Industry Collaboration to Foster Tech Growth in Africa

Terra Kulture, a little lounge and event center, tucked in a corner along Tiamiyu Savage Street in Victoria Island, Lagos, was the venue of the first #DigiClanDev Lagos collaborative meetup, held on Saturday, 4 November 2017. The event brought together a crop of eggheads in both the digital marketing and software development industry to brainstorm on how to move the technology sector in Nigeria forward.

The event which was organized for the purposes of cross-pollinating ideas between digital marketers and software developers and to produce a high-breed technology solution that will serve as springboard to launch the growth of both the digital marketing and the software development business segments in Nigeria and Africa in general.

The turnout of participants at the event was encouraging, and the six hundred-capacity hall was not sufficient to sit everyone in the crowd. Featuring at the event where many keynote speakers from both the software development community and digital marketing industry such as, Kayode Abass, Caroline Wabara, Omokehinde Thomas, Princewill Ejirika, Tega Oghomienor as well as Tobi Adelkunle, Mobola Akingbala, Innocent Uchenna.

Present at the event also, were software developers that came all the way from Kenya, including representatives of Google Nigeria, and folks from the Dev Center such as Justin Irabor and Seun Awoyele. The event also featured sponsors such as Forloop, PayForte, Flutterware, Africa Talking and Trace. 

Challenges

“Reporting constitutes one of the major challenges digital marketers face, and compiling weekly analytics from all the different marketing channels is quite a difficult and cumbersome process,” Tega Oghomienor emphasized, “it is an expensive process and using foreign apps such as SMERush is ridiculously expensive.”

Several of the speakers echoed this position, and evidently, collating marketing data from various digital marketing platforms during the reporting process, is a vital requirement and a recipe that has capacity to introduce spiraling success in the digital marketing industry; and this brings to the fore the important role Big Data plays in driving growth in the technology sub-sector.

Recommendations

The developers’ community has capacity to provide software solutions for the digital marketing industry that would sprout into a multi-million-dollar sector, but first, one of the questions that was raised by the Dev Center fellows, was how large is the digital marketing sector that it can provide the market for the software products enough to compensate for the enormous cost and time required to develop these applications.

The position of the developers’ community is that presently, the digital marketing industry has not grown sufficiently to support an integrated software development environment both financially and market availability. Currently, there are several analytical software applications in the market, which can meet the needs of the digital marketing industry.

Some of the other issues highlighted at the meetup session were:

1. There is urgent need for indigenous software developers to write apps to address the analytics needs of the digital marketing industry, specifically for Africa.
   
2. The digital marketing industry in Nigeria needs to map out a clear road map of what they want from the developers’ community.
   
3. Practitioners need to come together to address their challenges under a common platform such as a digital marketing association.
   
4. The industry is currently limited to social media and concerted efforts aimed at broadening the scope is required urgently.
   
5. Digital marketers should focus more on conversion strategies rather than soliciting for just engagement.
   
6. Digital marketing practitioners should be more interactive and operate in an open community where ideas and knowledge sharing are encouraged.
   
7. Developers must also collaborate with digital marketers to find solutions to the software challenges of digital marketers.
   
8. Digital marketers need to develop spreadsheet skills to enhance their reporting and analytical capabilities. 
   

Conclusion

Clearly, the digital marketing industry is in its infancy, and this can be literarily seen in the age of participants that made up the audience at the event. The average age of attendees ranges from between 21 to 32 years, and this relatively young population of digital marketing practitioners in Nigeria and in extension, African, is a positive indication of the vibrancy and future viability of the industry.

The industry is poised to grow in the next few years as the practitioner’s consequently garner experience, maturity and skill on one hand; and the other hand, it shows that traditional advertising practice is gradually taking back stage, as the younger generation of practitioners continue to introduce digital solutions and use new media.

Despite the positive indication of the youth populations entry into the digital marketing industry, there I san apparent lack of relevant skills and understanding of the digital marketing industry which was exhibited by some of the speakers. This lack of understanding of the subjects creates a whole new opportunity for skills development and training of practitioners. The establishment of a school of digital marketing under the umbrella of a digital marketing association is eminent.