Nigeria’s leading e-commerce platform, Jumia, has opened up its e-commerce platform to brands and corporate organizations to advertise.
The company’s Head of Growth & Partnerships, Olusegun Martins who made the disclosure recently during an exclusive interview with Marketing Edge, said: “Our platform is one of the most visited in Nigeria and Africa. We are in 12 countries of Africa, and in each country, we serve consumers absolutely everywhere. We are much more than “e-commerce”, we have hotels, flights, restaurants, classifieds portals, and many more platforms, which give us even more data and more ability to target the right audience for brands looking to reach a wider and more targeted audience.”
In 2018, page views on the Jumia website reached over 700 million, but now averaging over 90 million views per month.
“We have bespoke solutions for various needs. We can help brands build awareness, consideration, engagement, sales, even multiple products to tap into. We can segment users in a very unique way based on their real shopping interest at the most granular level. We help brands to target users geographically in the most effective way. We have run very successful campaigns in multiple countries and advertisers who choose Jumia can decide to allocate recurring budgets to our platform,” Martins continued.
Martins further disclosed that Jumia’s digital advertising platform is growing very fast. Every day, more users access Jumia and use it as a source of research, inspiration, and shopping. “No other platform is growing faster,” he said.
Its campaign reporting tools are objective and independent. Jumia is adapting the model of the leading e-commerce platform in the US, Amazon.
“We have an online shopping audience. Amazon Advertising is growing very fast because brands and advertisers see it as a great alternative for other advertising channels, “he added.
Martins informed that the decision by Jumia to veer into the advertising business space arose out of the popular demand by various customers of the company who had long been yearning to have an advertising platform owned by Jumia to expose their services and brands.
According to him, over the last seven years, Jumia had remained one of the top 10 most visible websites in Nigeria, adding that the clamour by customers for an advertising platform from Jumia was on the increase, hence the decision by the company to give it a try this year.
“We decided to open our platform starting from last month (October). There is a huge opportunity for brands to showcase their services and products to our audience and that is why we opened our platform. The way we want the brands to look at it is to think of Jumia as a search engine. The perception is that people come to Jumia to buy only. This is not entirely the case. A large chunk of people that come to Jumia come to make informed decisions; at that point when they are searching, their minds are receptive to whatever communication is available. So, people need to look at Jumia as a search engine,” Martins said.
Throwing further light on who are the target audience for the new advertising platform, the Jumia boss observed that every brand that aims to reach Nigerians was a possible target.
According to him, Jumia has already established a close working relationship with a few strategic agencies who have indicated long term interests in partnering with the company over the new advertising platform.
Martins continued: “We have always made it possible for sellers on Jumia to be able to advertise and all our vendors know this. But over the last couple of years, we have been getting inquiries from banks, insurance companies, telcos and different sectors of brands who don’t necessarily sell on Jumia but are interested in reaching their targets by placing an Ad on our platform.
We want to enable brands to reach out to people we call “quality audience” because the people that are coming to shop on Jumia are not just there to look around. They are at an advanced stage of the purchase funnel. They are in an active mode of purchase and at that point in time, they are receptive to communication.”
