MTN Ghana, as part of its “Y’ello Care” Staff Volunteering programme, on Thursday trained young entrepreneurs on how to use digitisation and social networks to grow their businesses.

The training programme aimed at enlightening start-ups to know the advantages of using social networks such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, and LinkedIn to communicate and serve customers.

Mr Dario Bianchi, a Digital Consultant with MTN Ghana, who made a presentation on Digital Marketing, said digitisation helped businessmen and women to talk to their customers whenever necessary.

Utilising digital tools in businesses, he said, helped business actors to know exactly how much was the return on market investment, test an idea, and get feedback from hundreds of customers in less than 48 hours.

He noted that it could also help businesses to measure any step of the customer’s journey such as his or her loyalty, awareness and consideration of a product, and how much he or she was willing to advocate for a brand.

“All companies’ goal is to make their customers advocate or recommend their products to others and it doesn’t matter what you do or how much your budget is, you need to know who your customer is,” he said.

“If you know your customers, it is easier to find sustainable ways to drive growth.”

Currently, the country has 10.32 million active internet users making 35 per cent of the entire population, he said.

The total number of active mobile internet users in the country is 9.37 million, which constituted a percentage of 31 per cent of the total population, and that explained why businesses needed to reach many of their customers through the internet to drive growth, Mr Bianchi said.

He advised companies to conduct simple surveys to know how customers felt about their products as well as the uniqueness of their services, which other companies lacked.

The Digital Consultant advised businesses to always satisfy the customer, welcome change, deliver frequently, work together, trust and support each other in the organisation to drive growth.

Usually, businesses focused on introducing new products, thereby, ignoring the quality of existing products, which was a threat to the growth of the organization, he said.

He, therefore, called on the entrepreneurs to pay attention to improving their existing products in order not to lose their loyal customers.

“You can’t ignore complaints from your customers. You need to manage negative comments well to get positive feedback.”