mabinda.com Business, Education, Technology Commentary.

Most people mistake their digital strategy as a few posts on social media. But is that really it? Should your digital strategy be a few posts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, X or YouTube? First of all, determine the quality of the audience that is consuming your product message. For a company that is working with influencers, don’t just look at the numbers of the influencer. Look for brand influencers that have an emotional connection to your brand. So, balance the rate card between the number of people that are going to interact with your brand, and the quality of the audience. You’d rather spend more on a lower number of followers but a higher engagement than spend on influencers that have a high number of followers but a low quality audience. Just like in the old media where a brand could spend a million dollars and not get a single customer in return, in the new digital media space also, it could also be that you are spending highly on your brands with no return on investment.

Try and get a target audience that might be customers for your product. For instance, if a brand influencer is talking about personal finance, then as an investment portfolio, you could partner with them so they open a money market fund. Just remember that most people hate being sold to so instead of only splashing ads, try and create a story around your product and you will have an advertorial that helps to convert highly. For instance, it helps that Danielle Geathers was the first black student body President of MIT and so she could be able to sell a venture capital fund that helps to plug in the racial innovation gap by funding black founders. In the old days of radio, one of Africa’s most esteemed radio presenters Caroline Mutoko used to market everything from chocolates to milk brands to school shoes, and that’s how she was able to sell so much. Another successful online campaign is where high school content creators Norah zawadi Andenga and Stephanie Mumbuz who basically operate their mums YouTube and instagram accounts are able to sell back to school shoes by Bata company, and that’s an esteemed target audience between high school going kids and a school shoe company.

Such is the kind of targeting that can be especially resourceful for company. With a social media campaign, you can measure the return on investment with every ad spend, and so you can know which brand influencers convert. On your own posts, create story lines around your product and even perhaps do a marketing campaign. Such is how you get to have emotional connection to the audience. Marketers usually advertise for two reasons, to close sales and for mind share, that is for people to know about their products enough so that by the time they have money, they’ll be able to convert. Which is why to restrict your marketing budget to only being able to post a few times a day is to do an injustice to your digital marketing strategy.