurate in your targetting.
“For every product or service, you need to first identify your target market and then create awareness of your products with the objective of getting people to buy. Whatever your industry, whether you are a seamstress or musician, you have to leverage online tools to reach your audience,” he stated.
Digital marketing channels
Also speaking on the programme, Digital Marketing Strategist Mr. Maximus Ametorgoh described digital marketing as “trying to send a message to the end user of your product or the target of your product using digital channels”.
He said some of the digital channels through which entrepreneurs can reach their audience include websites, blogs, e-commerce platforms, digital display ads, search-engines, games and mobile SMS.
Audience profiling
Mr. Ametorgoh advised young entrepreneurs who wish to use digital channels in reaching their customers to first do a profiling of their target audience.
“The first thing is that when people are starting their businesses, they usually don’t do a comprehensive profiling of their target audience. So as they go along, when they want to go digital, they then start wondering whether their target audience is online or not.
“Your audience profiling should be part of your business model; and digital must be part of the channels you can use to reach those targets at the onset. When you are done with profiling, you then move on to select the digital channels to use.”
He said the profiling will allow an entrepreneur to know which channels the target audience are on and the ones to deploy.
“When it comes to selecting an online channel, it is your target audience who selects it for you. You don’t select it based on the fact that it is popular or a lot of people are on the platform. What you are interested in is the percentage of your audience on that platform,” he explained.
“When you are able to do the segmentation, then the rest is your content and communication and the campaigns that you want to run,” he added.
He said consistency is also very important, stating that: “The objectives and reason why you set up the business must be there; and when you add the digital, it must also flow through it. Why you are going online and why you are using the channels you are using.
“If you are able to get the mix right, then your business become more effective, easier to manage and easier to measure,” he said.
Permission marketing
Mr. Ametorgoh also noted that one thing people tend to forget is the fact social media is permission marketing.
“You don’t need to spam people with content they didn’t request. It is illegal to do that,” he cautioned.
