Digital Marketing for Business Growth
There is no turning back; digital marketing is here to stay! Business owners must adapt and embrace the internet as vital to growth. Whether in a nascent market like Sierra Leone or a more developed one like Ghana, you can’t ignore that your customers search for products and services on WhatsApp, YouTube, and their Gmail inbox.
There is no secret to having a booming online business. What every brand needs is a digital marketing strategy. A solid strategy isn’t just a question of making posts—connect your digital effort to business goals. Your digital marketing strategy plans your online presence. It is your game plan. How are you going to score goals? Where will you be online (media channels)? Who’s on your team? How will you grow your fanbase and keep them loyal? There are many things to consider, but make sure you have a strategy and are just posting to post.
Many strategies have existed to help businesses grow online, but what we will share with you what is tried and tested. It has worked for us.
Unlock the Power of Search
Where and how people search changes from place to place, influenced by the level of internet access, literacy, and digital culture.
Most people know about Search Engine Optimization but only sometimes know how to use it. While Google and other search engines change their algorithms over time, certain things will always remain true. You’ll always go right if you think of search engines as librarians and your content as library books.
If you walk into a library and want to ask a librarian for help, you either need to know the book’s name or the author. If you don’t know either, you will use “keywords.”
For example, you might ask: “Where can I find books about traveling to Sierra Leone?”
For the librarian to know which book to recommend, she will consider the book’s title and content and determine if there is a book that gets checked out often by others looking for the same information.
As a business online, if you want the search engine to recommend your digital channels, you need content that responds to search queries related to your business.
If you were reading this article and arrived here via a search, you have searched for “digital marketing.” VR&C Marketing sells “digital marketing” services, so we create content to help people looking for information. Content like this article increases our company’s discoverability.
Social Media Search & Discovery
Apply the same strategy on search engines to social media channels. Make afrobeats music playlists and want to be found by people on Instagram and TikTok? Use three hashtags on your posts: #afrobeats #afrobeatsplaylist #Nigeria.
This tells Meta to catalog your post with similar content. Two of the hashtags are specific, and one is general.
However, discoverability or search optimization on social media continues beyond hashtags. Your caption, tweet, and bio matters. Does your Twitter bio contain information that lets those who find you know what content to expect from you?
Another thing to consider is the post format and diversity. Are you making reels (short videos), carousels, threads, and posts? Are you changing the style from time to time to keep the content creative and in line with the platform’s culture? Some businesses found one template that worked in 2016, which they still use. You can’t just slap a logo on a photo with a catchy quote and expect that will increase discoverability.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is optimizing your website to rank high on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). SEO increases the traffic received on your website, specifically aiming to attract a business’s target audience.
About 54% of people in the developed world shop online; this means most individuals who are interested in a product or service will Google it first. If your website is optimized, it has a higher chance of being noticed earlier by a potential customer than if it is not. Your goal is to get your website to appear in the top three search results on the first page of the results. There are different types of SEO, including technical SEO and e-commerce SEO, amongst others. Once you do research, you can identify which SEO type suits your business.
SEO is essential for businesses whose primary home online is their website. While the value of SEO is undeniable, it may be less crucial for enterprises in less-developed internet markets or businesses whose sales happen offline. For example, NP in Freetown doesn’t have to worry too much about SEO; all its business happens between its terminals and fuel stations. No one in Sierra Leone is going to ask Google about NP.
Someone may optimize their website for search and still need to get traffic, if the customer’s method of discovery is a query in a WhatsApp group.
Uses Cases for Search Engine and Social Media Discovery
Our digital marketing strategy is simple: leave visible crumbs across the internet to lead our target audience to us. VRC uses blogs, videos, polls, customer reviews, social media, digital ads and influencer marketing to help prospective customers find VRC.
VRC Marketing was founded in Ghana in 2013 and expanded to Sierra Leone in 2016. From West Africa we develop and implement digital marketing strategies for clients in Washington, Maryland and Pennsylvania.
Our digital marketing experts in Accra and Freetown do content and copywriting, photography and videography, public relations, jingles, TV commercials and communications strategy.
Digital Influencers
Most customers find us because they see our content on Vickie Remoe’s social media platforms. Vickie’s posts get seen as an influencer across Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Unlike other digital marketing entrepreneurs she has built a platform for herself and her brand. What better way to show you’re a digital marketing expert if not with a large following. VRC Marketing leverages our founder’s influencer status. If she hadn’t been an influencer, we would have collaborated with influencers to expand our reach. Thankfully, we have our in-house influencer, something our clients are also grateful for.
Vickie Remoe posts the work we do for clients as proof of our digital marketing expertise, so the audience can judge for themselves. She also shares tips, behind the scenes of works in progress. VRC’s social media company pages are our digital portfolio.
Optimize Website For Search
VRC’s website meets Google’s search essentials, which the tech giant says makes it easy for its engine to search, crawl and index a site. The next thing is that our website has both static content and dynamic content. Both are also optimized for search.
If you search digital marketing or marketing companies in Sierra Leone VRC Marketing’s website is always in the top three searches. How do we come to rank so high? We don’t treat our website as a noticeboard. We update our company’s website blog page with milestones. We publish authoritative articles like this to help our prospective clients learn digital skills.
Two questions that can help you optimize your website content:
- If someone was looking for a business like mine, would they query, or enter words in Google?
- Is my website content authoritative (the canon) and helpful to my customers?
Tailor Your Social media
When we create content on our website we promote it on our social media channels. On social media we don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Our Twitter content is not an exact copy of our Facebook or LinkedIn content. We tailor the content to match the style and culture of each platform.
For example, in April for Sierra Leone’s Independence month, we ran a Twitter threads campaign. We didn’t try to force the content on LinkedIn. Instead, Vickie used some of the content from the thread to create a blog about Sierra Leone travel.
Alternatively, when we created a blog post about “influencers,” we didn’t stop at sharing the link on social media. We also curated a list of top influencers in Ghana and Sierra Leone. The former performed well on Instagram, and the latter hit the right note on Facebook. What did we learn? To reach our target audience in Sierra Leone, Facebook trumps Instagram, and vice versa for our audience in Ghana.
Promote Your Content
We know the internet is oversaturated with content. Great content doesn’t always reach its intended audience. Your content will go further if you give it a boost.
Whether it’s our in-house podcast, articles, newsletters, or the work we create for clients we promote our content. Our team reposts and shares the content we create on their feeds. We DM prospective clients our Instagram content to ensure they see it. Just because we shared it once, doesn’t mean it’s dead and buried. No, we will re-share and repost content. We share our content in WhatsApp groups and communities. We tag people in our posts, and we ask our followers to engage with our content. We also pay for digital ads to make sure our content goes far.
Use Digital Tools To Measure Digital Marketing Impact and Content Quality
You may be working hard on your digital marketing and still missing the mark. It can be frustrating. One way to ensure you’re on the right track is to look at the analytics.
The benefit of digital is that you can see the digital impact in real-time. YouTube will tell you, the number of subscribers, the video people watch the most on your channel, and more.
Twitter will show you monthly impressions, top tweets for the week or month, and how your media posts perform compared to those without.
Facebook and Instagram will show you the age group, location, gender, reach- when most of your followers are the most active, CTR, views, shares, and more. Each month, you have the opportunity to review data and optimize your content. If a type of content is consistently performing poorly, why keep doing it? Let your analytics guide and inform your digital strategy.
For articles and posts on your website, use tools like YOAST to help you improve your content. The Yoast plugin can tell you when your content is optimized for SEO, guide you with improvement, and tell you if the content is easy to read.
Another handy tool for articles and posts is Headline Analyzer. With it, you can test and optimize your headline and get a score before you publish. SEMRush will help you monitor your page’s rank, identify keywords, and help you find your competitors.
Lastly, when all else fails, start with ChatGPT. A smart way to work is to use AI tools to generate a first draft of your content. Once you have that skeletal draft, you can refine it with your creativity, tailoring your website and social media content to help your audience find you online. But don’t be lazy with it. If you use AI tools (a template ), just remember that search engines can detect AI or generic web content.
About the author
Vickie Remoe is one of West Africa’s finest digital marketing experts. She is also a content writer and highly sought-after publicist. Vickie advises businesses, NGOs, and nonprofits on communication strategy and offers one-on-one “pick my brain” consultations to founders, creatives, and public leaders. Get in touch- if this article made you realize that you should outsource your digital marketing to the experts.