“Notwithstanding that Nigeria is the largest and fastest growing mobile market in Africa, with over 90 million mobile subscribers, marketers are yet to tap into the opportunity this platform presents.
The question therefore is why brands should shy away from a huge marketing opportunity to grow profits, market share and sustain success in the market place. This challenge, according to mobile marketing experts is not far from lack of education of how the system operates and how to measure the results.
Assessing the development, Dayo Elegbe, managing director, Sponge Limited, attributed the complacency of brand owners to embrace mobile marketing to lack of understanding of how to use the channel effectively.
“The mobile device is an important bridge between the online world and the real world around us and needless to say there is an opportunity for smart brands to engage their target audience like never before,” he said.
Acknowledging that some of the challenges faced by Nigerian brands to embrace mobile marketing is not dissimilar to other markets, Elegbe, who is also the co-chairman of Mobile Marketing Association West Africa, said: “When we spoke to marketers in Nigeria, they admitted that mobile is hot and that there are a lot of people using mobile who sleep with the device, but they don’t know how to utilise it as brand to really connect with their audience.”
It was this gap that necessitated Sponge, the mobile marketing firm to assemble last week in Lagos, some best minds from within and outside Nigeria to share valuable insights, learning and benefits associated with the use of mobile, as part of an integrated marketing communication strategy to achieve commercial and brand objectives.
One of the speakers at the forum, Alex Meisi, chairman of Mobile Marketing Association(MMA), UK, who counselled that brand owners should not fear the technology but approach it in an educated manner, believed that organisations who are reticent about adopting the mobile marketing must be those with “traditional management structure where the senior management is of certain age. They don’t really engage with social and don’t really use mobile.
“When we talk of education of marketers, they are not really people who are involved in the marketing side but it is also a challenge to encourage the senior management team. If they don’t get involved in mobile, soon they will miss a huge business opportunity. Mobile marketing will dictate marketing and organisations that move into mobile marketing earlier will get a proportion of better response and better engagement with consumers because they are the first to market. . .” Business Day has the full story.
Photocredit: Mobile Marketing Watch.com
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