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HMO can save your life. I am a living witness.

I am a BP and diabetes patient. I have managed to put my diabetes under control without medications for over 6yrs. My BP is well managed with my BP medications and exercise. However, since January this year I observe my BP keep running very much high. I keep increasing my BP medications to almost 5 times my usual dosage it still remained high. I could not go to the hospital because I had no cash. Consequently, I was doing self medication, until I had an old school secondary school mate that died of stroke just two weeks after we met.

I decided to go to the hospital to see a doctor for my condition when I remembered that my company at VMFARMPRO had enrolled me with an HMO. With HMO I am entitled to visit the hospital to get treatment and get my medications without paying any additional fee subject to total cost and my class of enrollment.

After seeing the general physician and no improvement after two weeks of treatment, he referred me to see a specialist, a cardiologist. The cardiologist referred me to undergo some tests. After the tests it was discovered that I had a blocked artery and I needed to under a heart surgery to prevent sudden death from heart failure. The cost of the surgery was beyond the scope of my HMO enrollment class. Consequently I had to rally family and friends to raise the funds to under the surgery. Within two weeks of the the test results I successfully underwent the surgery. My BP is now under control and responding to my normal medications.

If I had not gone to the hospital because of being enrolled with a HMO I would have continued self medication and probably passed on just like my late friend.

With HMO you can visit hospital at anytime not having cash will no longer be a constraint. I get my medications monthly from the HMO.

Because of my condition, having a pre- existing conditions (diabetes and hypertension) I took additional HMO. I pay N11,500 monthly, but I get medications worth N25,000 monthly.

HMO makes health care more affordable and accessible. There are different categories. For people without pre-existing conditions N2,000 to N3,500 monthly can get you covered. You can attend hospital anywhere in the country anytime you need to. I started my treatment in Lagos and did my surgery in Lagos, but now I am getting treatment in Port Harcourt with the same HMOs. Sickness does not give anybody any notice. It is better to plan for it than to be taken unaware with no cash. With HMO you don’t pay for card and consultation fee when you visit the hospital. Also some of the routine medical tests are covered. Many families are embracing HMO and I think you should too.

Finally started IG live/Stories? Here are some things to try:

Show how it’s done
Get personal and authentic. That’s the beauty of small businesses! Use the casual format to show your products, how it’s done and let your followers experience your amazing business.

Questions and Answer sessions
Use the questions sticker to run an anonymous Q&A with your audience, or to gain customer feedback.

Polls
Similarly, encourage follower interaction and feedback with the poll sticker.
Story takeover. You can have polls on anything.

Collaborate with an influencer, or another brand with the same audience as you, and try out a Story takeover.

Tag locations
Get your Story featured on a location Story by using the location sticker! This will increase your reach and could result in more followers.

Go live
Plan a livestream via Instagram Story – whether it’s an event, a Q&A, a sneak preview or something else – Live Stories are naturally featured higher up in Story feed.

Our last blog post spoke about how you can leverage resharing customer posts to grow your account but how? Over the week, we will talk about this.
Post during active periods
The faster an Instagram post gets likes, comments and shares, the higher the algorithm ranks it, revealing it to more of your audience and giving it an organic boost. The easiest way to ensure fast engagement on your posts is to publish them when the majority of your followers are online and actively using Instagram.

Plan posts around social media holidays/events
A tip to increase the reach of your Instagram posts is to use hashtags that will be getting a lot of attention in a short space of time, such as global events (#worldcupl), social media holidays (#InternationalWomenDay), and time-limited trends (#ThrowbackThursday) etc
Get to Reposting and now!

We are back this week with more bite sized tips to leverage your socials. This time we focus on Instagram. Why Instagram? Well, because we are in the business of selling things people ‘eat’ this means that you have to show your consumers what they are missing out on- your awesome products!

Reshare content from your followers
Instagram is about community, and the best performing types of posts on the app is user-generated content i.e posts from users.
This is when brands share photos taken by a user on their business profile, and is a great opportunity to acknowledge customers while spreading brand awareness.
It has a higher user conversion rate, proving its value for businesses. It really is a win-win for consumers and brands.
Some of the rewards you stand to gain:
Community building
By acknowledging and encouraging customer’s posts about your business, you’re interacting with your audience and building a community!

Customer loyalty
Your customers love you more and this builds a sense of community

Free content
Your customers are basically doing your social media marketing for you!
Make resharing customer posts a major part of your social media marketing strategy and watch your IG account reach more eyes.

Just as it’s important to outline why you’re using social media marketing, you also need to clarify who you’re trying to reach. This will help to determine which social channels will be most effective for your objectives.
For example, 72% of teenagers are on Instagram, whereas the majority of Twitter users are aged 18-29. Depending who your target demographic is, you might decide to prioritise a certain social network over another.
Clearly outline your audience demographic, and go into as much detail as possible: age, gender, location, hobbies, interests, challenges they face, where they hang out, what other brands they like – the lists can go on and on.
Determining these characteristics will ensure you use the best social networks to reach them, and also cater your content to best reach your objectives! See how it all links up?

Do some market research
Analysing your competitors’ social media marketing activity is an important and valuable part of your strategy. After all, their target audience is your target audience. Spend some time researching:
Which platforms they’re most active on
What kind of content they publish
How much average engagement they get
What hashtags they use
What tone of voice they use
What kind of conversations they have with their audience
What call to action they promote
The list goes on…
Taking the time to do this social media marketing analysis will put you in a good position to decide which platforms are best for your audience and objectives, as well as help you get to know your target demographics’ behaviour on social media.

Now we’ve covered a brief overview of what social media marketing is and how it can benefit your business, let’s move on to the practical bit.
Before diving straight in with a few tweets and Instagram posts, all social media marketing activity needs to start with a strategy.
NB. If you’re already well set up with social media marketing and have your strategy in place, you can probably skip this part and head straight to our top tips for 2022!
#1 Have clear objectives
As discussed, you can’t plan which channels to use or what kind of content to produce until you determine your business objectives. i.e what do you want your social media marketing to achieve?
Deciding these targets in advance will:
Save time and resources
Ensure you’re not producing content ‘for the sake of it’
Help you establish the key metrics to track success
These objectives will naturally vary business to business, which is why there isn’t a blanket answer for ‘what works best’.
Write a list of everything you want out of your social media marketing activity, and then prioritise them in terms of value for your business. Once you have your core objectives decided, you can proceed with the next steps

Key approach to leveraging social media platforms is to have specific business outcomes for each social media marketing campaign (such as sales, traffic etc) which depend on what objectives you set in the first place.
Some of the other benefits that come from active brands on social media, are:
Discoverability
If you’re posting content on a number of social media channels that’s tailored to your target demographic, you’re naturally likely to be discovered by new potential customers.
Genuine conversations with customers
It’s no wonder so many companies use Twitter for customer support, or run Q&As on Instagram Stories. Social media marketing offers a personal and informal way to get to know your audience.
Recruitment opportunities
Social media marketing makes it easier than ever to share company culture and the people behind a business with the world. This not only increases customer loyalty but also helps when it comes to hiring brilliant new people!
Community Building
No matter your industry, social media marketing helps to connect you with your target audience and other relevant businesses.
Think of it as an opportunity to churn out more creative ways to enhance your social media marketing and hit those KPIs. The rewards are clear and worth it

There are so many social media platforms that finding out which generates the best results for specific business objectives, and the content published will also vary depending on these factors.
Take a look at a video on Facebook, it is unlikely to be more effective for driving business audience traffic than an article on LinkedIn, and so on. Good thing is that you can use the different social platform’s purposes for different kinds of marketing campaigns, making sure the content is highly tailored for that platform and audience.

In our next post, we will look at the benefits of leveraging social media.