Adedaas group operates chains of businesses in Lagos which include but not limited to SMALL CHOPs, AUTOS, INTERIOR DECOR.

We are excited about this, and we’ll work hand in hand with them to surpass their expectations.

We welcome them to the iNove Media family!

Stay tuned,
Cheers!

Family Dental Care is a creative, beautiful, and fully functional multi specialty dental clinic in Lagos equipped with the latest dental equipment and materials. It is situated at 92, Awolowo Road, South West Ikoyi, Lagos.

We are excited about this opportunity to work with them, and we plan on over-delivering.

Watch this space for more news!

Watch the video below for an overview:

The ad was talking about an inverter product, so I expected to land on a page giving me more information specifically on that product, but instead they made the landing page their homepage with lots of other products scrambling for my attention which I have no interest in whatsoever. If they were to be building their brand online as a leading Nigerian online IT store with an ad that says that, then I’d understand the landing page being their homepage. But the ad clearly talked about a specific product, it’s advantages and where to get it. And so naturally I should be taken to a specially designed page for that product.

I was pretty annoyed and frustrated that I wasn’t taken straight to a page where I would immediately get more information on that said product. And this is the same page where they’d actually get to convert me into a customer assuming the basic landing page factors were already put in place like good copy-writing, and a strong call to action. Imagine other numerous prospective customers going through the same scenario.

Here’s a little advice for businesses trying to advertise their products and services on Facebook or any other online medium:

Create a specific landing page for every product you wish to advertise, unless you’re just trying to create online brand awareness. In that case you advertise different products but all lead to your home page. This is if you’re not keen on making a sale, just to let people know that you’re the leader in your space. So in which case they know where to go to when they need such product.

I’ve also noticed that an ad asking a question tends to get the most click. But you’d have to create a sandwich page before a formal landing page. The sandwich page serves to answer the question being asked on the ad without trying to sell anything to them, and at the end there’s a call to action to the product landing page. This has worked pretty well for some of our campaigns. The key here is to be creative and test, that’s one of the beauties about marketing online. You’re allowed a great deal of flexibility.

Test Test Test
Don’t forget to test. Test different images, different ads, track and see which is bringing you more visitors.

Track, analyze, and improve.

With this you’re able to know what people do on your page, their actions and every other data that you’d need to fine tune your campaign. Facebook provides you with basic reporting, but you’d need more than just ad and click impression reports. For this I’d recommend outbound tracking with Google analytics. How to integrate your Facebook ad tracking with Google analytics is a post for another day.

Final thought
Landing pages are a must if you’re doing online advertising. Of course your home page or service page could be used for this purpose, but that depends on the goal of your campaign. What are you trying to achieve – sale, brand awareness, lead generation?

One last thing you should know is that People on Facebook are not specifically looking to buy something. You have to see this from a user’s standpoint to understand it. They are there to view their friends’ photos, share gossip stories, and of course chat with friends. So trying to distract them with a “buy this, buy that” ad is just plain annoying, and will do nothing to help you. You should be trying to engage them instead.

Have something to add? Use the comment box below.

As you can notice we’ve added a little bit of touch to our website. Colors have slightly changed, logo redesigned.

Isn’t that a cool way to begin the new year?

Anyways, hope you like the new look, and please let us know if you notice any layout issue or broken links. We are still tweaking though.

Happy new year!

So here’s to a more prosperous 2011 for both our businesses, and hope our partnership keeps working all through the year. Of course we would have to justify that by the level of service and ROI, lol.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

When you do a Google search on something related to a Nigerian business, product or a service, you’d expect to find relevant information, but what comes up is complete garbage. That’s because businesses in Nigeria aren’t taking advantage of the free traffic/advertising that Google and other search engines have to offer. Most Nigerian businesses are not even online yet, the few who have managed to take their businesses online are seeing little or no benefits. Nobody goes to their websites except their employees and webmaster.

Like last week, I needed to get some training weights for my home gym. I went to Google to search if I could get one around Lagos. I typed in “buy gym equipments Lagos”, and all the results that came were totally not related to what I was searching for.

Frustrated that I couldn’t get what I was looking for, I decided to search to see if there were other people in Lagos searching for a similar thing on Google and how many of them were actually searching in a given month. I used the free Google keyword tool for this. I saw that not only were people in Lagos searching for “Gym Equipments”, other related keywords were getting searches as well.

Now imagine you are a company selling this in Lagos, and you have a website showcasing it, and your website has been optimized to sit on the front page of Google whenever somebody searches for that. And out of the 500 searches you’re able to convert just 5% of them into sales. That would do wonders for your business.

What You Can Do To Help Your Business Today
First you need to realize that technology is changing the way businesses are done not just in Nigeria but everywhere. And this is not just about following the trend, it’s about what’s critical to your business success. Nigerians are using Google Search to look up information about companies, services and products. And having your website show up in the top ten result for your business keywords will do nothing but put money in your pocket.

11 Checklists For Your Business
1. If you don’t have an online presence which is basically a website, get a web developer to build one for your business. This typically costs between N50,000 to N100,000 depending on the type of website. I would recommend you get a professional to do this for you. N10,000 website design will do your business no good.

2. Ensure your web developer has basic skills about web usability, web standards and general web optimization for the keywords you’re interested in ranking for your business. You’d need to do some basic keyword research to determine keywords that will bring you business, and then use those to optimize your website.

3. Proper page title is a must, and each page has to be unique. This is where you get to use your keywords. This is powerful, so use it wisely.

4. For content, I’ll advise you add a blog to your website. This is where you’ll be posting news about your business services or products. This can be in the form of tutorial or FAQ or how to use a specific product or service or the benefits of using them, etc.

5. Ensure you list your business address on all the pages on your website and every other website where you have the opportunity to do this. This forces Google to put your business on the map. So when a prospective customer does a local search on Google for local keywords, your business gets listed.
6. Submit online press releases about your business or any news worthy item. Online press releases help fuel your SEO efforts by sending traffic and links to your site. Don’t forget to add your business address too.

7. Ask for link exchange from other business owners in your community. Also write a few articles related to your business, properly optimized with your keywords, submit these to a few article directories, like Ezinearticles.com, Articlebase.com, etc.

8. Consider creating a professional video about your business or service, and submit to youtube and other video sharing sites. With windows movie maker you could crank up some pretty nice videos using pictures and sounds. Ensure you optimize this with your local business keywords when submitting.

9. If you have a listing on Google places, claim it now. Google places is like yellow pages on drugs. You can also add your business if you’re not yet listed. More on Google places for local businesses here.

10. Add your site to Google webmaster tools. A Google webmaster account provides you with details and tools to fix your site’s technical issues and help you rank better in the search engines.

11. Get a free Google analytics account to track your keywords and visitors. With this you’ll be able to fine tune your online marketing efforts. Basically knowing what’s doing well and what’s not working so you can take appropriate actions. This isn’t like offline marketing/advertising where you have no idea whether your money and efforts are really paying off.

Marketing online isn’t a one time process, ongoing tweaking and improvements will go a long way to position you as a market leader.

This is just the beginning, as more and more Nigerians flock to the internet for information about businesses, products and services. Positioning your website for them will be what makes you fly above your competitors.

“Frustrated guy” image courtesy of istockphotos.com

Vicinity Limited is a Lagos based IT systems support company that has been servicing various companies and small businesses in Nigeria since 2001.

We are proud of this opportunity, and we plan on exceeding their expectations.

Stay tuned for more news!

USP’s were originally defined around the 40′s, as a position a company took to make them stand out from their competitor and make the customers of said competitor switch to them.
It works, basically, as an understandable and tangible reason for people to buy your product, over that of other, competing products – clear and tangible can be actual, measurable reasons, or a benefit that your competitor doesn’t offer.

For example a typical bank in Nigeria is promoting themselves on the concept that they are a “Slip Free” banking system. So no one is dealing with filling slips or carrying passbook & ID card here and there.
They have no middle men – which means there’s no commissions to pay to anyone.
They have NO share holders, so they don’t charge money for things that should be free.
That’s the USP for that bank – and its resulted in many people switching to them.

Or MTN back in the days, as the only network with the largest coverage in Nigeria that even extends to our villages .

Your unique sales position is a clearly defined statement of what your business stands for – what makes it special. Its the thing that makes your business all you.

Your USP could be your customer service position – whether its to do with your response time, or your guarantee, in fact it can be anything that makes you ‘different’ from your peers. The only caveat to this is to make sure its a clear difference – anything unclear, or too technical may not work, or be completely overlooked by your customers, thereby creating no reason for them to switch to you or choose you over their competitors.

Create one for your business today and make sure your customers/clients, prospects and employees are all aware of it. Basically integrate it fully into all your marketing efforts and business operations.

How has your Unique Sales Position (USP) helped your business?

So out of curiosity I asked what strategy he has implemented so far, and what the progress is like. His response was quite amazing to tell you the least. He told me he has optimized the title, description and other various meta tags. And that he has also submitted to all the major search engines and some link directories.

While those are some of the necessary things one should take care of. SEO goes beyond just that, you need a good marketing plan in place. Gone are the days when you just stuff keywords into tags and just relax.
I didn’t have enough time to do a presentation for him, but here’s basically a draft of some of the things I explained to him.

1. Keyword Research
First I told him, he needed to figure out who his target audience were, and what keywords they were using to search for his kind of business (meaning his client’s business, I’ll refer to it as his business). Which is basically doing old fashion keyword research. I gave him a link to Google’s free keyword research tool which you can find here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Competitive Research
I made him realize he needed to figure out who the competitors for those keywords/business were. To find out what they were doing, how they were doing it, and copy, then add a little twist and some creativity.
I told him about Google’s competitive research tool.

3. Page Title Optimization
I then talked about page titles, which in my opinion is the greatest SEO effort you can implement on your site by targeting the right keyword for your business. He already took care of this, but all of the pages contained the same page title. Like using: “iNove Media, Nigerian Digital Marketing Agency” for all the pages on this website which is ridiculous. And also because he didn’t do keyword research there was no way he could use it here.

When you do a proper keyword research in the first stage, you come up with pretty interesting phrases and keywords that are getting moderate searches for your particular business. These are some of the keywords you sprinkle on your page titles. Every page title must be unique, no repetition here.

4. Meta Description Tags
I also mentioned meta description tags, which he already took care of, but didn’t know he needed to at least add a keyword to it. Though this is no longer a major ranking factor, but still works. I’ve had pages rank just by having my target keyword in the description meta tag. Besides a meta description tag helps the users figure out what your content is all about when shown in the search engine result pages. Do not put much effort into this though. Do not keyword stuff (spam), or you might just run the risk of being penalized.

5. Internal Linking
I told him about internal linking, and that he needed to make sure his pages were properly linked to each other with good descriptive anchor tag that he would like to rank for. Basically just ensuring his most important pages were properly linked to from other pages on the website.

6. Website Technical Issues
I told him if Google and other top search engines are unable to properly crawl his pages, then nothing else he does matters as they wouldn’t be able to read or properly access his website to give him the ranking he deserved. The easiest way to handle website technical issues is to sign up for Google Webmaster Tool which is free. This will inform you about crawl-ability errors, if your site has been infected, if your robots.txt file was missing, and also enables you to submit a sitemap that tells Google where to find all of your pages quickly and effortlessly. That’s just the basics by the way.

Vote of Authority by Other Websites – Links
I talked about links from external sites linking to various pages on his website. Getting other quality sites to link to yours tells the search engines that your website is of value, and this forces them to do nothing but promote your site/pages on their search results.

There are various ways to get links, which includes writing and submitting articles to top websites that accept it, guest blogging, video submissions, press releases, social media sites, social bookmarking, do-follow blog commenting, directory submissions, link exchange from your wife and kids, etc.

Tracking Your Results
I told him he needed a way to know if all of his efforts were actually working and what he could do to improve or adjust on them. Then I mentioned Google Analytics which is free. You get a small code which you put on your pages for tracking results/conversions.

This tells you how many visitors your site had, where they came from, what pages they visited, how long they stayed, what they bought on your site, what frustrates them, and basically how often they come back.

Market Research
This came last because I didn’t bother telling him about market research or business intelligence. This is a brick and mortar business trying to go online. The business has already been established, and nothing I say about this will make any difference. We just have to work hard to get him customers by all means.

Conclusion
When next you have a meeting with your web development team, mention some of these things to them, and if they have in-house SEO capability, have them do it for you. Of course they’d have to charge a separate fee for it.