A new generation of brands is approaching e-commerce differently in Nigeria. And these brands are causing quite a bit of disruption in the Nigerian retail industry.

What are these Direct-to-Customer or D2C brands doing differently? They are catering to people’s desire for simplicity.

Analysis paralysis already makes many customers unwilling to part with their money simply because they have way too many options.

Yes, allowing your customers to have too many options can hurt your sales. And that is why smart D2C brands are eliminating the many choices their customers have.

D2C brands manufacture, market, and distribute their products without intermediaries, enabling them to reduce costs, interact directly with consumers, and provide a seamless start-to-finish buyer’s experience.

Thanks to the ease of global distribution, some D2C brands have helped define retail’s past decade. Some of the most noteworthy examples include Casper, Dollar Shave Club, Allbirds, Everlane, Brandless, and Happy socks.

These brands aren’t just similar because they are D2Cs. They also share other things like

• Knowing their customers very well,
• Investing in an engaging and aspirational brand,
• Exceptional end-to-end customer service experiences using technology to deliver it,
• Brilliant paid marketing strategies that aren’t just designed to sell but also to tell powerful brand stories.

Do you know what is exciting? Seeing Nigerian brands take up the concept and doing it well.

Let’s look at four Nigerian D2C brands and study how they’re building the future of brands born on the internet.

Mint Eyewear

This eyewear brand is making it their life mission to make everyday life more comfortable by protecting the eyes through filtering up to 60% of blue light (emitted by computer screens, smartphones, tablets, TVs, etc.) and delivering the best value for money.

How they do it

• Innovating the entire glasses buying experience.
• User-generated content and reviews.
• A seamless omnichannel experience.
• Email Marketing

Before coming across Mint Eyewear, buying glasses in Nigeria was a stale, clinical and expensive experience. Now, this Nigerian startup uses D2C commerce to reduce stress and price without affecting its quality. Changing the shopping experience for glasses and showing off their customers on social media.

From browse to add-to-cart, Mint Eyewear’s user experience is simple, clean, and effective.

Smiley Socks Co.

A D2C brand that believes that good socks can inspire confidence and happiness. Having and sharing the gospel that a pair of socks has the power to transform not just the style but also the state of mind of their customers. The goal is to help everyone embrace their personality and be inspired to be the best version of themselves.

How they do it

• Using social media as a marketing channel and a way to interact with their customers
• User-generated content and reviews
• Focus on customer experience
• Developing a creative content marketing strategy that’s executed by an in-house content team
• A seamless omnichannel experience

Smiley Socks has been able to start and grow an engaged audience by using social media as a marketing channel to build a vibrant and fun-loving audience,

Their audience always looks forward to sharing their happy moments in a pair of Smiley socks, attached with good messages and experiences that also get more people to be a part of the brand.

With a good content strategy that looks to engage everyone on social media, Smiley socks have garnered more reach and ultimately generated more sales. The Smiley Socks team believes that the customer experience is what makes everyone happy.

Taeillo

This D2C makes furniture as rugged as Africans, at least that is what they claim. Their mission, however, is to create furniture for Africans wherever they are in the world.

How they do it

• Very creative
• Digital-first mindset, using AR/VR
• Lots of user-generated content and reviews
• Influencer Marketing

Taeillo became the go-to furniture company for most millennials, and it also made more name and sales during the lockdown in Nigeria.

As many Nigerians were forced to work from home, they had to create a comfortable setting, and Taeillo positioned itself as the best option to fulfill that lifestyle. Taeillo provides a very creative shopping experience that provides their customers an augmented reality of what they want to buy before they even get it.

They collaborated with big and micro-influencers and used user-generated content on their social media pages, which helped them build trust and loyalty quickly.

Taeillo also uses Facebook ads to drive more people to visit their online store — with their ad copy, design, offer and calls to action always on point.

They’ve seen their most significant returns on influencer marketing.

Hingees

One of my favorite brands in Nigeria, positioning itself as a lifestyle brand passionate about creating simple and functional, minimal products, is Hingees. The brand’s purpose is to help people find common ground through simple and easy-to-use products that make everyday life better.

How they do it

• A simple and carefully considered product line
• Comfortable online buying experience
• User-generated content and reviews
• Great branding and packaging

This Lagos-based startup sees a customer need in experience and meets it with creating what people love. They know the importance of branding to eCommerce, and they’ve been intentional, concise, and clean with it.

With a straightforward online shopping experience via the website or social media pages, Hingees has made it easier by combining social commerce and eCommerce, giving an omnichannel shopping experience. With heavy reliance on UGCs, they have also built trust with their audiences. What makes them unique to their customers is how they go the extra mile to delight their customers.

To Wrap it Up

Building a trustworthy brand is very important for creating a D2C brand. It also involves intimately understanding your audience and having an exceptional product. The idea is to cater to people’s desire for simplicity with an unforgettable experience.

The D2C space in Nigeria will continue to rise, and I look forward to it.

I don’t want to sound like someone’s dad, but in life consistency is key. Yeah, the same goes for social media marketing, you must be consistent, for you to build a brand your audience recognizes. The consistency in a brand brings growth in audience engagement and reach. From the tone of voice used in messages to the aesthetics of your profiles, you need to be recognizable to gain traction among your intended audience.

Consistent Posting

Imagine you have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Bae sends you like three texts in one day and fiam! Nothing for the next five days and then two random texts. But you are a good sweet person, you took your time to respond and when you did that, it takes days for you to get a reply. That doesn’t look like a great relationship, right? That’s the relationship you’re building with your audience. No one likes to feel like they’re being ghosted.

The Algorithm

All social media platforms have their algorithm, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter create your timeline based on the type of content you engage with and most likely resonate with. That is why you see ads for products you’ve been searching for saying hi on your feeds. Engagement = Clicks = Cash; these people have to make money one way or another. Facebook and Instagram decrease your views on people’s timelines if your posting decreases (especially when you are a business page) and Twitter shows tweets from accounts of people you interact with. They say the more social you are, the more air time you get, as long as you are not spammy– and believe me, that line is very thin.

The good thing here is the fact that once you start posting regularly, you will likely see an increase in your engagement level which will help boost your posts for future engagement. It’s a cycle you can work in your favor, especially when engagement = brand awareness.

Perception is what Matters

Almost half of the millennials can’t go more than 5 hours without checking social media. I am a millennial and I like seeing new content constantly and quickly, but I am not the only one who likes insights and instant satisfaction, every active social media user spend over 2 hours a day on social media.

So, quick question. Why should I follow you and your business if you have nothing new to contribute to my addiction?

If you post irregularly, let us say, once a week, the perception is you don’t have the content to offer and there’s no real benefit from following you on social media. However, be careful with this, as much as people love content, they don’t love to see salesy content that’s all about you and your business. Yeeeah, there is a balance you have to maintain.

You see the thing is, people’s perception of your business is their reality. With social media, you have the power to influence the narrative. If you’re only trying to push sales on social media, it’s all about you instead of your customer and your audience will tune you out, consciously or subconsciously. But if you provide helpful content, like tips and tricks, insights or industry news or explanations, you’ll engage your audience and create a connection.

Data is Importanter

Take out time to learn more about your audience. By responding to comments, enquiries, feedback, and checking your insights. The growth you want to see on your social media channels can only be achieved if you take the time to invest in the quality and value of your content to your users. Analyze your posts, check your Twitter analytics, Facebook and Instagram Insights to see what your followers are engaging with the most. It will help you identify what is working, and what is not. By utilizing data and feedback, you can only grow!

How To Build Consistency

I believe that’s enough about the importance, let’s round it up with how to build consistency:

1. Create a Content Calendar: Social media isn’t all about you, it’s about your followers. Test and study the content that works and add those types of posts to your calendar. Here is a social media calendar template you can use
2. Set Realistic Goals: When planning your calendar, make sure you don’t get too excited and set unrealistic goals. It is best to keep to the schedule you create. If posting eight tweets a day is too much for you, research, test and see what times are best for your followers, and set a realistic goal. Four times consistently is better than eight times in a row and then nothing for weeks. Don’t ghost like our imaginary bae.
3. Make Use of Tools: Don’t make the mistake of deciding you’ll post when you have the time or something interesting happens. Free posting tools are plenty, the Facebook scheduler is a great way to schedule Facebook posts, Later for Instagram, Tweetdeck for Twitter. Research what works for the channels you’re on and provides you with the easiest user experience for the way you like to work.
4. Watch Your Engagement: Now that you’ve scheduled the time to post, you need to plan and schedule the time to interact with your followers. It’s called social media for a reason.

Quickly responding to messages and comments on your posts makes your followers comfortable with you and it puts a face on your brand. Decide what works for your day. I recommend setting a time in the morning, afternoon and evening to check the page, ensure the posts went out correctly, answer comments/questions and repost and comment on other people’s posts.

Posting consistently and frequently to social media will only strengthen your brand. By being consistent with your followers, you’ll build loyal followers that will share and talk about your brand, you know what they say about word of mouth.

To round it up this week, take this from me to you Social Media takes time, just because you are present, doesn’t mean your target audience will see you. Remember to pay it forward by liking, sharing and commenting on other peoples and pages posts first. Don’t be hard on yourself, social media is a slow burner in terms of marketing tools. Providing value with consistency will at the end give you results.

Why should you be consistent with your social media marketing? was originally published in Ingressive on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Growth hacking is a data-driven, full-funnel marketing strategy based on rapid experimentation. It is the overall term used for initiatives focused only on growth and usually used in relation to early-stage startups that want to achieve rapid growth in a short period of time on a small budget.

As much as it is used to grow revenue, sales and app users, growth marketing can also be used to grow audiences on social media. As we all know, follower numbers aren’t the only KPI to be measured for social media growth. There are other KPIs such as clicks, likes, shares, brand mentions, profile visits, and etc.

In this article, I will be giving you 8 social media growth hacks that can help the growth of your startup.

1. Lead Magnet: This is an incentive you can offer your followers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. It could be in the form of a resourceful eBook or webinar. The idea is to use lead magnets to grow your list and engage with your community.This will also give you something to talk about repeatedly on social media. After building your list, the next thing is to work your social media fans through your funnel, and ultimately convert them into customers. Always make sure that you provide value with your eBook and/or webinars, value in terms of uniqueness, resourcefulness, and align initiatives with the goals of the company. At Ingressive, we provide weekly webinar sessions to our community, by having thought leaders in the tech community come on as guests and provide valuable information for startups, entrepreneurs, designers, and developers. This strategy has increased our community members as well as our social media audiences.
2. Visual Content: 32% of marketers say visual images are the most important form of content for their business, 80% of marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing. Without any doubt, this is a top social media hacking strategy for growing a business. Optimize your growth strategy by sharing visual content on social media, it could be in the form of images, infographics, or videos. Aside from producing engaging and professional visual content; you have to optimize it for the company’s goal. Always align your content with each platform you are using. You need to know what works best for the different social media platforms you are using. Watch the size or dimension, for example Instagram contents are more engaging when it is 640 x 640, and the video length is not more than 1 minute, consider these features when creating your content to achieve a smooth experience for your followers.
3. Influencer Marketing: If you’re looking for a social media strategy that will give you an instant result, Influencer marketing is your go-to strategy. Due to the industry competition, companies are using influencer marketing to register their brands in the minds of their audiences and as a way to shape their opinions. If you want to leverage on Influencer marketing, you should focus on relevant Influencers in your niche and reach out to them for collaborations. This can help boost your brand awareness, increase followers, sales and build trust for your brand. Brands are collaborating with Influencers in different ways and some are even having social media influencers as brand ambassadors. You can read more on Influencer marketing here.
4. Ask Questions: When you build strong relationships in real life, the more time and effort you put in the better the result. It’s almost the same with social media; you have to engage your followers, ask them questions and acknowledge their answers. Tweetchats are another example of how we have used this strategy at Ingressive to increase our social media followers on Twitter. At least, once a month we have a tweet chat with someone from our community, and these tweet chats allow questions and answers from us and our community members. This gets us an average of 400,000 impressions and 200,000 reaches every tweet chat. Always seek out new opportunities to reach out to new followers, rather than wait for them. This might sound hard but the authenticity in this is what builds great communities with loyal followers.
5. Social Media Analytics: The importance of social media analytics can never be underrated when it comes to growth marketing; every account requires a strategy and there is no strategy you want to implement that won’t require the use of social media analytics. Your analytics will tell you what works, and what it is that doesn’t. This will help you optimize your social media presence as you progress. For example, Instagram insight will tell you the best time to post your content, the most engaging type of content, call to actions that are driving engagements, and so much more. All this information helps you get maximum engagement. Check your analytics weekly to quickly determine what is working and what isn’t. This is where you apply the ‘Iterate and Release often’ philosophy. There are so many social media analytics tools that you can use to determine what’s working for your social media presence. Hootsuite, Iconosquare, keyhole, socialbearing, and others have been found useful in this endeavor.
6. Trending Topics: Every industry will always have new trends — creating content around new trends will always make you relevant. Creating valuable content can be hard, but knowing how to use search trends and volumes to identify trending content will help you in creating valuable content that will grow your social media presence. Creating content around trending topics has worked for various brands, for example, the lead designer at Kunocreative, created a custom graphic for the season premiere of “Game of Thrones” and earned an incredible amount of engagement relative to their follower base. Knowing how to leverage on trending topics would give your social media page that uplift you’re searching for.
7. Storytelling: The importance of storytelling cannot be overemphasized, storytelling has become a very important part of marketing as it helps brands resonate with their audience. Emotions play very essential roles in how human beings think and behave, the emotions people feel can compel them to take action and influence the decisions they make, both large and small. You can tap into this human strength/weakness by harnessing the emotional power of stories within your content, using social media storytelling can help form strong, long-lasting relationships with their audience. When you create content on the topics that customers care about, it gets shared and one of the ripple effects would be the growth of your social media influence.
8. Collaborate: Collaboration in this sense means leverage. Leveraging on the network of people in your industry/community could get you very far in building your social media presence in your industry. Some of the ways you can collaborate to build your social media presence is by doing Tweetchats, Instagram Takeovers, and/or Live videos. Create publicity materials after getting a guest you want to collaborate with, and share with your community. Your guest(s) would also share it and this will help you get across their community. It could be an organization or just an individual who is influential in your industry.

Wrap Up

You cannot copy and paste strategies, you have to learn what is working for you as a startup, what works for one business might not work for you. You have to focus on your focus, define your goals, identify your audience, create a plan to get to them. Never forget to add value to the lives of your audience, and encourage them to take action. Depending on what you want, it could be to sign up for your newsletter, buy a product or join a community.

Value is valuable, and your followers would start sharing your contents if you present it to them. Experiment with your ideas and learn from A/B testing, see what works and what doesn’t. Also, reach out to people in your industry to learn from their experiences.

Join the Ingressive community to get access to a network of over 10,000+ Founders, Developers and Designers. And if you are a Founder in the Sub-Saharan Africa Ingressive capital is funding $50k-$100K investments in top early stage tech companies. Apply for funding here.

8 Social Media Hacks For The Growth of Every Startup was originally published in Ingressive on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With over 2 billion users on Facebook and 1 billion users on Instagram, these are two of the most used mobile platforms for advertising. For years, businesses and brands have found success in reaching different types of audiences using Facebook and Instagram advertising, as well as through Influencer marketing content.

Do you have a product or event launch? In this article we will look at the differences between these two marketing strategies and what they mean for your businesses.

Facebook/Instagram ads are any ads or promotions regularly found on Facebook and Instagram. These ads could come in form of text, images or videos, and they can be found on your news feed or story timeline as sponsored posts.

Influencer marketing advertisements are created by social media Influencers from their personalized accounts, could be their Youtube page, Facebook page, Instagram or Twitter page.

To help you identify which marketing strategy will best meet your business goals, below is a list of advantages and disadvantages for the two different marketing strategies.

Facebook/Instagram Ads

Advantages:

1. Instagram and Facebook are connected. This makes it easier to target your audience based on Facebook data.
2. In terms of ROI and cost, Instagram and Facebook returns the best results. It’s effective and less time-consuming than other online marketing channels.
3. Flexible budget/Scalability. Facebook and Instagram’s ad buying program allows you to run your ads according to your pocket.
4. Measuring the success of your campaign based on awareness. You also get to view the analytics and know what worked and what you need to work on.

Disadvantages:

1. Adjusting Algorithms: Facebook and Instagram are trying to restrict blackhat SEO tactics, hence they are always changing their algorithms. If you create a content based on one algorithm, you might be doing it wrong because you don’t know there is a new algorithm.
2. There is Competition: Because Facebook has a lot of users, ads are sprouting like mushrooms. And because of this, competition is tight. It is hard to stand out.
3. Higher Engagement Demanded: Yes, ads must generate more engagement from visitors. But social media marketing also demands greater involvement from the person who is placing the ad. The likes and shares need to be monitored, and the comments need to be responded to in good time. If the comments are queries or complaints, then they should be responded to the fastest. Since you don’t know when and where the next complaint would come from, you need to be at alert. The audience potential is high on Facebook and Instagram, it can be difficult to accurately target your ads if you’re new to them, even with Facebook’s advanced algorithms.

Influencer Marketing

Advantages:

1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as views, reach, and engagement rates all spike because audiences feel connected to the influencer and follow loyally.
2. B2C Influencers engage consumers, improve brand awareness, and boost sales.
3. Influencers help boost your SEO because they often have their own highly rated websites that get high exposure, giving your brand that desirable halo effect.
4. Word-of-mouth marketing boosts brand identity and recognition through stories about people, instead of just the brand.
5. Consumers aren’t interested in traditional marketing tactics anymore. They would rather put their trust in spokespeople, especially YouTube/Instagram/Twitter celebs because they seem more credible than brand advertising.

Disadvantages:

1. Influence marketing is a strategy that should be incorporated into your larger marketing mix. This takes time, budget and dedication and planning.
2. You must build relationships with the Influencers you work with — and this takes time, energy and dedication. You must invest yourself or your team in your Influencers: get to know them, invite them to events, build trust.
3. You can’t buy your way to success by paying influencers. There is always a risk that you will spend money and the results will come up short of expectations. This final point is why so many brands fail at it.

Conclusion: On balance, it is fair to say that they both have their advantages and disadvantages, Facebook/Instagram ads and Influencer Marketing are weapons that no digital marketer’s arsenal should be without.

Facebook/Instagram ads and Influencer marketing in general still continues to grow.

Are you an Entrepreneur looking to learn how to use social media to generate more sales for your businesses, join over 500+ Entreprenuers, Designers, Developers and Digital Marketers in the Ingressive EDG community to get access to resources, and help.

Facebook/Instagram ads vs Influencer Marketing: Which is better? was originally published in Ingressive on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s just two months away for the world to clock 2019, 2018 has been crazily amazing for social media with the new trends coming out almost every day. The social media space is constantly evolving, this jungle is not for the weak, if you aren’t on top of your game, you are losing a lot. As a marketer or business owner, you need to know how to leverage social media to your own advantage. Your consistency and presence is quite valuable for your survival.

Yes obviously, presence is not just enough. This is why you need to have strategies for your social media plan. I want to share with you trends that I think you should include in your social media strategy for 2019. I tried to analyse data and trends in 2018, and previous years just to get a clearer picture of what next year holds for Digital Marketers and businesses that are using Social Media to grow their businesses.

1. Video Content: Let us start with video contents. According to this study by hubspot, 83% of consumers would consider sharing video content with their friends if it is specific to their interests. Facts all the way, I personally don’t go a day without sharing awesome contents with my friends, could be funny, enlightening or sad, the thing is 90% of them are always videos. You can check the contents you’ve shared with your friends on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook, you will notice that the bulk of it are videos. Online video drives better engagement, 80% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2019. Before we move on I want to give you more numbers, because numbers don’t lie. The team from depositphotos did a research and this is what they got:

• 90% of consumers say video can help them make buying decisions
• Mentioning the word ‘video’ in your email subject line increases open rates by 19%
• Video on landing pages can increase conversions by up to 80%

So, if you are not thinking about videos because you find them stressful to create, you need to start reconsidering. There are many options out there, you can always outsource or learn. Also note that live videos will become more popular.

2. Increased Focus on UGC: What’s UGC? User Generated Content. This is one of the best ways to grow your business without doing a lot of work, or spending money. Brands are leveraging UGCs, this is because 65% of customers agree UGC is more interesting than the content created by brands. This is how UGC influences online shopping.

The recent ‘Just Do It’ campaign by Nike is a perfect example of how UGCs can help your business. On Instagram, there are more than 15 million posts with the hashtag #JustDoIt and this UGC did help Nike gain more social media followers, comments, and sales. Twitter, and Facebook also played their parts in the #JustDoIt movement. UGCs are amazing and you need to include this in your 2019 strategy.

3. Chatbots will become More Popular: I nearly typed my baby will become more popular, that’s how much I love chatbots. This chat solution right here is a gem, they’ve been around for a long but like everything else, chatbots are evolving as well. More businesses are adopting the use of chatbots to communicate with their customers on social media. This trend is really growing fast. Did you know that, 80% of marketing executives have used or plan to use chatbots by 2020? Now you do. To know more about Chatbots, please check out my medium page.

4. Social Media Ads: Friends and Family First, that is the facebook and Instagram algorithm summed up. As long as you have a business page, you will always need to do ads on these platforms. They are always changing their algorithms, and this is affecting what users see on their timelines. You can’t bank on organic reach anymore due to this, so one of the alternatives out there is social media ads. Ads will help you reach more people, what’s awesome about ads is the fact that you can target your right audience and it goes straight to their faces. By January when you want to draw the budget for the year, you should consider putting in a lot for ads.

5. Influencer marketing will become more popular: According to Forbes, influencer marketing is on the verge of exploding. 84% of marketers engaged in influencer marketing campaign in 2017. This just reaffirms the fact that organic traffic is dropping, if you want to get your product out there via social media, Influencer marketing is something you cannot neglect. According to research, micro influencers have a 60% higher engagement rate than the normal celebrity influencers. You can also expect to see 22.2% increase in average weekly conversions from this marketing strategy. There are micro influencers and there are macro influencers. Micro Influencers range from 1000 followers to 90,000 followers, anything from 100K and above makes a macro influencer. Personally, I am more drawn to micro influencers and this is because their followers trust their opinions and they are cost-effective compared to macro influencers.

To Wrap It Up

Social media is constantly changing, and as a marketer you need to always keep up with the trends. In 2019, these 5 social media trends will definitely help your business as long as you include them in your strategy.

I want to add that branding will become more important and this is key to making so many things work for you on social media. 2018 is almost over, but you can use this information to grow and expand your business in 2019.

Before you go, I would like to know what social media trend(s) will you/your company focus on to generate leads and drive conversions in 2019?

As at 2015, 39.5% of mobile phone internet users in the Middle East and Africa used messaging apps to communicate. This figure is expected to be 42.9% by 2019. It is no news that chatting or Instant messaging is becoming more popular as an everyday means of communication in the world and Nigeria is becoming a part of the movement.

Growing with this rise are Chatbots, a chatbot is a computer program or an artificial intelligence which conducts a conversation through audio or texts. In April 2016, Facebook started allowing businesses deliver automated customer support, e-commerce guidance, content and interactive experiences through chatbots.

A number of Nigerian companies are already using chatbots for customer support because it is an effective way for brands to have an:

· Improved Customer Service

· Increased Customer Engagement

· Monitoring Customer Data and Gaining Insights

· Better Lead Generation

· Cost Savings

Here are some of the exciting chatbots that are growing with the tide in Nigeria and what they do:

Leo: An AI-powered Facebook Messenger bot, to allow users perform banking transactions. It was recently launched by The United Bank for Africa (UBA).

Top Articles on How Businesses are using Bots:

1. Is Chatbot a synonym for great Customer Experience?

2. Chatbots: What Happened?

3. How Businesses are Winning with Chatbots & Ai

Kudi: This is my favorite, another financial bot with which you can purchase mobile airtime, transfer money and pay for TV bills via chat using Messenger, Skype, Telegram or a web browser.

SimbiBot: This is an interactive learning assistant on the journey to prepare students for the scary Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and Post UTME. The bot also assists students in making career choices. This is an amazing bot.

Loystar NG Bot: Loystar helps you discover local brands in the country and you can shop for food, beverages, fashion items, flights and hotels. The Facebook bot connects you with a merchant on WhatsApp, and you get rewards and points for your patronage.

Lara.ng: I think this is my most used bot after Kudi. What Lara does is to help people get from point A to B using public transport. The platform, which currently serves Lagos commuters, also goes as far as giving the estimated cost and time of the journey. Life just became easier in Lagos.

Hyper-CV: Another very useful bot in Nigeria is Hyper CV, you can easily create resumes with templates to choose from. CV creations just became much easier with this chatbot.

Jumia Bot: Jumia’s e-commerce bot integrates with Facebook messenger and it asks users what they want and displays the best offers in several categories. You can book flights and hotels as well as order food.

Asides from the ease of access, these are all problem solving bots. Apparently, Nigeria has 15M — 20M monthly active people on Facebook. So the opportunity is there, it makes more sense to create your online store, business, as a chatbot on Facebook messenger and market it, as opposed to creating new apps.

I think I am past asking or answering the question “are bots here to take away jobs from humans?” because the answer is “NO”. Bots are here to make our jobs easier and better. I am really excited about Nigerian companies taking advantage of this huge potential to give their users an amazing experience while also winning over new ones.

If you know of any Chatbot in Nigeria that should be here but isn’t, drop their names with a response and if you have used any of the listed ones, please share your experience.

The Rise Of Chatbots In Nigeria was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Chatbots are gaining more popularity in the marketing industry and this is because they are bringing a new way for businesses to communicate with the world and most importantly with their customers, riding on the exploding popularity of messaging apps. Adopting the chatbot technology will give you a major advantage as a marketer over competitors.

Most Popular Chatbot Tutorials

1. Write a serverless Slack chat bot using AWS

2. Chatbot using django rest framework + api.ai + slack

3. Building a ChatBot with Watson

Here are 5 out of so many advantages of using a Chatbot;

1. Improved Customer Service: A survey shows that 83% of online shoppers need support during shopping. So, your customers may require help trying to understand which products fit their needs/budgets any time of the day. A chatbot will provide real-time assistance like a sales person in a real store, offer an interactive communication where they also ask questions to understand the real problem. Using text and voice, they can present customers rich content with product pages, images, videos etc. This means that a chatbot will provide an extensive customer assistance, always-available customer support and proactive customer interaction.
2. Better Engagement: It is important to keep your customers engaged with your brand and this is why companies are using social media marketing. Engaging customers through social media will increase your sales by 20% to 40%. While this sounds good, a chatbot will definitely add to the experience because a character driven experience to the customers helps in better engagement.
3. Cost Savings: Implementing a full functioning chatbot is way cheaper and faster than creating a cross platform app or hiring employees for each task. Since chatbots are automated solutions, they allow organizations to handle many customers at once, and simultaneously. By “employing” chatbots that complements human agents, you will not only save on employee costs but you will also avoid the problems caused by human errors.
4. Monitoring Consumer Data and Gaining Insights: Chatbots are great tools to communicate with customers. With the feedback they collect through simple questions, you can make improvements on your services/products, you can also them to track purchasing patterns and consumer behaviours by monitoring user data. Monitoring user data helps a company to decide “which products to market differently, which to market more and which to redevelop”.
5. Rapid and Increasing Growth in Messenger apps: 65% of smartphone users don’t download new apps in a month. Since users have their core apps such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Messenger etc, they hardly download new ones. Therefore, integrating your own chatbot into one of the popular platforms that your customers use daily, can be better than building a new app by saving money and time (take your product/service to where your consumers are spending their time).

Users are spending more time on messaging apps like Messenger, Whatsapp, Skype, WeChat, and others. Using Chatbots in messaging platforms allow brands to interact personally.

Messaging apps will soon leverage on technologies such as chatbot to deliver smarter and better engagement with the customers. When used in the right effective way Messenger apps can leverage business.

In conclusion, the biggest advantages of chatbots include being able to reach a broad audience on messenger apps, as well as the ability to automate personalized messages.

5 Benefits of using a Chatbot was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last week I wrote an article on Chatbots, explaining what a Chatbot is, the advantages and how it is growing significantly, you can check it here. We all know what digital marketing is and the amazing thing digital marketing uses in beating the traditional form of marketing, which is Data.

Gaining insights into user behaviour really changed the game of marketing, now companies and brands know what their customers like and what they do on the internet. If you search for a ring on jumia, it is possible that for the next few days you will keep seeing ads about rings from jumia everywhere you go on the internet.

Technology has really changed the way brands interacts with their customers and the means of communication today has developed to a level that provides more human treatment of consumers. Social networking sites for example, is like a hangout spot on the internet, a lot of people are always on these sites having fun, brands saw this and started using it to interact with their customers to engage them more, because being in their faces makes them more relevant and this leads to an increase in sales.

Over the past years, instant messaging apps have been growing significantly and statistically, they have taken over from social networks. If you study yourself, you’ll notice that you spend more time on whatsapp and messenger than you do on twitter and facebook, this is because chatting is more engaging.

How to Make a Chatbot: Tutorials

1. Getting started with Dialogflow and building my first bot (Newbie’s guide)

2. DialogFlow(formerly API.AI): Let’s create a Movie ChatBot in minutes

3. Discord Bot Maker

As a business owner who wants to sell his/her product, the next thing to do is to take your services to where your clients are spending their time. That way you make it easier for them to gain access to your services and you get to spend less on marketing. This is where Chatbots are playing the big role.

Let me give you a quick brief on the five Cs of Chatbots

1. Consistent — Since Chatbots are driven by Artificial Intelligence, they eliminate any possibility of human error, making for smoother lead creation and conversion. Chatbots are also self-learning, so they constantly adapt to grow even more efficient over time.

2. Context driven — Chatbots are capable of gauging emotion and tweak their behavior based on the customers pre-determined profile, like age, gender and location.

3. Conversational — Chatbots replicate everyday human interaction more accurately than actual humans do. The vocabulary we use with our friends and family doesn’t cross over in companies interactions with clients. Single word commands on FAQ pages like “download”, “log-in”, “click here” is how businesses suffer from social communication disorder and lose customers.

4. Compatible — Chatbots are endlessly malleable, regardless of business or function from simple lead generation to full-fledged automated sales, all made possible by a little pop up on the bottom right of your screen.

5. Cost Effective — Chatbots aren’t just less expensive compared to their alternatives, they’re an outright steal.

In conclusion, messaging apps have become the top destination for brands to reach consumers, it’s no surprise why chatbots have become so popular. By implementing a chatbot into your marketing strategy, you’ll be able to learn about your audience, tailor your marketing efforts, reach new consumers and monetize your social media profiles.

This is the part where I tell you to do something but I don’t have anywhere to redirect you to, so just clap for me if you enjoyed this article.

How to Increase sales with Chatbots — Digital Marketing was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Chatbot (also known as a talkbot, chatterbot, Bot, IM bot, interactive agent, or Artificial Conversational Entity) is a computer programme that can respond to text or verbal commands and questions, providing advice in the place of a human staff member.

Now that we are clear on that, let’s continue. Chatbots are becoming a huge growth area, with tech research giant Gartner predicting that by 2020, the average person will have more conversations a day with bots than they do with their spouse, Lol. I can’t even defend the human race on this one because I know people are already buying sexdolls(bots). This rise is being driven by several converging trends like the popularity of messaging apps, the explosion of the app ecosystem, advancements in AI and cognitive technologies, conversational user interfaces and a wider reach of automation.

Trending Articles on Chatbot Marketing:

1. How my Chatbot got 100K users in 1 week

2. BotXperts asked — with Veronica Belmont of Growbot.io

3. Messenger User Acquisition: How to build Facebook Comment Auto Reply

Chatbots are gaining popularity in a number of industries as an important customer service tool, with financial services like Kudi.ai, UBA’s Leo using them the most in Nigeria. For businesses, using chatbots could not only free up the time spent dealing with customers directly, but also lead to visitors being better engaged with their websites, for example; chatbots could help to direct them towards the information or products they’re looking for.

Twilio conducted a global study and claimed that 66% of people would prefer to talk to brands on messaging platforms (namely native ones, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp) over any other medium. Also, Sprout conducted another study and the result was that almost 90% of messages that require a response are ignored by brands, with an average wait of 10 hours for those that do get a reply, even though consumers expect a reply within four. This is where chatbots come in.

Conversational marketing or customer service provided by chatbots is an effective way for brands to have an Improved Customer Service, Increased Customer Engagement, Monitoring Customer Data and gaining Insights. Better Lead Generation, Cost Savings.

The amazing thing with Bot development is you don’t have to be big to tap into this trend, with platforms like chatfuel, Microsoft Bot Framework, API.ai, etc. Any facebook user can use these platforms to create a virtual agent.

This is an opportunity for SMEs to increase their sales by making use of the opportunities that comes with Chabots. They need to start using automation bots to automate order, downloads, instantly allocate and fulfill orders, send order to the warehouse for fulfillment and shipping. The opportunities chatbots are bringing are limitless.

How to Improve Your Customer Service With Chatbots. was originally published in Chatbots Life on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.