Tips for Effective Multichannel Marketing in Nigeria

Nigeria’s unique consumer markets require a different strategy. A lot of things that work fine in more advanced markets, Europe for instance, can also apply here. However, they need to be adapted to the Nigerian audience for maximum ROI. Multichannel marketing is one of those strategies that will drive up sales if properly implemented.

Multichannel marketing refers to a structured process where businesses interact directly and indirectly with their customers and prospective clients across several marketing channels. The ultimate goal is to reach the customers through whatever channel they choose with the exact message.

The following are a few tips to keep in mind when designing your multichannel marketing plan.

1.      Clear goals

The road to ruination is clear and smooth when a business does not have clear goals for their marketing efforts. Your multichannel marketing planning and every component should have a clear goal. They should also converge at some point. Your billboard campaign may drive traffic to your website for instance. In that case, the goal for bill board is to draw traffic to your website. Your website as marketing tool should have its own goal too, else the funnel starts to leak. Clear goals will help achieve successful multichannel marketing.

2.      Know your audience

Marketing is all about your audience. Not knowing your audience means you do not know who you want to sell to. It is important to identify your customers even at the point of product development. Develop audience personas, classify them and build your multichannel marketing strategy around this. You sell life insurance- are you targeting self-employed people or employees in large corporations? Who is your typical buyer? Where will they be found at what time?

3.      Be Different

Even if you are a microfinance bank and offer the same services as your competitors, there has to be a way to differentiate your message. The success of marketing across different platforms depends on you offering something different to your customers. What is unique about your business? Superior customer experience? International affiliations? Dependability? Innovativeness? You have to identify how you are different and incorporate it in your marketing messages across the different channels.

4.      Your metrics in one place

Find a way to put your metrics in one place either by acquiring a software that has that capability or painstakingly develop such an interface. The ability to monitor your metrics is one very important feature of multichannel marketing that cannot be overemphasized. It is even better when you can view your metrics in one place. You want to see the impressions on your Facebook campaign compared to your SMS open rate. Having them in one place helps you to measure performance against each other to see what channel requires what modification.

This is not to mean that you should treat channels the same way. Every channel is unique, with its own conversion rates and time within which to expect results, but you can put the metrics side by side so as to properly structure your strategy.

5.      Harmonize your messages

The last point brings us to this one. You are different and have found a way to infuse it into your marketing messages. It is time now to ensure that your messages are harmonized. Where you have different entities handling your various channels, ensure that there is adequate communication amongst these entities. For example, if an agency handles your television commercials while you have an in-house team handling SMS campaigns, there is a need to ensure communication amongst them. Harmony is important when it comes to multichannel marketing. You want your customers hearing the same thing in different ways across platforms.

6.      Use Mobile

This is where we come in at HollaTags. We can tell you authoritatively that mobile marketing via USSD, SMS and others is one of the most effective ways to implement you multichannel marketing. SMS has incredible open rates. USSD and IVR can be used as connection points especially when employing improved customer experience to boost sales. For instance, Nigerian banks’ adoption of USSD as a banking channel has been widespread because it brings banking services closer and easier to the customer. For most businesses, mobile is the fastest route to reach their customer.

Within mobile on itself, you can implement robust multichannel marketing that fires up your sales. HollaTags provides messaging platform and APIs for SMS, Voice, USSD and Carrier Billing. Talk to us to help you implement multichannel marketing using mobile.