By Lucas Ajanaku
The Founder Legit Vendors Nigeria, Joy Eghebi, has appealed to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to take advantage of both online and offline medium of doing businesses in effort to enhance their businesses and make more sales.
She spoke at the firm’s first end of the year party/ annual trade fair, held at The Pearl Event Place in Lekki Phase 1, Lagos State.
Tagged, a shopping experience for everyone in retail businesses, the event brought together over 50 SMEs for the one day programme. Prizes, including generator, gas cooker, dresses, smart watches and braid wigs among others were won.
Eghebi, who is also the Chief Executive Officer of Jacbell Media, said SMEs have gone beyond social media.
“Many SMEs uses social media to market their products and services but they must know that marketing has gone beyond social media to working on offline presence as well.
SMEs have to work on both offline and online presence. Social media platforms are temporary just like Black Berry Messenger came and has gone.
Anything can happen to the digital space, the page may be hacked after having millions of people, but, with offline presence you are covered and your contacts remain with you.”
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She urged SMEs not to be fully dependent on online platforms of sales alone. “As you are working on your social media online presence, you should also work on your offline presence as well.
Marry both of them together and push your business both ways. This is what Legit Vendors Nigeria is all about and that is the essence of this trade fair.
“When people see your business face to face, you and your brand name is registered in their memory, they know you personally, you have each other’s contact, they have personal contact with you and the relationship is built.
So what they see about you on the social media platform becomes real and visible, such that when the digital space is not there, you have your offline presence to fall back on.”
She added that SMEs in Nigeria should always maximise any offline visibility opportunity they come across. ”Many SMEs are reluctant and not ready to push themselves; they don’t want to do anything again to promote their business because they already have somebody pushing it online for them. You should also push your business yourself in all the ways you can because no one can carry your brand the way will do.”
She urged government to help SMEs thrive in Nigeria by creating innovative platforms and trade fair for them. “The trade fair government has is not for SMEs, they target big business and that is why the slots are expensive, but SMEs needs more events like this for them to thrive.”
She explained that those who won prices emerged having shopped up to 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 naira or more. “We did raffle draw and the winners emerged.”
She said: “Legit Vendors Nigeria is a community that occupies entrepreneurs and we have over 7000 members. We decided to add trade fair to our end of the year party to enable our vendors sell out their goods as the year ends and it will be an annual event. I am a digital marketer and we provide digital marketing solutions for SMEs,” she said.
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