Internet Marketing and Small businesses

I attended the Google day Nigeria workshop for internet marketers last week and it was a very interesting session. The Google team explained how small and medium businesses can use its products like Adwords, AdSense, Analytics and Blogger to promote their businesses online with little initial investment. These platforms are very important for SMEs especially in Nigeria.

The Google VP Engineering EMEA Nelson Mattos and his team had earlier that week visited the store of one of our small spenders who had an amazing story of how Wild Fusion used Google marketing platform to transformed her small business forever. This was interesting case study for the Google team and Wild Fusion and basically this is how it goes.

Last year Wild Fusion decided to offer services to SMEs and small spenders who couldn’t afford inventories on the "big sites". We reached out to a few SMEs in Ikoyi and we met Mrs Funke of BabyM store www.babymafrica.com at Dolphin Estate Plaza. She didn’t understand what Google platform could do for her baby store or better still how digital marketing could help her. For months we kept coming back and one day she finally decided to give it a try once our team assured her of money back guarantee.

She could only afford $400 or about N50,000 and with a very simple website of about 4 pages and a feedback form we got to work. On Google search, anyone searching with keywords baby, maternity, pregnancy, baby names, kindergarten, paediatric etc were served with her sponsored ads (inorganic listing) and others could see her display ads based on what sites they were browsing (all ads were geo-targeted to Nigerians ).


Google VP Engineering EMEA Nelson Mattos, Isis(Google Kenya) and Anat (Head of Marketing , Africa) listen to Funke's success story


As a result interested people completed forms on her website and this was auto-emailed to her with the contact details of the visitor. She followed them up and in about a month of the campaign, she had hundreds of enquiries and requests. She emailed, called and followed up these prospective buyers and they came to her little store from different parts of the country to order till she ran out of stock. Last week she told us she had sold out and we should discontinue the campaign as she ran out of stock and some customers had already put down some money for the next set of baby clothes. Of course she didn’t demand any money back.

For those of you who were not at the workshop, you can continue reading and learn how Adwords works.
Google Adwords is an internet advertising system that uses search advertising alongside contextual targeting to place ads beside natural search results and websites on the internet. Ok, so I started out with just Google Adwords and now I have mentioned search advertising and contextual targeting and I’m sure you're wondering hey where’s all this coming from. Just take a break, relax and let me take you through it all.

Now we all know Google is the largest search engine in the world and we all use Google to find information about so many different things. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably used the Google search engine to search for stuff and found information on what you were looking for. One thing that you may or may not have noticed is that beside the Google natural search results are sponsored links that are also related to your search query. The sponsored links appear either on top or to the left of the natural search results and that’s what I’m going to talk about.


Google Vice President EMEA Nelson Mattos listens to Mrs Funke’s story on how Google Adwords transformed her little business


The sponsored links area contains text ads which are basically made up of a catchy headline, a body of text and a display url. Another thing you may be wondering now is why do the ads in the sponsored links show when you search for something and I’ll tell you but before that let me break down a few terms. The words or phrase you type in the Google search box to be searched is called a search query, and keywords make up a search query. When you use Google Adwords to advertise, you select keywords that are relevant to your business and tell Google that if any of the keywords you select are in a users search query, then your ad should be shown in the sponsored links area, basically that’s how it works.

So if you are a travel agency, you might want your ads to show to users who are searching for travel tickets. Now one very good feature of Adwords is that you can geo target. What this means is that if you do business in Nigeria and you cannot offer your services outside Nigeria, Adwords allows you to specify that your ads should only show if your keyword matches a search query of users only from Nigeria, cool isn’t it.

Yeah, I had mentioned earlier that Adwords uses contextual targeting alongside search advertising. With contextual targeting as the name suggests, your ads are placed on websites that have the same context as the keywords you choose. Let me break that down a little bit. Let’s say you sell cars, and you’ve chosen keywords relevant to cars and automobiles. Now when Google looks through you keywords, they will show your ad on a webpage where cars are the central theme thus making your ad more relevant to the user. With contextual targeting, you have a choice of using the text ads mentioned earlier or image ads which can be a combination of texts and images and maybe your company logo. Google also has image ad templates that enable you easily create image ads effortlessly.

Internet advertising is a great way for small and medium businesses to engage customers with the right message at every stage of the buying cycle and unlike traditional advertising doesn’t cost a fortune. So if you want to try it out today you know where to go.


Funke tells her story to the Google team.

Strike While Hot!

I attended a business management forum organized by the British Council last week in Lagos. It was a nice opportunity to interact with professionals from different industries and get to learn things from them.
The speaker said a lot on business survival tools for today’s economic environment, but dwelt on two things:
Reaching customers as fast as possible, and
Reaching potential customers with social media.
For businesses to survive in today’s economic environment, they have to be able to engage their potential customers in the fastest possible time and with the right tools.
Social networks are excellent ways for businesses to engage their customers today and are also very interesting if used well also.
Recently I was visiting some facebook pages of some businesses in Nigeria and I found them very boring. Most of the content was loads of text that were so boring to read and I’m sure whoever’s managing those pages must be wondering why user interaction is minimal.
At Wild Fusion, one of our service offerings include assisting our clients with social media plans where companies can take full advantage of social media tools and use them in exciting new ways to engage the right people with the right content at the right time.

Facebook in Africa

Congrats to Habari Media as Facebook launches in South Africa. This amazing platform is indeed imparting greatly and transforming the way we interact, connect and socialize. With over 950,000 nigerian Facebook users and the second most visited site by Nigerians according to Alexa, Facebook is an amazing opportunity for digital engagement.

With different targeting options including Age, gender, interests, locations new Facebook ( launched 4th of February, 2010), new ads possibilities and the ever increasing number of Africans signing up daily, Facebook brings immense possibilities.

We here at Wild Fusion are excited about Facebook launch coming up in Nigeria April this year and the possibilities this brings the Nigerian online audience. Social Media is transforming digital marketing for the better. ;)

An interesting video on Social Media

Social Network Marketing in Nigeria

Phew! Another weekend is here, after a long week of meetings and an interesting presentation on social network marketing to a client on Thursday. Most of the presentation time was spent getting the client to understand social networks and how it can be used to promote his products and elevate his brand.

In my opinion the use of social media for digital marketing is one of the most engaging, collaborative and innovative element in digital media plans. Social network marketing is here to stay and it is the use of social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to market, sell or engage customers on line. Social networks in this context are those websites that allow users publish content on these sites.

One of the most interesting social media products is the Video Contest competition on YouTube which allows a company or brand to setup a video contest online. Members of the YouTube community can create and submit video assets for the brand or company and participate in voting. Users will spend hours creating videos and voting for the best video in the contest. The Video Contest encourages participation, word of mouth, collaboration and hence increase brand visibility.

Its very important that social network marketing strategy should be well planned so as to harness the benefits that comes with online communities. We here at Wild Fusion believe in innovation and we constantly seeking new ways to add more value to our clients here in Lagos, Nigeria.

I am very excited about being involved in this project and show casing the immense benefits that comes with this exciting way of engagement. Truly I can’t wait to publish success stories or case studies or evaluate the impact of this campaign.

A video on You Tube Video Contest.