Social media marketing is booming now, no doubt. Businesses selling sports goods in Nigeria have realized that the biggest platform to build a dedicated audience is social media.
More than being a ready source of information, platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok have become amazingly profitable channels for expanding a brand’s reach in Nigeria, tapping into the country’s renowned teeming audience of sports lovers.
But in the digital euphoria of social media marketing, there are still some red-card fouls Nigerian sports goods businesses commit in this game that they get penalized painfully for.
Let us dive deeper into some of the biggest stakes these businesses (targeting Nigerian sports enthusiasts) make on social media.
SPREADING THEMSELVES TOO THIN ON MULTIPLE PLATFORMS
Spreading your resources about on several social media platforms carelessly without an organized strategy is one catastrophic way to reduce the productivity of your social media marketing.
This is one mistake many budding sports businesses in Nigeria are guilty of. They have a limited army (resources) on social media but want to wage war on all social media frontiers.
This dilutes the supposed impact a rather concentrated approach would produce. There are hundreds of social media platforms today.
If you spread all your resources extensively across all, you will end up having a shallow presence on each of these platforms.
Instead, it would help if you selectively focused on the biggest platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. These platforms have a substantial concentration of sports lovers in Nigeria.
It is preferable to start with two or three at first and only extend to other platforms if you have consolidated your presence on the initial platforms you set out on.
As you achieve more success, you can aggregate resources (in terms of a larger team) to effectively manage your presence across a plethora of platforms.
MANY BUSINESSES TEND TO BE UNRESPONSIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Agreed, it is not easy to follow up robustly on communication on social media, but it is duly worth all the hassle.
Grooming your social media as a sports goods brand is procedural, and you may have to soak in effort and time to engage your audience.
Relax; it is not as challenging as manually climbing the Eiffel tower. But it is important to follow up and respond to messages, say on the major platforms.
See these messages as leads and follow up on them. The more satisfaction a customer drinks from you on social media, the drunker in love they tend to get with your brand.
The customer would lose that sense of comradeship when you appear dumb to their messages. This is one unforgivable mistake business owners make in their social media marketing activities.
BEING TOO QUIET ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Listen, it is not enough to be numbered among social media users. You have to make your presence known as a destination for quality sports goods in Nigeria.
You must put out very inspiring and thought-provoking messages to distinguish yourself from the drowning Atlantic of messages on social media.
Note that we don’t mean you submerging your brand in controversies to generate attention on social media.
Make “good” noise. Stand up, preferably with the quality of your sports-related content. It would be great if you could tap into your creativity and create fascinating content.
If there are viral trends on social media, feel free to jump on some of them relating to your brand. This helps to present your brand as cheerful, contemporary, and relevant, especially to a younger audience.
POSTING LOW-QUALITY CONTENT
This is a jolting blunder! Instagram is a market of pictures. The quality of the picture is the marketing fragrance of the post itself.
You shouldn’t be posting low-quality pale pictures on Instagram when you have just a handful of seconds to make a quick impression with your post.
So if you were planning on snapping pictures with your grandfather’s 1980 Kodak, be prepared to be scrolled past on social media.
Luckily, smartphones with impressive picture quality don’t cost a fortune anymore. A modest iPhone or Android phone can give you pictures of appreciable quality that you can post on Instagram.
Similarly, the quality of your video content, say on TikTok, matters. Users enjoy sharp and crisp videos with great resolution.
NOT MAXIMIZING HASHTAGS
We tend to readily ignore the power of hashtags. Many social media platforms boost the visibility of your posts if you can integrate the right hashtags.
Hashtags are even more important if you are a local business in Nigeria selling sports goods. A smart strategy would be researching trending hashtags and building your content around the related theme.
Alright, we have come to the end of the guide. By now, you are reasonably informed on the lethal errors you should never make on social media as a Nigerian business.