SMEs urged to adopt digital marketing to boost revenue

By Bankole Orimisan

VCONNECT, Nigeria’s largest local search engine and leading information service provider, recently converged Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) owners in Lagos for a business forum on Digital Marketing.

The business forum with the theme “The Power of Digital Marketing” which was held in Lagos recently, was organised to help business owners achieve a paradigm shift from traditional marketing methodologies to digital marketing, which is more efficient and cost effective.

Speaking at the forum, the facilitator and Territory Sales Manager,

VConnect Global Services Limited, Mr. Wale Onibudo disclosed that digital marketing has great edge over traditional marketing in that it is focus targeting, cost effective and measureable in terms of Returns on Investment (ROI).

“Traditional marketing is costly, fragmented and difficult to measure.

It’s a fact that a small and medium business owner will not able to afford high investment driven marketing channels such as TV or radio. However, in the hyper competitive world, if one must survive, marketing has become a need and not a comfort,” he said.

He stressed further that with Internet becoming an integral parts of our lives, various new forms of advertising using Internet (e-mail, websites) and mobile phones (SMS) have emerged and are now dominating the traditional means.

Onibudo also explained that VConnect is positioned to cater for the digital marketing needs of businesses in Nigeria by making SMEs widely visible through an online presence by listing them on www.vconnect.com, leads forwarding, where prospective customers are referred to businesses, targeted SMS (help to send promotional messages to targeted audience (based on LGA, age, profession etc) as well as website designing at very affordable cost.

He declared that VConnect has already trained more than 1,000 business owners till date in the Business Forum series, which will continue weekly for 10 months. He then urged any business owners who want to get a free invitation for the next training session to visit http://vconnect.com.

Some of the participants who spoke at the end of the forum described it as an informative and fresh insight on how to market their business in a more efficient and cost effective way.

Reacting shortly after the session, Mr. Dennis, Business Development Manager, Excellence Awards International (dealers in medals and awards), Lagos, lauded the initiative of VConnect for exposing business owners to the magic of digital marketing.

Also, Mrs. Sade Soderu of SonShade Meadows, a branding and printing company, commended VConnect for organising the forum, which she said will give more leverage to SMEs at less cost and help grow their businesses.