Mobile Phone Penetration hits 100% Mark in Nigeria, Where’s Your Slice of the Pie?

Imagine placing your product and services in the hands of over 178 million Nigerians. Imagine everyone knows your brand or receives marketing messages about the categories of products you sell or the services your brand offers. Wouldn’t that be one of the coolest thing ever? What’s the use of a product or service if it is not known by the people it was created for? 

Advertisers and marketers are always on the lookout for channels that would help push out personalized messages to their target audience. That’s why in this era of digital, advertising aficionados’ advice brands to employ email marketing as one of the tactics to employ to help achieve their campaign objectives. This is because an email account is personal and the probability of ignoring a mail inbox is low. The truth is 60% of email messages are read, so wise marketers employ this channel to get their marketing messages across to customers and prospects. 

Mobile advertising is king and there’s no other marketing communication channel that’s as personalized as the mobile phone because it’s like a personal assistant, we take it wherever we go. Using myself as an example, I take my phone to the bathroom, check status updates on Facebook en route, discover latest trends on twitter at work, check my emails when I am having lunch and browse news sites on mobile web as I return home after a hard day work.

Before you finish up on the marketing strategy for your business, here’s a few benefits of mobile that you should know:

(1)   Your brand has more exposure on mobile than online because mobile is personalized.

(2)   Mobile is a two way communication device. With USSD, a brand can kick off a lead generation campaign and acquire personal information from customers and prospects.

(3)   Conversions are always possible on mobile.

(4)   Brands can employ Geo-Targeting and send targeted messages to their target market effortlessly.

(5)   Brands will repeatedly reach customers and prospect if they leverage mobile advertising and marketing.

(6)   Mobile is intimate and marketing moves goods to the people. In my opinion, with mobile marketing, your brand delivers solutions that would ease people’s needs intimately.

Leveraging Real Time Marketing



Oreo's Blackout Tweet

Savvy marketers would leverage Saturday’s general election and advice the populace to vote rather than fight. We can easily conclude that marketers are not the most creative people but we all can agree that they are opportunist, leveraging every opportunity to put out their products and services in front of the public.

The craze for real-time marketing has not been fully adopted by Nigerian brands, however some brands are taking good advantage of it. They publish content that readily gets the attention of their target audience by joining online conversations and strategically gathering eyeballs for their product and services.

Global brands that have successfully earned applause with real time marketing are Samsung, with Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar Selfie, Nissan’s Royal Baby Announcement, Oreo’s Blackout Tweet and Arby’s Pharrell William’s Grammy hat. These brands employed social media and messages were sent at strategic times capturing the attention of the online community worldwide.

I was opportune to listen to how Oreo’s Blackout Tweet for the Super Bowl was created as a student of the Miami Ad School. Mihnea Gheorghin, mentioned that 360i, the agency responsible for one of the most discussed RTM campaigns till date prepared for the unexpected. He said, the brand got the creative team from 360i to watch the game live with the brand manager and other representatives from Oreo. They needed an opportunity to shakeup the online space. They never expected a power cut, they envisioned other unexpected occurrences.  And alas! The lights went off, there was a power cut in the middle of Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl is one of the most watched sporting events in the USA, so it is a big deal. The first copy that emerged from one of the copywriter was “You can still dunk in the dark.” The brand manager loved copy, the arts director got to work on the creative, and it was posted on Facebook and Twitter. That how Oreo won the Super Bowl, with 15,314 retweets and 5,470 favorites on Twitter.

So, the Nigerian general election is tomorrow, it’s not too late for your brand to leverage RTM. Its politics so you need to be clever with your messages, wish the country well and push your products or services to the public.