Every business in Nigeria whether small or big, desires improvement in both sales and growth of business. The Improvement is needed in order to expand their assets and also their market size. Since every business enterprise was established and created with the intention of being successful, several strategies are devised to keep the business going as well as make profit and commercial growth. It is also important that small business devise strategies to retain attraction of customers, improving sales and general business expansion which could be inform of opening other branches to get products close to your customers.
However improving sales strongly depends on marketing skills, ideas and techniques in ensuring that such expectations are achieved which will aid in boosting the performance of business. One of such marketing ideas is an online marketing which does not need the physical presence of the customer or physical pricing to buy any merchandise.
Therefore, the goals of every small business may include survival, growth, customer satisfaction, creating outstanding value for customers and other stake holders, developing new product lines and service offerings, profitability, reduced operating cost and developing a great company amongst others and will do all it takes to meet its goals and objectives even if it means going online and paying for sponsored ads on every social media platforms. You can read up some latest undergraduate projects to get insight on online marketing.

Online Marketing

In today’s business world customers do not need to come physically before their orders are taken and delivered to them even regardless the location. Also small businesses using the online marketing strategies do not also hesitate in communicating via email, SMS, internet adverts to customers. Today, businesses are closer to customers than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries. To understand and get an insight of what an online marketing is let’s look at some definitions
Online marketing is the practice of leveraging web-based channels to spread a message about a company's brand, products, or services to its potential customers. The methods and techniques used for online marketing include email, social media, display advertising, search engine optimization, Google Ad Words and more. The objective of marketing is to reach potential customers through the channels where they spend their time reading, searching, shopping, and socializing online.

The Issues Surrounding Small Business In Nigeria

The issues surrounding small businesses in Nigeria has raised many controls, monitoring and forecasting measures as well as the need for businesses to re-orient their business model and operational strategies into a more adaptive model instead of a reactive model going by the highly competitive business environment and unstable economic situation in the country.
However, it is worthy of note that marketing strategies for small business is quite different from that of a large business. Small business marketing are mostly informal, reactive, unstructured and highly spontaneous. This is so because small business marketing is used for immediate needs and little attention is paid to strategic planning and expansion.
Most of the small businesses in Nigeria (SMEs) direct their attention to sales in order to survive. For all issues outside of advertising, such as customer satisfaction measurement and improvement and design of customer service and support, the sales function has a slightly greater. One of the most prevalent areas in which a small business has problems is marketing which is one of the sole factors of growing a business and improving sales. You must also know how to earn your customers trust if you must adopt the online kind of marketing where your customers do not see you physically nor are sure of your products. Consequently, online marketing has been discovered to provide fast, far reaching and affordable for most businesses

The Benefits Of Online Marketing

a) It gives business owners the exposure they need

The exposure a business owner who uses an online marketing strategies gets cannot be overemphasized. It exposes them to the internet world and connects them to people outside their geographical location some even gets connected to people outside the country. They also get to improve on their marketing strategies from other vendors online; they learn other skills to improve their sales and customers trust.

b) It improves sales and revenue

One of the benefits of online marketing is that it increases sales and revenue. When a business experiences sales improvement it simply represents an increase in the volume of business revenue generated by an enterprise firm over a period of time. Improvement could also be in form of increase in prices of commodities and sales of more commodities or goods, it could also be an improvement in both. However, understand that sales improvement that occurs due to increase in price could be linked to adjustment in inflation and could therefore not linked to actual or real growth in sales of products. However, if the costs remain at low level, it could then be described as the real increase in sales and revenue.
Furthermore, an increase in sales of goods may imply growth in sales and this could be due to expansion in geographical business environment, increase in the number of branches, and expansion of quantity of products as well as the number of services provided.

c) It helps minimize expenses and stress

For those who buy products online, it helps reduce stress of having to meet the vendor face-to-face and even begin to negotiate price which could be lot of stress. Most online vendors display their products with price tags on them which make it a lot easier for the buyer. So customers do not need to ask for pricing or start negotiating. For customers who wants product that they cannot find within their location but sees it online do not need to travel and spend money on transportation just to get one or more products all they need do is to place their orders and have it/them delivered to them at little or no stress at all.

Conclusion

Conclusively, small businesses must have an understanding of how to go about an online marketing, earn the trust of your customers because no one would want to spend or pay money to an online scammer. Also there are cases of customers who purchase things online when it delivered its totally different from what they saw and ordered this will affect the business and your customers will lose trust in you.