How To Grow More Sales On Social Media In Africa
One of the most lucrative ways to grow your business today is through social media. This is because social media has the potential to boost your brand’s profile, give you a loyal and engaging customer community, and in turn, grow more sales for your business.
It is a misconception that social media is all about networking with people across the globe, but there is already a change in the narrative as social media has reinvented the traditional ways of buying and selling in Africa. Amongst its several disruptive features, social media has greatly reduced the cost of starting and running a business in Africa, thus acting as an incentive to engage more in private enterprise.
The emergence of social media has enabled the simple setup of businesses from the comfort of your home without necessarily having a physical store. Like common knowledge, the internet is a global village where we can achieve innumerable things in an instant. So the advent of social media allows you to have an online store where potential customers can interact with your products and services as if they are in physical stores.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are the most common social commerce platforms sellers use in Africa, and by extension, the world in general. Facebook has a marketplace that enables sellers to list their products on the platform and have wider visibility of products to people living around your geographic location. Also, you can have an Instagram business account, likewise, a WhatsApp business account that enables you to list your products in the catalogue for your new and existing customers to see.
In this instance, sellers also use Peppa’s online storefront to design their store for a wider audience to engage with their products and which would improve your sales and boost profits from your business.
In the foregoing, it is apparent that the importance of social media is notable for small and medium-scale enterprises in Africa. However, there is a need to understand how to use social media for emerging businesses that want to leverage technology.
How Can I Grow More Sales On Social Media?
- Find Your Audience
You must be proactive to define who your audience will be. It is one thing to set up your business on social media and it is another thing for your business to have a wider reach of customers. Therefore, you must understand the demography of your customer to know the best social media platform that would give you a reach to them.
For instance, if you are selling a product that is targeted at ages 18 to 30, you can be sure that Instagram will be the most ideal social commerce platform to sell your products. When you deal with a product that hinges on business-to-business (B2B), a platform like LinkedIn would be where you should have your business.
Therefore, you must allow the demography of your target audience to influence your decision on where you will open your business because it is best to put a round peg in a round hole for the best suitability.
- Prioritise Customer Engagement Over Selling
The true meaning of social media is to be social in our culture with other people. As such, selling your products on social media should not make you too rigid to be only international about your business. An average person believes that LinkedIn is a professional platform for serious-minded people. But that is not true in the actual sense, as LinkedIn is more of networking and engaging than business.
Therefore, it is better to be more flexible with the approach of your business on social media in a way that you join societal trends that could relax your audience while reminding them about the products and services your business provides. Nobody wants to have engaged with a boring business that is not societal-conscious or understands the general mood of its teeming audience.
Therefore, you must act like a human and not a robot when engaging with your customers.
- Provide A Holistic Customer Experience
You must have social media presence that is representative of your business across all social media platforms that you use. Consistency is the key for every brand of business, and it stamps some level of authenticity for your business when you are engaging your customer on social media.
For instance, it is best to create content that would appear on all your social media accounts the same way without any changes. But when you have content on your Instagram page different from what is on your Facebook or WhatsApp, it may give people a belief that your business team is not working in sync with each other, which may lead to a loss of confidence in your business.
Some of the benefits of brand consistency are:
- Boost in customer trust
- Increase in customer loyalty
- Improvement in your brand dependability
- Steady brand evolution
Work With Each Platform’s Strength
Every social media platform has some distinguishing features that make it enforce originality and which also trickles down to how businesses should use the platform.
Different platforms have different strengths that underscore how they can be used by businesses in terms of their features like design and analytics.
For instance, Instagram is all about visual and inspo content. Therefore, you must be conscious of using captivating graphics and engaging words that would make customers interact well with your brand. When you are using Facebook, you must have your focal point on videos and information while Twitter is about news and discussion. YouTube is your go-to platform when you want to do how-to for your business and LinkedIn is ideal for longer-form content.
Additionally, when you think of the business side of things, Instagram has a high cost and Facebook has a weak organic reach which in a way affects the ROI of the business.
- Eliminate Friction
You must endeavour to create a smooth sales process that would enable your customers to engage and buy your products seamlessly. Every customer wants to make purchases from sellers that do not have friction in their business. We all know that friction is frustrating, as such, you must make your sales process as easy as it can for a layman to understand and make purchases with little or no guidance.
To get a sales process that will be hitch-free for customers, you need to map out all the stages your customer has to go through from your ads/post to conversion to the payment stage of trade.
Conclusion
Growing sales on social media can be demanding especially when you are just building an audience. But being keen to diligence and understanding the dynamics of every platform’s operation enables you to grow your business quickly on social media.
However, you must do a bit of research about the functionality of your preferred social media platform to gain more audience and boost your sales, which in turn helps to maximise profits.
Alternatively, you can grow your business with Peppa as we offer escrow service and an online storefront that enables sellers to grow their businesses. You can create a Peppa account to get started with Peppa.
