If you do not know that the Nigerian market is totally different from the western market, then you might be building a business that will fail on day one. While it is good to watch videos from successful business owners around the world, prominent marketers around the globe, it is also very wise to learn from locals. I was a victim of this for a very long time and I learnt from painful experiences. I alienated myself from the African professionals that I took everything that has been taught by westerners hook line and sinker.
This post is to help you as a Wantpreneur and even for entrepreneurs reading this as well. You might have been having setback on sales, progress and growth and you know for sure that your strategies are right. Well, it might be but maybe not for this market. Few things to note;
- Freemium Model doesn’t work effectively here: In Nigeria, we’re very used to anything that is free. If your business model is built just like that of Netflix where you put a free package and you expect that with time they’d see a need to upgrade to premium packages, I’m sorry to let you know that you may fizzle out waiting. A typical example is Medium Blogsite. It started out as free then placed a three-free-articles-monthly offer then you need to subscribe to get exclusive contents, a lot of Nigerians with time will abandon your products. I once had a friend complain about why Medium will have to use such strategy and had to quit reading on Medium.
Another good example are apps that give us free features then tell us to upgrade to enjoy better features. Most times, we get comfortable with the archaic features because we don’t want to upgrade. A good example is the jotterpad app I’m using, I can type and edit but to upgrade to more features for a certain amount looks stressful to me.
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- Aggressive system of marketing works here: If you’ve read Seth Godin, on marketing, you’d want to totally buy the idea of FREE which I did. The FREE strategy works well in the western world where value is appreciated but you will have issues here because Nigerians will want to take you for granted if you’re not smart about it. You will end up being used and not valued in the long run. There’s a way to strike a balance between offering services for free and letting people know your worth, the earlier you figure this out, the safer it is for you.
- Services works better than products: The only products that work without having glitches are products that we all cannot survive without. Aside from that, we take products as second option. Service company’s seem to have an upper edge because people are quite aware that they cannot get some tasks done without paying for services. If you can strategize on how you can convert your product offering into a service offering without altering any other profession, the better it will be for you.
With these few tips, I expect that you stay safe in the Nigerian market and not get consumed by the anomalies in the behaviour of the market, understanding that buying behavior here is unpredictable and varies.