6 Things that Hinder Innovation in Ghana

I wrote this article listing 6 things that hinder innovation in Ghana. As part of an effort to drive traffic to my new website, I will like you to visit the link below to read the full article. Thanks.

http://opinionghana.com/categories/business/18485-6-things-that-hinder-innovation-in-ghana

5 Promising Ghanaian Tech Startups that May Soon Become Multinational

Ghana's technology and software industry is relatively a younger one and with this comes many challenges for those who are in these fields. Countries like Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria have received some level of international recognition for their software industries. In some of these countries, they have had huge multinational companies buy out some of their budding startups.

In Ghana, the software industry is growing and already is seeing some promising startups that may soon become multinational. In this article, I take a look at five of such startups that are ready to be sky rocketed.

1. RetailTower

RetailTower is an ecommerce marketing solution. RetailTower enables merchants to create campaigns on price comparison engines.

They seamlessly integrate between e-commerce platforms and comparison shopping engines. With a few clicks, merchants can export their inventory product descriptions, images, and prices from e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and osCommerce to publish their products on shopping websites.

RetailTower has over 11,000 online retailers who are all outside of Ghana an indication of their potential in terms of growth and expansion.

The company was adjudged the Utility APP of the year 2013 at the Topappawards, Ghana.

2. Dropifi

Dropifi is a smart contact widget that helps small businesses better analyze, visualize and respond to incoming messages. They promise to help small businesses offer better customer support, capture lead and drive sales through the roof.

Dropifi has over 8000 small businesses as customers all over the world which include TKC Apparel, Colombia International, ALMA Soul among others.

With the nature of their business and customers, it is expected that, they will soon have offices in some countries in Europe and the US to address their growing customer base.

Dropifi has been featured on many international platforms including Forbes, the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and were recently selected as the first and only African startup to be among the 500 Starups.

3. Leti Arts

Leti Arts is a startup that is focused on Africa's superheroes. Leti Arts is bringing Africa's rich folklore to life through the media of comics and mobile gaming.

This tech company is set to launch The Epic of Ananse, an exciting new comic book series and mobile game that reimagines the ancient fable of the African trickster god.

With their target market and intentions of running TV series around these superheroes, they might soon expand into other African countries. Already, they have offices in Ghana and Kenya.

Leti Arts has been featured on the BBC World Service, Polygon and were recently selected as World Summit Award (WSA) Nominee. They were winners of the Entertainment APP and APP Developer category of the TopAPPSaward 2013, Ghana.

4. mPawa

mPawa is a job matching service developed by Innokiq. mPawa supports the posting of jobs and the onwards notification to blue collar workers in Africa.

They wish to bridge the gap that exists in the current blue collar recruitment space; that is getting blue collar workers into a centralized location and allowing employers to easily reach them.

Their focus on the African continent and the successes in the countries they are already in indicates a possible expansion into other African zones.

mPawa has offices in Ghana and Kenya.

5. SMSGH

SMSGH is a Ghanaian tech company that provides bulk SMS, corporate SMS solutions, mobility and web solutions among others.

Their story of three young graduates coming together to build Ghana's first non-telco internet SMS messaging gateway and software is an inspiring one.

The have not only succeeded in building an idea into just a company but a company that sees millions of cedis as yearly revenue. Their turnover is expected to reach GHC10 million in 2013.

SMSGH processes about 10.8 messaging requests every second and over 28 million business-critical & subscriber messages monthly with more than 7 million mobile subscribers relying on them to inform, alert, notify, transact, interact, monetize and share mobile data.

Their vision of becoming an international brand for business messaging is on course and we might soon see them expand into other African countries.

They were adjudged the APP company of the year 2013 at the Topappawards. One of their products, Mpower Payments was also adjudged the most innovative new app 2013, finance app 2013, top user experience app and was the overall winner, the top app of the year 2013 at the same Topappawards, Ghana.


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5 Very Important Things Ghanaian Businesses Take For Granted--Part II

In the part one of this two part article, I mentioned content marketing and email marketing as some of the things Ghanaian businesses have taken for granted and as a result are paying dearly for. In this part, I will continue to mention the three other things.

3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a collection of tactics that help a website rank in the first positions of Google for search terms that describe their business.

Everyday, millions of people use Google to search for everything from 'which premier league team won the championship in 1987' to 'electronic appliance shops in Accra'. These people click on the first results Google returns and have no time to check what is in the 25th page of the results.

How do businesses make sure they are also among the top results to be shown to the 'Googler'. This is where SEO becomes very important.

When SEO is done right, businesses see significant growth in organic visitors to their site and once the business site contains all the information needed by the information seeker, then the seeker becomes a customer.

There are many consulting service providers in Accra who are mostly small businesses and as such have financial constraints that prevent them from carrying out aggressive advertising campaigns. With SEO, all they need is an expert who will use keywords to make sure whenever someone googles 'consulting services in Accra', their business shows at the top.

Several small businesses abroad don't engage in mainstream advertisement but in SEO and they have regular customers because whenever someone googles for the kind of services they offer, they appear at the top and the 'googler' checks them out.

It is the time for Ghanaian businesses too since the usage of the internet in Ghana is at an all time high. Take advantage.

Content marketing is one great way to boost a business' SEO.

4. Social Media

I agree that many small and large businesses in Ghana are most likely to have a social media presence. But one challenge for these businesses is how to curate this social media pages.

It is common to see a business start a facebook page or twitter page with much enthusiasm which results in regular posts from the pages but after a while, the enthusiasm fades and the pages are left to 'grow weeds'.

The full potentials of the businesses behind these pages will not be harnessed if social media is run like the way ECG runs electricity in the country.

Maintaining a social media presence requires dedication and I must say some Ghanaian businesses understand the importance of this and as such put much effort into it.

Maintaining a social media presence is like a marital relationship, initially there is much excitement until the positives you thought were present begins to ellude you. Patience and constant updates is what is needed to keep your brand alive socially.

Businesses should make atleast a post everyday so as to keep their brand in the minds of their fans. Too many posts a day will also annoy your fans and so a proper balance must be sought.

The positives of social media are obvious and I would not say anything about that.

5. Brand Personality

The tone of voice of a business can make or umake that business. Despite the importance of brand personality, many small Ghanaian businesses care less about this.

It is important to know how you want your customers to perceive you. Do you want your customers to think of your business as a serious one, a humorous one or an energetic one.

In choosing a brand personality, the sector in which your business falls must be taken into consideration. You don't want your business to be seen as humorous in a banking or finance sector.

Once that personality is chosen, the tone has to cut across all your mediums of communication. And so if the tone of your business is that of humor, it shouldn't happen that on your website and advertisements the business appears serious whereas on social media it is humorous. Potential customers will take your business as a fake and disregard the genuineness of your personality.

So stick to your personality all way out.

Many small businesses in Ghana do not have a personality for their businesses and this deprives them of the benefits of having one. Customers will connect more with the business if the personality of your business is similar to theirs.

For example if your business is a paedriatic clinic, your brand personality might want to be a little less serious since you are dealing with children and parents who are mostly stressed from the role of parenting. To lighten both the children and parents up, a less serious tone will connect more with them. Bear in mind children like fun.

Take another paedriatic clinic whose personality is that of a serious business and it sticks to this. I am pretty sure the parents might not have an issue with this if they do not know another clinic exists that helps them to de-stress with their less serious tone. One thing is for sure, the children will not connect with such a clinic.

So that's all for this article, if you have followed this article from the beginning stay loyal to OpinionGhana.com as there are other interesting articles to read on this platform and many more to come. If you missed the Part I try to have a read of it. Remember to share this with a friend or colleague.

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5 Very Important Things Ghanaian Businesses Take For Granted

Content marketing involves investing time and energy into websites and features such as blogs and FAQ sections. It is becoming common for businesses in Ghana to have websites however these websites are left so dry of content that they were better not in existence. Hardly does one come across a blog or FAQ section on business websites in Ghana.

Take for instance websites of UT bank, RLG, Kasapreko and all the other big businesses in Ghana and you will realize they invest less into content marketing. They either have a newsletter form (which is not taken seriously) or an FAQ section which doesn't serve its intended purpose fully. What is absent is blog sections. Ghanaian businesses just hate blogs.

The primary goal with content marketing is not typically to make a direct sale (although it happens), it is to deliver content over an extended period of time, preferably through email or other means.

The secondary goal is to become a “thought leader” in your industry. The benefits of this is that your content gets you on the radar of larger publications, who will then link to you naturally.

Now let's take RLG for a case study. Assuming RLG had an active blog section on its official website that regularly churns out important articles about the world of technology as it relates to Ghana. After sometime, tech savvy Ghanaians (who have the potential to use RLG products) will begin to visit this blog for news and updates about technology. The more people visit this blog section the higher the chances they would visit other sections of the same website and as people visit sections that explain RLG products, they get interested in what RLG offers and eventually these site visitors become RLG customers.

This is a very low cost marketing strategy which startups especially must adopt since they do not have much financial resources to engage in the very expensive traditional forms of marketing.

Another benefit of the blog section is that, these regular articles that the business produces get crawled by Google and other search engines and kept for future potential customers who may be having their Zero Moment Of Truth (ZMOT). ZMOT is that point in time when someone decides to look up information, reviews etc. on a particular product the person intends to buy.

What form of advertisement is better than having tech-pundits, bloggers, social commentators among others referencing the blog section of RLG for a particular piece of fact or statement they are using?

The most benefit a business can derive from content marketing in my opinion is trust. The more valuable the information you put out there, the more people (who are potential customers) trust your business and the services or products you offer. These people will consider you an expert in your field of business since you have for a long period satified their information need. They will forever remain loyal customers and will refer many other people to your business.

Note: There are other forms of content marketing that a business can engage in.

2. Email Marketing
Do you know what smart entrepreneurs or businesses do with the traffic they receive from content marketing? They build an email list. Outside of direct sales, there is no better business outcome attached to first-time visitors than when they subscribe to receive newsletters and email updates from your business.

So after all your efforts in content marketing (created a blog section on your website etc.) and you are beginning to see several visitors to your company's website, it will be dumb on the part of the business if it does not collect emails.

I know in Ghana, we are not very good at this email thing. Nevertheless, they are people like me who do everything with our emails (I am sure there is a lot more of us with the popularity of social media).

Email marketing basically involves putting a 'Subscribe to our Newsletter' form on your website and other channels and using the emails you collect as a competitive advantage. If on your site, the 'Subscribe to our Newsletter' should be seen on all pages of the site especially where the blog section is. And make sure it is very conspicuous.

The more the visitors to your blog section, the higher the chances they will subscribe to your newsletter in order not to miss future 'juicy' information.

After collecting all these emails, the business can now be sending regular personalized messages to these potential customers. And trust me, there is a 99% probability they will respond positively to your messages if crafted well than they will do to your facebook page posts which might not even get to them because of facebook's new policy for pages.

People feel privileged to be on the email list of companies they trust and will be glad to share whatever information you send them with friends. In fact, most businesses abroad have had their product launches gone viral because the people on their email list decided to share the next 'coolest' thing with their friends who in turn reshare to their other friends. Wouldn't you wish to be the first to know via email what promotions MTN will be launching in the next couple of days? Wouldn't you, thinking to be very important to MTN and the first to hear such news tell your friends about it? This is how email marketing works.

According to ExactTarget, 50% of online users bought something as a result of an email which is higher than any other marketing channel.

To be continued ...
This article will be continued in the second part (3 remaining points will be talked about). You can visit http://www.opinionghana.com for more interesting and intriguing articles or like the facebook page www.facebook.com/opinionghana for the best articles.