4G driving Africa’s online marketing growth

Online platforms are on the rise as businesses in Sub Saharan Africa respond to consumers in the 4G era. Offering insights into the online marketing outlook, a new study has revealed that the widespread introduction of 4G wireless broadband services would make online marketing even more vigorous. The UK company that conducted the study, which provides fully integrated online marketing services, noted online advertising business in Sub Saharan Africa was worth $2.8 billion in 2015, and was growing by 40 per cent annually. Around 60 per cent of the clients are small and medium-sized enterprises, with online media purchases by SMEs increasing by about 39 per cent from the previous year.The figure indicates that SMEs are now embracing the online advertising trend, which used to be limited to larger corporate clients, he said.Google now has many more tools and techniques suitable for different types of SME businesses, study added. For example, keyword searching can be refined based on analysis, making each word appropriate to the business to help reach the right target. Keyword bidding is designed to ensure your budget is well spent, besides which negative keywords help businesses save the cost required for modifying searches.Google’s AdWords advertising average position, meanwhile, is aimed at yielding the ultimate outcomes.Users of these tools can see searches displayed in external countries, hence expanding their customer base, according to the study.One of the researchers involved informed me that at the same time, content on SMEs’ main websites must be provided in two more languages beyond English, French and Portuguese, while businesses should prepare for expansion of online marketing to meet the above-mentioned demands.

Various western organisations are well-prepared and serving as assistant to local SMEs to develop online advertising media to strengthen clients and help them use their full creative capability so that they can become a vital foundation of the economy.Sub Saharan Africa has around 20 million SMEs as of a study conducted in 2013. Given such a total, there should be about 5 million websites run by these enterprises, but the real number is only 1,000,000 to 1,500,000, reports pointed out.In other words, only 20 per cent of all SMEs are online, which spells opportunities for substantial further growth in online marketing in Sub Saharan Africa, London based researcher suggested, adding that the top three businesses with the biggest spending for advertising per client are education, finance and health.For SMEs, online media are suitable and can be the main platform for helping to increase sales and expand the customer base, reaching the right customer groups and matching buyer behaviour at a time when more people are searching for information and doing their shopping online and helping to prepare businesses to adopt e-commerce transactions. Moreover, online media also serves as a more accurate and accessible platform for every business, owing to the low budget required and measurable outcomes.For instance, businesses can see how many advertisements have been posted, how many people viewed their websites, and how much the profit per advertisement is.In addition, they can instantly know the amount of merchandise sold, advertising fees per day, and how many clients made contacts.These types of data provide opportunity for business growth.It also helps in reducing costs, from retail-space rent to brochure printing, because many buyers no longer shop in stores. The online media that are the most popular among SMEs in Sub Saharan Africa are Google, with 48 per-cent growth followed by websites, with 55 per-cent growth and Facebook, with 100 per-cent growth, according to the study.


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