TheCable

Elo Umeh, Twinpine Founder, a digital marketing firm, says  Nigerians spend 193 minutes on their smartphones daily, adding that businesses must understand this to stay atop.

Umeh said leveraging the digital revolution by tapping into the power of ‘Big Data’ will help businesses stay close and understand their market better, especially in 2017.

He disclosed this while speaking on ‘The Future of Mobile Marketing: Data, Performance and Personalization’ at a forum organized by Twinpine for the integrated marketing communications (IMC) industry in Nigeria.

He spoke on the best approaches to conveying brands to stakeholders, cautioning that due to the present economic recession, companies choosing cost-cutting measures might be negatively impacted with declining value preposition.

“The narratives have always been cost-cutting, but for businesses to be sustainable or defensible in 2017 you can’t continue to cut cost, because you are not going to be competitive in the market,” Umeh said.

The Twinpine position comes on the heels of a report by Gemalto which indicated that 2017 will see mobile advertising spending exceed desktop ad spending for the first time.

Umeh said that a similar report released by Twinpine earlier in the year placed Nigeria ahead as the most mobile telecommunications induced nation, with 76 percent of the internet traffic from mobile platforms.

In the report, “Nigeria 2016 Mobile Trends Report” Twinpine indicated that with “total population 184.6 million (estimated); 74.7m unique mobile users (any type of handset); 40% mobile penetration (unique users vs. population) and 30% smartphone penetration rate, Nigeria is now head of India and South Africa with 65% and 57% internet traffic coming through mobile, respectively”.

From 2011 – 2016, number of smartphone users increased from four million to 15.5 million. The report indicated that Nigerians spend, on average, 131 minutes watching television, 80 minutes on laptop; 193 minutes on smartphone and 39 minutes on tablets, daily.

Twinpine’s report also shows share of desktop traffic decreased from 57 percent in 2011 to 18 percent in 2015 and mobile share of traffic increased from 42 percent in 2011 to 79 percent in 2015.

Predicting the Nigeria’s IMC space in 2017, he said, “from this report, I think, it will pay off to any company that focuses on leveraging data and engages itself in smarter marketing”.

“I think there will be more brands looking into their data offerings as main strategy. We have local brands that will begin to collect data about their users and request more targeting and ensure their budgets are well spent.

“I think data is going to be the central thing going forward. So, individuals and brands need education in this direction to achieve better results through smarter marketing. Therefore, Twinpine’s position is to work with such brands to understand the identity of the people who own smart devices.

“This year, probably, due to the recession, the narratives have always been cost-cutting, but for businesses to be sustainable or defensible you can’t continue to cut cost, rather focus on getting more value from your spend”.

He however decried that skills gap remains big issue in the industry.

“We don’t want to keep going outside Africa to execute our projects, the reason we are nurturing talents and building expertise locally,” he added.