Broadcasting
Leveraging Search Intelligence for Year-End Product Positioning
By Reuben Kalu
As the year draws to a close, businesses face a critical period where consumer spending typically surges. This presents an exceptional opportunity to position your products and services for maximum visibility and sales. However, achieving the best positioning requires a well-thought-out strategy that leverages search intelligence, consumer behavior insights, and market trends.
In this article, we’ll explore the most effective strategies to enhance your product and service positioning as we approach the end of the year.
Understanding Search Intelligence and Its Importance
Search intelligence involves the use of data from search engines and online behavior to gain insights into consumer intent, preferences, and trends. By understanding what consumers are searching for, when they are searching, and how they are interacting with content, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies to meet consumer needs more effectively.
As we approach the end of the year, leveraging search intelligence becomes even more crucial. Consumers are actively searching for holiday gifts, seasonal deals, and solutions to year-end problems. Understanding these search patterns allows you to position your products and services where they are most likely to be seen and purchased.
- Leverage Seasonal Trends and Keywords
The end of the year is marked by several key events such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. Consumers’ search behavior shifts dramatically during these periods, focusing on deals, gift ideas, and festive essentials. To capitalize on this, your strategy should include:
- Identifying Relevant Keywords: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to identify trending keywords related to the season and your products. Focus on long-tail keywords that capture specific consumer intent, such as “best holiday gifts for men” or “affordable New Year’s party supplies.”
- Creating Targeted Content: Develop content that addresses the specific needs and interests of your audience during the holiday season. This could include blog posts, gift guides, holiday-themed product pages, and promotional emails. Ensure your content is optimized with the identified keywords to improve search engine rankings.
- Updating Product Descriptions: Tailor your product descriptions to highlight their relevance to the season. For example, if you’re selling watches, emphasize how they make great gifts or how they complement festive outfits.
- Enhance Your Visual Appeal with Seasonal Imagery
Visuals play a significant role in capturing consumer attention and conveying the value of your products. As the year-end approaches, updating your visual content to reflect the festive season can make your products more appealing. Consider the following:
- Seasonal Product Photography: Refresh your product images to include seasonal elements such as holiday decorations, winter settings, or festive colors. This helps your products resonate with the emotions and themes of the season.
- Thematic Website Banners: Update your website banners to feature holiday promotions, countdowns to special sales events, or seasonal greetings. This not only enhances the user experience but also reinforces your positioning as a go-to destination for holiday shopping.
- Video Content: Create short, engaging videos that showcase your products in festive settings or demonstrate their use during holiday activities. Video content is highly shareable and can boost your brand’s visibility on social media and search engines.
- Optimize for Mobile and Voice Search
With the increase in mobile and voice search usage, especially during the holiday season, it’s essential to ensure your online presence is optimized for these platforms. Consider the following strategies:
- Mobile Optimization: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, with fast loading times, easy navigation, and responsive design. A seamless mobile experience is crucial as more consumers shop on their smartphones during the holiday rush.
- Voice Search Optimization: As more people use voice-activated devices to search for products and services, optimize your content for voice search. This includes using natural language, answering common questions, and incorporating conversational keywords.
- Local SEO: Many holiday shoppers look for local businesses to support or need last-minute gifts. Optimize your Google My Business listing with updated hours, contact information, and holiday-specific promotions to capture local searches.
- Implement Strategic Promotions and Discounts
End-of-year sales events are synonymous with discounts and promotions. However, to stand out in a crowded market, your promotions must be strategic and compelling. Here’s how:
- Exclusive Offers: Create limited-time offers or exclusive deals for loyal customers or email subscribers. This not only drives urgency but also fosters customer loyalty.
- Bundle Deals: Encourage higher spending by offering bundled deals where customers can purchase multiple products at a discounted rate. This is particularly effective for complementary products.
- Free Shipping and Returns: Offering free shipping, especially during the holiday season, can be a powerful incentive for consumers. Ensure your shipping policies are clearly communicated and easy to understand.
- Leverage Social Media and Influencer Marketing
Social media platforms become a hub of activity during the holiday season, with users sharing gift ideas, holiday plans, and shopping experiences. To tap into this, your strategy should include:
- Holiday Campaigns: Launch holiday-themed campaigns on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. Use festive hashtags, run giveaways, and encourage user-generated content to increase engagement.
- Influencer Partnerships: Collaborate with influencers who align with your brand to promote your products. Influencers can create authentic content that resonates with their followers, driving awareness and sales.
- Social Commerce: Utilize features like Instagram Shopping or Facebook Shops to enable direct purchases through social media platforms. This streamlines the shopping experience and captures impulse buyers.
- Create a Sense of Urgency and Scarcity
Scarcity and urgency are powerful psychological triggers that can drive consumer action. As the year-end approaches, leverage these tactics to boost conversions:
- Countdown Timers: Use countdown timers on your website or in your emails to indicate the time left for special promotions or sales. This creates a sense of urgency, encouraging customers to act quickly.
- Limited-Edition Products: Introduce limited-edition products or holiday-specific versions of your existing offerings. The exclusivity of these items can drive demand and increase sales.
- Low Stock Alerts: Display low stock alerts on product pages to create a sense of scarcity. This can prompt customers to purchase before the item runs out.
- Invest in Paid Advertising
Paid advertising can significantly boost your visibility and drive traffic to your website during the competitive holiday season. Consider these approaches:
- PPC Campaigns: Run targeted Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns on Google Ads and Bing Ads, focusing on high-intent keywords relevant to the holiday season. This can help you capture search traffic from users actively looking to make purchases.
- Social Media Ads: Invest in social media ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Use demographic and interest-based targeting to reach your ideal audience with holiday-specific ads.
- Retargeting Campaigns: Implement retargeting campaigns to re-engage visitors who have shown interest in your products but haven’t made a purchase. Retargeting ads can remind them of what they’re missing and encourage them to return to your site.
- Utilize Email Marketing to Engage and Convert
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for driving conversions, especially during the holiday season. Here’s how to make the most of it:
- Holiday-Themed Newsletters: Send out holiday-themed newsletters that highlight your best products, exclusive deals, and gift guides. Use catchy subject lines and visually appealing content to capture attention.
- Personalized Recommendations: Leverage data from previous purchases or browsing behavior to send personalized product recommendations. This makes your emails more relevant and increases the likelihood of conversions.
- Abandoned Cart Reminders: Send timely reminders to customers who have left items in their carts without completing the purchase. Offer incentives like discounts or free shipping to encourage them to finalize their purchase.
- Measure and Optimize Your Strategy
As you implement these strategies, it’s crucial to continually measure their effectiveness and optimize your approach. Use the following metrics to gauge success:
- Conversion Rate: Track the percentage of visitors who make a purchase. If conversion rates are low, consider adjusting your landing pages, offers, or checkout process.
- Traffic Sources: Analyze where your traffic is coming from (e.g., organic search, social media, paid ads) and invest more in the channels that are driving the most sales.
- Customer Feedback: Gather feedback from customers about their shopping experience. Use this information to make improvements and address any pain points.
- ROI on Marketing Spend: Calculate the return on investment (ROI) for your marketing campaigns to ensure you’re spending effectively. If certain campaigns aren’t delivering results, reallocate your budget to more profitable channels.
Conclusion
The end of the year presents a unique opportunity to drive significant sales and position your products and services at the forefront of consumer minds. By leveraging search intelligence, optimizing your online presence, and implementing strategic marketing tactics, you can enhance your visibility and capture the attention of holiday shoppers.
Remember, the key to success lies in understanding your audience, staying agile, and continuously optimizing your strategy based on performance data. With the right approach, you can end the year on a high note, driving both sales and brand loyalty that will carry into the new year.
Luft Pay TV has officially launched in Nigeria’s Pay TV landscape, bringing a fresh perspective to home entertainment.
Officials of Luft Pay TV at the launch
The brand’s dynamic debut in Lagos recenlty, drew media executives, content creators, industry stakeholders, and entertainment enthusiasts.
Yemi Adebowale, head of Corporate Communications and Media at Luft Pay TV, emphasised the brand’s mission to simplify entertainment and provide real value. “Luft Pay TV is more than just another player in the market.
He said, “We’re here to simplify entertainment, eliminate confusion around billing, and provide real value with high-definition content that reflects both global quality and local identity.
Luft Pay TV’s standout feature is its all-in-one subscription model, offering over 35 premium channels for ₦7,500 per month.
The channel lineup includes Sports, Live sports action, Movies: Nollywood and Hollywood films as well as Kids’ Programming, Documentaries, Music and Lifestyle content.
“Decoder and STB Kit Prices: Decoder: ₦25,000 – Complete STB kit with accessories: ₦35,000. As a proudly Nigerian brand, Luft Pay TV is committed to promoting local storytelling through partnerships with indigenous content creators.
“This initiative aims to project African stories globally and provide an inclusive, affordable, and proudly African entertainment experience to Nigerians everywhere.”
Luft Pay TV has commenced nationwide installations across the six geopolitical zones, supported by a growing distribution network and robust customer service infrastructure.
This ensures a seamless user experience for subscribers
With its innovative approach and commitment to Nigerian talent, Luft Pay TV is poised to revolutionise the television experience in Nigeria.
By Aniekan Ezekiel
What happens when legacy meets preparedness? What results from such a combination? Let us not be in a hurry to put forward any answers yet. Instead, let us consider first the opposite situation: When legacy meets unpreparedness.
The world abounds in examples of this distressing situation. A dynasty that has built wealth from generation to generation, with its illustrious heirs providing generational leadership, finds itself in a strange phase where an ill-prepared heir takes over the reins and in that same generation, not the next, wipes out the entire family fortune built over several generations.
We see the same thing with nations. History is replete with examples of great nations built by great leaders, which slid into oblivion when they were hit by arguably the greatest misfortune that ever befalls humanity – bad leadership. It is the reason American author and leadership expert John Maxwell asserts, “Everything rises and falls with leadership.”
As with nations, so with organisations. We see organisations that have thrived for decades and over several generations, get a new leader who is not prepared for such leadership, and the leader pushes the organisation to the brink of collapse.
Contrast this picture with the situation at Nigeria’s most enduring corporate organisation with the most amazing legacies of firsts, First Bank of Nigeria Limited, which witnessed a leadership transition about a year ago. Faced with a number of quality options in and outside the then management team, the decision-makers at the bank and its parent company FBNHoldings, now First HoldCo Plc, had to be clear-minded about who could become the new Chief Executive Officer of FirstBank Group.
Equally important as the need for continuity was the non-negotiable requirement for capacity to manage the ship of the 130-years-plus institution to sustain its enviable legacies and consolidate the gains made in recent years. The search was for someone with a steady head and hands (talk of risk control and mitigation), in addition to an excellent track record of sterling performance and achievements.
Fortunately, fate was on their side. They did not have to look outside. Right there before them was someone who understood all kinds of risks and how to control and mitigate them. He had been with FirstBank since 2016 when he joined as Group Executive / Chief Risk Officer. Then in January 2022 he was elevated to Executive Director / Chief Risk Officer and Executive Compliance Officer.
This man has given nearly three decades of his working life to the banking and financial services industry. He has under his belt a rich tapestry of cross-functional experience in credit risk management, financial planning and control, credit and marketing, and trade. His cross-functional exposure also includes corporate and commercial banking, agriculture financing, oil and gas, transportation, including aviation and shipping, and project financing
Meet Olusegun Alebiosu, the man history had prepared and the one decision-makers chose among the quality options. He was appointed substantive Chief Executive Officer of FirstBank Group in June 2024, having acted in that capacity since April 2024 when the former CEO left.
Determined to build on the bank’s legacies while navigating the ever-changing landscape of the financial services industry, Alebiosu has shown unwavering commitment to lead the bank through a transformative period that places emphasis on strategic consolidation, technological advancement and market expansion.
Alebiosu’s approach to sustaining the legacies of firsts at FirstBank, which has been at the vanguard of accelerating Nigeria’s digital payments as the first bank to issue over 13 million cards to customers, draws from his vast professional experience which began with Oceanic Bank Plc, now Ecobank Plc, in 1991. Between then and joining FirstBank in 2016, he had worked at Coronation Merchant Bank as Chief Risk Officer, at African Development Bank Group as Chief Credit Risk Officer and at United Bank for Africa as Group Head, Credit Policy and Deputy Chief Credit Risk Officer.
Under one year of his appointment as substantive CEO of FirstBank, Alebiosu’s strategic consolidation efforts have demonstrated that he is a worthy successor, not an ill-prepared or unprepared one, proving the decision-makers right. Understanding the critical role of its human capital in sustaining the bank’s legacies, Alebiosu has invested himself and the bank’s resources in promoting staff welfare.
A comprehensive review of the bank’s compensation structure was undertaken to position it within the 75th percentile of the industry, making the bank more retentive of, and attractive to, the best talents. The highest number of staff promotions across various grades in the last five years has happened under Alebiosu’s watch, with 1,654 employees being elevated in one single promotion cycle.
Under his leadership, over 2,186 new hires have been recruited across key functions and subsidiaries, with a large number of them deployed to the sales function to ensure that retail customers are adequately served. Staff are now more engaged based on the high employee engagement score of 86% achieved in the April 2025 WorkBuzz survey, indicating remarkable progress in the bank’s multi-pronged efforts to promote a positive and inclusive workplace culture.
This drive to reinforce a culture of inclusion and recognition has been accentuated by the launch of a group-wide culture transformation initiative with the goal of embedding the core values of integrity, excellence and innovation. It has also been strengthened by a renewed focus on inclusion, collaboration and high performance. Also contributing was the staging of a FirstBank Employee Appreciation Day 2025 featuring, among others, a personalised appreciation video message from the CEO to all employees across the group throughout Africa and beyond. The inclusion message is further boosted by the launch of the inaugural edition of the bank’s pioneering initiative, Mandarin Language School, to bolster the bank’s expansion in the Asian market.
Expansion is a critical plank in FirstBank’s new strategic planning horizon, under Alebiosu’s leadership. Taking off this 2025, the plan seeks to reinforce the bank’s market dominance across all operational regions and it includes deliberate expansion into new markets within and outside Africa.
Beyond geographical and horizontal expansion, Alebiosu’s plan has also targeted a skyward expansion. Or how else does one describe the groundbreaking ceremony in March 2025 for the bank’s new green-certified, 44-storey iconic head office building in Eko Atlantic City, Lagos State?
Alebiosu is also prioritising the acceleration of process automation in recognition of the importance of digital transformation. It is a massive push for technological advancement that includes adopting robotics technology and artificial intelligence at scale, to give the bank an unassailable competitive advantage among its peers in the industry.
The bank has deployed digital tools to enhance seamless account opening and optimised backend systems and customer service delivery. Two additional Digital Experience Centres (DXCs) have been launched – one at Lekki Admiralty Way, Lagos State and the other at its UNN branch, Nsukka, Enugu State. Also, the bank’s agent network has expanded to over 280,000, a 50,000 increase from the 230,000 agents it had in 2023.
As expected, shareholders, among other stakeholders, have been observing the strides the bank has been making under Alebiosu’s leadership, with a keen eye on the numbers. Fortunately, again, the bank’s results for the financial year ended December 2024 speak volumes, with after-tax profit of its parent company rising to the highest point it has reached in the last 12 years, according to the company’s latest financial statement.
In recognition of his achievements within such a short period and his exemplary leadership, Alebiosu was honoured at the World Business Outlook Awards as “Banking CEO of the Year – Nigeria 2025”. He has also been honoured with the “Special African Banking Leadership Award” by African Leadership Magazine. This was in 2024.
The story of Alebiosu’s leadership at FirstBank has clearly been one of preparedness meeting legacy. Working with the board and management team, he has consistently sustained the bank’s legacies and also consolidated its recent gains in ways that will ensure the gains keep compounding. FirstBank, more than ever before, is poised for greater intra- and intercontinental growth and impact in the years ahead.
South Africa’s competition authority announced Wednesday it had approved the buyout of Africa’s largest pay TV enterprise MultiChoice by France’s Canal+, which wants to expand its footprint on the continent.
The merger, which has been in the works for nearly a year, needs the final go-ahead from the commission’s Competition Tribunal, it said in a statement.
Canal+ holds around 45 percent of MultiChoice’s shares and offered last year to acquire the remainder for 125 rand (6.16 euro) per share.
Canal+ is present in 25 African countries through 16 subsidiaries and has eight million subscribers, according to the French group.
MultiChoice operates in 50 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and has 19.3 million subscribers, it said.
It includes Africa’s premier sports broadcaster, SuperSport, and the DStv satellite television service.
“This is a major step forward in our ambition to create a global media and entertainment company with Africa at its heart,” Canal+ CEO Maxime Saada said in a statement.
The commission said its approval of the merger was subject to public-interest conditions worth about 26 billion rand over three years, including increasing the shareholding of people disadvantaged under South Africa’s white-minority apartheid regime.
It will also maintain the MultiChoice headquarters in South Africa.
A date for the Tribunal’s decision on the merger has not been announced but Canal+ said it was aiming for the deal to be completed by early October.
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