SMEs yet to connect with consumers in digital space says Thorpe

Managing Partner, Market Space, Mr. George Thorpe has decried the inability of corporate companies as well as Small & Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to adequately connect with their consumers in transacting their businesses using digital marketing.

Mr. Thorpe made the remark while delivering a paper titled: ”Brand Positioning in a Digital Age: Challenges In a Developing Market” at the Marketing Edge Brands and Advertising Excellence Award & Annual Summit 2016 held at the Civil Centre, Lagos.

He stressed that the world is going digitalized especially as more new technologies are unfolding on a daily bases adding that there is an exponential growth in the adoption of mobile devices with access to the internet, as about 85million GSM subscribers use the internet from their mobile devices in Nigeria.
To him, there is a marginal growth of consumers in the digital space compare to the previous years but added that many organizations were grappling with the difficulties of meeting the consumers’ demand in a digital market.

”In Nigeria today, the larger more established corporate organizations are struggling with the challenges of restricting their marketing organizations to fully capitalize on today’s opportunities. The vast majority of SMEs have yet to connect with the potential benefits of digital marketing that comes with greater brand equity, increases sales, better customer awareness all at a drastically lower cost,” Thorpe said.

According to the Market Space boss, both corporate organizations and SMEs have failed to commit adequate resources in their personnel, training, developing new content, tracking and follow through in engaging consumers in a digital space, affirming that engaging consumers directly was falling sharply for many organizations in the digital marketing world in Nigeria.

He pointed out that the migration from the traditional market to a digital one has led to the proliferation of digital marketing agencies stressing that the market space was also bedeviled with a myriad of problems not limited to market research, strategy focus, planning and execution of discipline of marketing theory and practice.

“Digital marketing is the use of digital channels-corporate websites, online communities, internet search and display advertising, mobile technologies, online videos and social media such as Facebook, Twitter to reach consumers and build stronger relationships. But most companies have failed to adequately do profiting transactions in a digital space” Mr. Thorpe stressed.