Create content strategy for businesses, First Bank urge SMEs

By Chinwendu Obienyi

First Bank Nigeria Limited has urged small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to create content strategy to ensure their businesses get the much desired growth.

The Head, Digital Marketing, First Bank, Chinwe Bode-Akinwande, stated this during the bank’s SME Connect webinar themed; Leveraging Social Media for Business Success: Best Practices and Strategies for Building Your Brand and Growing Your Audience’’ which held in Lagos recently.

Whilst urging business owners to nurture the link in the middle of their sales funnel by creating quality content that would attract customers to their brand, Bode-Akinwande said, “No matter how small your business is, you need these tips to create a content strategy- define your target audience and identify them, their interest and the type of content they consume.

Do you have a calendar as a business? If you don’t have this you will not know what to publish tomorrow and you will not be able to even do your content scoring. Choosing your content formula will allow you know what type of content you want to create and also spying is allowed, research the latest trends going on social media platforms. Doing all of these will keep you relevant in your own space and have a voice as it is very important in creating content”.

Also speaking, the founder Digital Marketing Skill Institute, Tobi Asehinde, urged business owners to grow their audience by letting people know about their brand on social media.

He said that for customers to be more aware of their services on social media, there is a need for business owners to be a strong and credible brand on social media that people could trust. He named four types of credibility that business owners could leverage their brand to include presumed credibility, reputed credibility (third party reference), surface credibility (use quality pictures to engage people) and earned credibility.

He urged them to also begin collaborating with other social media platforms like Instagram life, to show their faces or products on their brands adding that by the time people see their brand on those platforms, they would not be seeing them as a new business.

According to him, this automatically boosts their businesses and trust that people have in them. Mr Michael Olanrewaju, Head of Growth, Cashaam, a social commerce platform and marketplace for micro-entrepreneurs, shared three secrets that SMEs could effectively run Facebook Ads on WhatsApp and Amazon.

Olanrewaju said the big idea behind running Facebook adverts that converts on WhatsApp and Amazon was very simple. He noted that could be done by targeting ideal customers.