Creating an Online Market for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

One thing the global pandemic has taught us is being flexible and adapting to changes that emerge daily as a result of the disease. Everyone has been affected and small and medium-sized enterprises have also felt the heat of the disease especially during lock-down and cessation of movement.

In a way to caution our women, we are conducting social media marketing training and through the training, these women can incorporate the various social media platforms to market their products and services.

These women are going to create brand exposure and expand their customer reach.

Since it’s not a guarantee that you will create a post online and have sales roll in, we are taking the women through a six-week training to help them build an audience, make sales through posts and drive in traffic to their social media pages.

We are through with our first cycle, a class that had ten women. During the six weeks, the women were engaged in using Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram to sell their products. Among the key areas during the study included; creating brand awareness, which will help create an online community that serves as customers. They also learnt the type of content that will be appealing to their target audience. What works for one business might not work for the other. One business might identify so much with videos and the other identifies with pictures or links.

Planning and when to publish is another key area the women were engaged in.

Social media marketing needs consistency and being ever-present to respond to queries.

This way, you can get future customers since they are sure they will always have your presence online. To ensure a maximum reach posting content that your audience likes at the right timing and frequency comes in handy.

We are almost through with cycle two, a class consisting of another group of ten women so far so good. The women can attest that initially, their social media platforms were only for chatting with friends and online family. They have now created Facebook pages for their business and can make more money. Apart from having a physical shop, they have been able to widen their market reach through trading online.

In our advocacy, in promoting digital literacy among local women the global pandemic has forced us to take a closer look at the gaps and we are actually staring at the new normal, where physical interactions are being replaced by virtual existence and any digital literacy skill is needed now and not some other time.