An interesting piece was done by White African on interactive marketing in Africa. This came about after a conversation he had with both Rob Stokes of Quirk Marketing and I. Since then I have been working at developing a blog conversation covering our experiences in Africa. Our aim is to get African corporations to start engaging their potential online audience through better knowledge of the opportunities that exist.

Granted, only 5.6% of the African continent is online. Africa is the second fastest growing market in terms of connectivity at 1,100%. When most African corporations think of the web, they don’t see the potential markets this space holds for them. There are two very important aspects of online marketing that I point out to any potential customer looking at the reach an online market:

1. The web allows a company to reach Africans in the Diaspora effectively
2. Within Africa, the greatest concentration of online traffic is based on specific cities within a country and amongst the middle and upper class

Diaspora Africans
I once talked to an entrepreneur who wanted to reach Africans in the Diaspora. I told her that the biggest connection an African has with the continent whenever they are living in Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, Asia or Oceania is online. This is the ready access we all have when we think of Africa. We can read the news, find out which broadcasters have new content, connect with family and friends and keep abreast with conversation regarding Africa or our specific countries.

The Diaspora is a ready market for any product that can be sold or delivered online. Key hurdles often times are based on logistics or payment systems. Most African companies are either restricted within their corporate processes or international procedures and laws that place hurdles in their way of quickly utilizing available opportunities.

As is the case with most business models, success online depends on having the right strategy, knowing where and how to get your audience and figuring out a way to efficiently deliver on your brand promise. The web provides most corporations with an impressive reach into new markets either locally or globally. Africans in the Diaspora are already used to online shopping and have proven to be a constant source of remittances to their respective countries. Companies that utilize the opportunities a Diaspora market offers will be in a good position to reap great benefits.

An Urban Online Audience in Africa
So far, the web is an extremely urban affair within Africa. For instance, In Kenya 80% an internet study by the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) in 2006 found that the capital city Nairobi had 80% of all internet customers followed by Coast province with 9%. Kenya has 3 million internet subscribers as of 2008.

Kenya Internet Subscribers by Province

Source: CCK (Internet Market Study)

Nairobi Province’s population is estimated at around 3 million unique machines by Wikipedia. 80% of 3 million internet subscribers equal 2.4 million people*.

This is an extremely high reach for any company looking to sell its products within the urban areas of Nairobi and Mombasa which is within the Coast Province. When a company looks at its marketing targets and the audience they seek to reach, online marketing provides the right reach for them within key specific sectors. While the web is not the right platform for marketing to a rural or lower class audience, it is very effective in selling goods and services to middle and upper classes within any African country.

*The last study done by CCK was in 2006 when Kenya had around 1 million internet subscribers. The number of internet penetration within other parts of Kenya has grown but Nairobi still accounts for the lion’s share.

Erik Hersman talks with Joshua Wanyama, Co-Founder, Pamoja Media.

White African writes, “Joshua Wanyama found himself in a bind. He had just moved back to Kenya after growing a successful web firm in the US.

Now he wanted to put Pamoja Media on the map in Africa, and he realized quite quickly that there was a major knowledge-gap in the interactive marketing space. How could he sell the connections that his ad network gave him if the very people he was selling to didn’t have an online strategy at all?

This realization caused him to change his strategic direction of the Kenyan operations to gain a customers. He changed it from being just about his ad network, and added on 5 more areas of expertise that would really give his clients positive returns:

• Interactive strategy – how to scale a company’s operations and marketing online
• Creative Development – Interactive ads, landing pages, enewsletters & micro sites
• Placement – We run ads on the Pamoja Media Network, Yahoo, Google and Facebook network of sites
• Social Media Marketing – This works for clients seeking long term social engagement with customers. We handle blogging, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and other accounts for such clients
• Online PR – We also handle online PR for companies seeking to grow their reputations outside of advertising African Market online”