Boasting 6.5 million active South African users, one of Africa's biggest social networks has taken bold steps to transform advertising and branding opportunities on the platform. As a result, we are taking the local media landscape by storm with clients such as Vodacom, Coca-Cola, Cadbury, Castle Lite, Blackberry, Kimberley Clarke, L'Oreal, Unilever and KFC already taking advantage of the mammoth reach and targeting.
From humble beginnings in 2003 as a mobile instant message client, today the companyis a full-scale mobile social network offering compressed push messaging and data-light Apps featuring news, weather, sports, gaming, educational content, and brand apps. Mxit technology uses less bandwidth than traditional browsing, so what would normally cost hundreds of rands in data for multiple hours online, users can access a rich internet experience at a fraction of the cost.
Current Mixt active user demographic profiles include LSM 5 - 7, 3.1 million active users, LSM 8 - 10, 2.8 million active users and LSM 1 - 4,455,000 active users.
Given the origins of the company, historically media space was not leveraged to its full capacity. Realising advertising as a significant way to monetize ourselves, paved by the prolific user growth in the marketing sweet spot of LSM 5 - 8, my first objective was to complement the Cape Town Mxit team by employing a senior above-the-line sales team in Joburg to steadily educate the Gauteng media market about our company.
Key to this educational drive was to demonstrate how leveraging our popularity to meet marketing objectives offers highly competitive campaign costs and unsurpassed one-on-one engagement. The cherry on top of course being that our Apps, are supported by powerful Google Analytics to prove a campaign success.
In the last 10 months we've literally gone door to door, from agencies - media / creative / digital and client, giving demonstrations which package the Mxit platform in a digestible format to showcase exactly what the company is, the functionality, the advertising opportunities and how the advertising translates across various handsets.
It rapidly became apparent that the market was acutely unaware of the extent of our company as a social network as well as the advertising and brand opportunities. The general perception was that it was we are a basic messaging service. We realised that change was the only way forward.
The next step in the revolution was converting from past 90-day reporting to past 30-day active user reporting. We understood that this would make our data more relevant, transparent, and trustworthy. In addition, we started distributing quarterly statistical reports unpacking the latest trends and active user demographics around lifestyle preferences, age, the top apps / handsets preferred and the latest statistics on online times. The market has responded exceptionally well to this honest, transparent approach.
Costing was another area to tackle. Having being previously costed at a premium of R500 Cost Per Thousand, we have introduced Cost Per Click pricing, bringing costs down on impressions from R175, to roughly R45 per thousand users. These costs vs ROI ratios are highly competitive against all other formats.
Clients are astounded when I ask questions such as "If I could get 100,000 women aged 18 - 35 onto a tactically developed brand app to review your new product, and have Google analytics confirm that the average women spent two minutes on the app - would that be meaningful to you at R2 a consumer?"
Where else do advertisers get that level of quantified, targeted consumer alone time? It makes total sense. Advertisers are aggressively increasing ad spend day by day. They are excited by the new Mxit offering and the basis on which the media division now operates.
The First Pillar of Mxit is social. Our users have an extremely high social graft - we see 400 - 500 million messages per day, through both direct messaging and groups or chat rooms.
The Second Pillar is content - the user can access rich content ranging from weather, News24, motoring, music, Kick Off Soccer, SuperSport and general content apps such as Ask.Kim (advice for girls), Love Doc, and 15 PSL soccer teams apps, to name a few.
For the under-21-year-old varsity and school students, we offer rich content around education, which is a massive focus for us. Through Mxit Reach, our CSI arm we've developed apps which help with Maths and Science, free set work books through the Bookley app and an interactive periodic table, all of which render beautifully on the feature phone.
The Final Pillar is where brands can exist - brands can create their own Mxit app, specifically designed to be easy to do through a click-and-drag tool called Launch (Launch.mxit.com), enabling apps to be created and up and running in an afternoon. Splash advertising campaigns and our media platforms can then be run in conjunction to direct users to the app for brand engagement, voting, competitions, polls, text-based content and downloads. Content can be structured to complement existing media channels, increasing traffic through the campaign and ultimately creating interaction with brands.
Brands can also tap into the power of social media and get a disproportionate return on investment through using the 'refer a friend' functionality. Mxit also has a new app store, offering great search functionality and easy navigation. Brands are being discovered on a regular basis through the app store.
We're now in a position of working in partnership with the agencies, our key driver being to ensure that we're included early on in the briefing stage. The early partnership enables us to understand objectives, suggest the most impactful way to reach the Mxit user and forecast the expected response.
It has been hugely encouraging that the brands and agencies we have approached have responded positively, they want to do business with us and they're pleased about having a Mxit team in Gauteng for hands-on guidance. Based on the strides we've made into the local media space and the record breaking ad sales success this August, we're excited about riding the wave of the mobile ad space revolution.
For further information on Mxit visit http://site.mxit.com/pages/advertise or follow them on Twitter - Andrew Kramer @MxitMedia.
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