Talk I gave at Google Entrepreneurs Event , on how IT can be a differentiator for Small Businesses

1. Strategy Technology and SME’s
Complementing Business
with IT
Commercial Solutions Manager
Edel IT Consulting
BarCamp Africa UK Founder
Board Advisor : Chillax and Egotickets
Why am I here ?
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EthelCofie.com@MissEDCofie
Lean Startup Mentor

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AGENDA
Technology for Marketing and
Advertising
Social Media (Right and Wrong
Way)
Tools for Social Media
Mobile Marketing
What is a CRM and Why do u Need
it
Using Technology to Gain Customer
Insight and Data Mining
Do you need a Website ?
Google Tools for Entrepreneurs
Tools for Selling Online
Productivity Tools
AGENDA

3. My Passion
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Supporting businesses’ in their efforts to provide
customers with great service/product, provide excellent
customer service and make profit by providing excellent
and appropriate technology solutions.
My experience spans a variety of countries including UK,
Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone and worked on projects
like the Bill and Melinda Gates Funded Mobile
Technology for Health and Ford Foundation funded
election-monitoring project for Nigerian Elections.

4. • Increase profitability.
• Gain more market share.
• Increase approval ratings, or boost
customer satisfaction.
What Businesses Want ?
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Technology allows a local Company to
compete Globally !!!
The Appropriate Use of Technology Can Help you
double/ Triple /quadruple your profit
Gain Customer Insight!!!
Boost Customer Satisfication!!
Productivity!!

5. Marketing/Visibility/Selling
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Social MediaWeb/online
presence
Customer
relationship
Management

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Social Media

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Why you need Social Media
1.5m Facebook
Users
224,000 Twitter
Users
400,000 Linkedin
Users

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The Story of the Lunchbox

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How Most Businesses do Social Media
Create a Facebook
Page/Twitter/Instag
ram
Show pictures of
their Products
Give Phone Num
or how you can
be contacted to
Buy
No Differentiation

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Use Trends
and Tools to
Your
Advantage
Focus on
Relationships
Become a
Problem
Solver
Recognize
Your
Opportunit
ies
Find
Your
Custom
er
Target
Find the
Right
Channels for
your
Customer

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Doing it the Right Way- Easy Taxi
Free
Rides in
return
Free
Rides
for 1
DayPeople used the Service
and Talked about it on
Facebook ,Twitter and
Whatsapp with pictures
Result =I
will use it
Next Time

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Steaz
Channels used: Facebook and Twitter
Offered coupons and generated
discussion around organic tea
250,000 coupons were downloaded
2,830 tweets were recorded in an hour
Sales doubled
San Chez Bistro
San Chez Bistro is a tapas bistro and
restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
. San Chez encourages their patrons to
use Twitter to reserve a seat at their
restaurant. They call it “Tweet-Ahead
Seating” and it’s a great use of social
media local marketing. Once you tweet
your interest in a reservation, the online
hostess tweets you back with a
message similar to this: “Great, you’re
on the list. See you in a little while.”
Doing it the Right Way

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Opened in early 2013,
the 1888 Hotel in
Pyrmont, Sydney, has
to be known as
the 'world’s first
Instagram Hotel’
Video Link
Contiki Tour
encourages clients to
add #contiki to their
travel photos. The tour
operator then traces
these images and
reshares them on it’s
Instagram wall. With
over 20 00 followers,
Contiki has managed
to build an interactive
relationship with clients
on Instagram.
Doing it the Right Way

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Social
Media
Tools

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buffer’ any webpage or piece of content that you
wish to share and it will automatically add it to
your list of scheduled tweets to go out
HootSuite is a social media management
dashboard that helps businesses simplify and
automate social media marketing campaigns.
With HootSuite, users can manage multiple
social networks, schedule messages and
tweets, analyze social media traffic, track
conversions, and measure campaign results
IFTTT stands for ‘if this, then that’ and is built using a recipe
system which allows users to create a recipe to be used as an
automation trigger; when this something happens on one site (or
in specific channel), do that on another one.
For example, if you post an image to Instagram you can create a
trigger that will allow this to be also backed up in a specific
Dropbox folder of your choice, or you could automatically thank
someone for following you on Twitter with a custom message.
Free Social Media Automation Tools

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Free Facebook Page Tools
Fan of the week
It makes it very easy to reward your
loyal Facebook Fans. Each week this
application will select the fan who has
interacted most with your page.
Contact Me
Facebook now allows your Fans to
message you directly, but most Fans
don’t know that they can do it. This
form is an easy way for people to
contact you directly.

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Run unlimited free contests on your timeline:
- Quiz (ask a question and pick the right answer)
- Photo contest (filter comments that contain a photo and
choose your winner)
- Sweepstakes (randomly pick winners among likes and
comments on posts)
Free Custom
Facebook Business
Page
Free Facebook Page Tools

18. Mobile Marketing
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SMS
Marketing
SMS Feed
Back
SMS
Ordering
Website
must be
Mobile
Complaint
Does you
Business
need a
Mobile
App
100% Mobile
Penetration in Ghana

19. CRM
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What is a (CRM )Customer Relationship Management and
why do you need it
Now imagine you’re the manager of a small business, and your small business
has 10 clients. 10 clients whose vital details you have stored in your head. Yeah
you can probably keep track of 10 clients in your head. That doesn’t seem too
difficult.
Those 10 clients are your bread and butter. You probably talk to them everyday,
you probably know very personal details about them, you probably even care
about them as people.
Then your business starts growing. You attract more customers. You spend less
time with each one individually and find that growth needs to occur in the other
areas of your business in order to meet growing demand. Your time is spread
even thinner.
Phone calls become
infrequent, emails become
curt, orders are fulfilled
late, the clients with less of
a budget become sidelined,
forgotten about and
eventually lost.
There is a solution. It’s
called Customer
Relationship Management.

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Customer Relationship
Management Tools
Billing Special relations
•Generate invoices and
reminders
•Member, sponsor and
donor
•Monitor whether or not
paid
•Candidate
Collaboration User features (DIY)
•Workflow •Create users
•Task management •Create templates
•Projects •Adjust selection lists
•Queues •Export
•E-mail notifications •Define characteristics
•PerfectView Timeline •Adjust personal settingsZoho CRM
Zoho CRM (Figure A) is my go-to tool for
managing customer relationships. With Zoho
CRM you can handle all of your CRM needs,
which includes:customer management
day-to-day business automation
associate social profiles with customers
sales tracking
connecting using mobile apps
easily communicate with customers
integrate CRM with other Zoho tools
openCRX (Figure B) is the free CRM tool if you
need to manage enterprise-wide
coordination of sales generation/fulfillment,
marketing and service activities to
customers/partners/suppliers/intermediaries.

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Free Customer Relationship Management Tools
Insightly is a great tool to help small
businesses deal with the vital task of
managing your contacts, organizations,
partners, vendors and suppliers. Using CRM
best practices, you can see everything about
a contact -- from background, email history
and important dates, to any projects or
opportunities in which they have
participated. With Insightly’s web-based
contact management features you won’t miss
a beat:

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Customer Insight and Data Mining
Why you should watch it: Having a large amount of people see
your content is meaningless if they don’t interact with it.
Engagement is the only measurable sign of your audience
responding.
Post engagement metric
The post engagement metric
tells you the number of people
who have interacted with one
of your posts. It also identifies
post clicks, but your CTR (see
below) covers this variable far
more effectively.
People engaged
The people-engaged graph tells
you the age and gender of the
Facebook users who engaged
with your posts.
Why you should watch it: The people
engaged metric is vital to ensure your
content is valuable to your specific target

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Customer Insight and Data Mining
Post click-thru-rates
CTR is the number of Facebook users
who clicked on your post or ad divided
by reach (not including likes, shares or
comments)
Why you should watch it: If you’re on Facebook for conversions,
your bottom line is knowing how many people were interested in
your content enough to act on your calls-to-action. Whether that’s
downloading an app, trafficking to your Landing Page or clicking a
link is up to your company
Play Google Video on Web Analytics & Business Decisions

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Do You need a website ?
Are you Target
Customers
online? Do you
need to be
found online
Free Word Press
Site ( Blog +
website) e.g.
luvlyjewellery.wo
rdpress.com
Self Hosted site
will cost around
72 $ per year
( Free) Google
Site :
https://sites.goog
le.com/
Address will
be
http://www.
google.com/
sites/luvlyyj
ewellery

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Sell Online
Free Options
Paid Options
https://tictail.com/
Tictail is an easy and free online shop
solution that not only helps you create a
beautiful online store within minutes but
also helps you run it with ease.
www.shopify.com/
Shopify is a powerful ecommerce website
solution that allows you to sell online by
providing everything you need to create an
online store.
TICTAIL

27. Google Tools for Entrepreneurs
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28. Productivity Tools
http://prezi.com/i Create Amazing Online
Presentations, Wow Your Investors
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Online email marketing solution
to manage contacts, send
emails and track results. Offers
plug-ins for other programs
http://issuu.com/ Create Your Own
Online Magazine

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