The co-founders of the digital media agency, Imizamo Digital Media, Tlangelani Manzini and Daisy Mulenga are two women who came together in an effort to close the gap in the digital landscape, all while creating opportunities for the creatives in the technology industry.
The two managing directors recently sat in a radio interview, where they revealed how their business started out as a digital platform to integrate marketing agency that assists brands in navigating the vast and dynamics digital space and ensure that brands connect with their relevant audiences effectively.
Manzini and Mulenga decided to create a vehicle for other women who are interested in entering the space to learn how to go about it.
These top female executives have managed to change the narrative and stereotypes about female leaders by engaging with local communities, understanding unique challenges and needs. They invested in continuous learning, workshops, and seminars to upskill themselves and share knowledge.
When asked about the impact of covid-19 in the digital industry, Manzini shared that as much as the pandemic had a negative impact, however, it affected the digital industry more positively.
“I think the beauty about being in the digital space is actually when covid hit, it was a good time for digital to be utilized by different clients, different audiences because it was the only means of communicating. We couldn’t have the physical meetings that we used to have. So, there’s a lot of platforms or systems that came into place; they’ve always been there for quite a while but, I think it was an opportunity for us to explore what more can be done to keep the relevance for us to keep communicating and be able to manage the business side.”
She mentioned that unfortunately most businesses had to shut down because they couldn’t adapt as fast as they could with the impact that covid had. She added by saying: “But I think us running a digital agency was positive for us because it was a point where brands even started looking at how they spend their revenues. So, digital now came first and all the other channels obviously were part of “we appear first on digital, and we support media with all these other channels” so it was actually a very good space for us.”
Also on the topic of covid-19, Mulenga made an example about how the Metaverse is being integrated into these brands campaigns. She shared how technology around you can transcend into the digital environment.
“You can be walking in a place and get integrated with technology that becomes real. Meaning, how do I act when I’m in a physical space it comes into my digital environment. The other thing I’ve seen come in our digital environment is social media 2.0 ‘they call them content creators’,” she added.
She stated how “previously people would use social media to showcase their lifestyle only. But now content creators in platforms like TikTok, we see people commercializing their content; we see people making it their revenue streams. Mulenga made an example about how TikTok allow you to purchase a star or send a star to a creator. “That is beyond lifestyle, beyond me sharing what I’m doing, it has become a revenue stream for content creators.”
THE AIM OF APPLYING A DIFFERENT DEGREE IN ANOTHER FIELD
The psychology degree and BA holder, Daisy Mulenga also shared: “In this day and age, one can do cross functional work, it doesn’t matter whether you have a degree in law you can find yourself in the IT space.”
Mulenga spoke about how her diverse qualifications are actually coming quite handy, “because I may be trained as a psychologist, but actually what I use its function, especially for my campaign ad my brands; is understanding their audiences so, instead of me sitting in a consulting room with a person, what I find is the psychology part of it gets filtered in with strategy.”
“So, if I come to a brand and I need to meet a particular audience, I need to understand how to communicate to these audiences, then stripping it down obviously to how does a particular audience actually benefit from the digital space. So different technologies have always been around over the last few years and using our knowledge, our qualifications, mostly our experience from all these years that we have been in this space to find ourselves at a point where adopting different technologies has been a must. sometimes we find ourselves preaching to our client to explain, because we find that clients sometimes they have basic ideas what they would use the platform for, but actually it’s the detail of what the back-end look like.”
She gave an example using Artificial Intelligence and ChatGPT. “People feel that the beginning of where AI started but when you look at simply things like Voice call on your google search that is all AI powered already. So, in terms of advice that we give to our clients, as well as how they adopt to these technologies, I can through quite a few very quickly.”
“In terms of how AI come live in our lives. It is very much an important function that I think in future is going to be integrated in our daily lives,” she added.
She went on to say: “I think in the past when we started talking about big data, IoT, I think we were thinking of AI as robots and physical things.”
WHAT SYSTEM DO YOU USE FOR MARKETING
Manzini said: “You need to understand that there’s basic things like cookies that are being tracked as you obviously do different things on the online environment,” she added. “ You will see an ad of the car, if I want to re-multi bet you as the bank because you didn’t perform the next step or didn’t interact or engage and say that that ‘I will use your IP address’ or the cookies that I get on my site to reserve you the ad, because ‘I’m expecting, when you see it once or two times the cases of you engaging it will be more increased.
“There are different platforms that we utilize like a google performance and it has AI powered capabilities obviously where you can use different types of platforms that google own. That means you can run a campaign from one environment. You should be able to have visibility across all the platforms that google own, the YouTube, Gmail.”
She continued to add that: “If you still use Gmail, you enter the environment were even in your emails there’s an ad that pops up on the side of emails, same applies to YouTube environment and all of it is set to go live through a platform called Google performance.
“Some of the things we have in search, Dynamic App that you can create your copy creation that allow you to have automated part of copy that you created and pay Dynamic App within google space that you can utilize for your brands,” she added.
Imizamo co-founder Manzini added that they are “guilty of using ChatGPT type” as it provides much more detailed information that you will not find when you search on google.
“We do play around quite with channels and platforms that come up,” she added. “And the reason for that its obviously if I’m gonna stand in front of the brand or client and talk about certain topic, I need to be knowledgeable enough to know what I’m talking about.”
She advised, that as a company, you need to stay in tuned to what is new and what apps are being utilized and having that information will help you stay relevant and be able to offer the best service to clients. “If you don’t utilize the platforms, you going to be left behind.”
ADVICE FOR SMALL BUSINESSES: HOW TO SURVIVE TOUGH TIMES AS SMALL COMPANY
Mulenga advised that for small businesses “they need to start using artificial intelligence (AI), if you haven’t started using those two, you are going to be left behind. You don’t have to have everything automated; however, you can use it as a tool to make efficiency work in your company.
She added, “we use to have copywriters, we use to have designers, what you need to do: is being able to understand how you put on prompt in these things. There are different things you can use when think AI in terms tool it doesn’t have to be ChatGPT only,” she added. “Think of narrative AI that we use for our images for e-commerce, very good for small businesses.”
Main Image: Business Tech Africa
