Unless they cater specifically to an older niche, most brands want to grab the attention of young people. That makes sense too. Young people are tastemakers and the guardians of what’s cool and what isn’t. And, if you grab their attention while they’re still young, there’s a good chance they’ll stay loyal for a very long time. It is no wonder, then, that so many brands are showing an interest in Africa.
As other major population centres age out and face stagnant (or even decreasing) birth rates, Africa remains home to a young and growing population. In fact, as of 2022, around 40% of the population was aged 15 years and younger. Its overall population, meanwhile, currently sits at around 1.4 billion and is expected to grow to 2.5 billion people by 2050. And by 2030, young Africans are expected to constitute 42% of global youth.
But attracting all those young people to your brand is more complex than launching it and hoping they’ll come. You also have to market it actively. And the best way of doing so is through targeted, relevant messages on the digital platforms that most young Africans spend the majority of their time on.
Internet traffic has grown too. In fact, between 2018 and 2022, Africa saw the most rapid growth in international internet bandwidth. While global average bandwidth growth during that period was 28%, Africa saw 44% growth in the same period. Young people are a major driving force behind that growth in internet adoption and traffic. While not an exact proxy for internet connectivity, it’s illuminating that in 2019, sub-Saharan Africa was expected to add more than 160 million mobile subscribers by 2025, driven primarily by the youth population.
With those improvements in connectivity come increased levels of consumer savviness. That means that consumers increasingly want the same kinds of brand experiences as their counterparts in other countries and will actively seek out those experiences.
They clearly see the potential in Africa’s young and increasingly connected population, so shouldn’t you too?
Of course, as much as those platforms have made it as easy as possible to advertise on them, brands can’t simply launch a campaign and hope for the best. They should instead partner with experts who can help ensure that their campaigns are as effective as possible.
Such a partner will have expertise in each of the most important platforms as well as extensive experience in the markets your brand is trying to break into. That on-the-ground knowledge in particular should never be underestimated. It can be the difference between a successful campaign and a total flop.
The right partner will also help you deliver creative excellence at a transparent price, maximising the impact of your digital campaigns.
The brands that get that right stand to see serious and lasting gains.
By James Gachie, Industry Lead at Infobip
Implementing an effective omnichannel communication strategy can provide retailers with a distinct edge in the competitive market, but the move can also present significant challenges for businesses operating within the ever-changing landscape of modern retail.
To overcome these hurdles and unlock the full potential of their omnichannel strategies, retailers should look to partner with the right communication technology specialist, invest in the appropriate technology and continually adapt to shifting customer expectation.
Omnichannel communication refers to a customer-centric approach that allows enterprises to integrate various channels and touchpoints to provide a seamless and consistent experience across all interactions with the customer.
A successful omnichannel communication strategy starts with integrating channels, meaning that a retailer must ensure that all communication channels are interconnected, working together to provide a synchronised experience for the customers. Secondly, it requires personalisation and contextualisation, which entails leveraging customer insights to deliver tailored recommendations and offers. In addition, customer engagements need to be contextualised, meaningful and targeted.
Lastly, an effective omnichannel approach must include aspects of data integration and analytics to guide decision-making regarding ongoing customer engagements. Data collected from various channels and touchpoints should be integrated into a single platform, enabling the organisation to invest wisely in the channels that exhibit the highest growth and yield the best results.
Difficult to achieve
Attaining a comprehensive omnichannel strategy is often difficult to achieve, due to the high technological complexities involved in its implementation, often becoming a major stumbling block for many businesses. For example, integrating multiple communication channels and touchpoints can be technically complex, especially in environments where multiple vendors offers different channels. However, by partnering with the appropriate communication technology partner, organisations can access a unified platform and comprehensive overview for all customer interactions across various channels, thereby simplifying the process and mitigating complexities.
Another common challenge around omnichannel implementation is that of data management and integration. For an omnichannel communication strategy to work, a company must rely on effective data management across various channels. Unfortunately, this is no easy task when coupled with the need to meet data privacy, accuracy and consistency requirements.
To implement an omnichannel communication strategy, a retailer must assess its current systems and infrastructure to identify the gaps and mutations that may hinder a seamless integration. From there, they should deploy a unified commerce platform that will act as a central hub for managing and integrating various channels and touchpoints and cross channel data synchronisation.
By synchronising customer data, organisations can establish a singular, reliable customer database that relies on first-party data to build detailed customer profiles that enables communication that is personalised and contextualised. Integration of customer data from various touchpoints further enables segmentation and customer profiling based on diverse metrics, including gender, geographical location, and age, for example.
Evolving customer expectations
However, retailers must also ensure that they stay ahead of evolving customer expectations and adapt their strategies to deliver consistent and personalised experiences across different channels in their omnichannel communication strategy. This is where personalisation at scale or hyper personalisation comes into play.
By leveraging customer data for segmentation and customer profiling, retailers can deliver a personalised experience and provide product recommendations, promotions and messaging targeted at either individual customers or segments. To achieve this at scale, companies will need to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation, which will not only ensure that the messages reach the right individuals, but also keep profiles updated by constantly tracking customer behaviour.
To successfully implement an omnichannel communication strategy, companies should explore partnerships and collaboration, mainly because building these tools and solutions is not the core business of retailers. At the same time, retailers should also embrace cloud solutions that will allow them to scale, to be flexible and to assimilate integration across their existing solutions.
As the retail landscape moves towards conversational everything – marking, support, experience, and commerce – an experienced partner is key to supporting retailers to deliver personalised customer engagements, implement communication strategies and capitalise on the growth of conversational formats.
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