 2-5-4. Atek Farm was founded in 2019 in Nairobi, Kenya. So here is where we analyze gaps in the digital field. By that I mean businesses and entrepreneurs. By entrepreneurs it also goes to celebrities and corporates. So we help them do business in a better, faster and smarter way. Ya, interesting. Thanks for that. I was just scanning through your website and you say that you walk across East Africa and mainly centered on small, medium and large-sized business to provide result-oriented digital solutions. So in terms of digital solutions, what are these digital solutions just in case somebody is watching back at home right about now and they want to know what is digital solutions? And you will see that most big companies, especially corporate companies like you mentioned in the intro, they have ahead of digital solutions. So ahead of digital solutions even for a company, what exactly is it? Digital marketing basically is getting yourself known to the people who can be your potential customers. We were used to traditional marketing whereby you could have a marketing team because office by office advertising your services. But now past the COVID-19 pandemic, we were able now to shift from that traditional marketing and now we are embracing more on digital marketing because digital marketing, when you post something on Facebook and then you have targeted marketing, you are able to reach the exact people you want to reach to, the exact demographic, the exact location and that way it simplifies how you do your digital marketing. For example, using traditional marketing, you could use a budget of 1 million Kenyan shillings to get to 10,000 people. But when it comes to digital marketing, you could use a budget of 100,000 Kenyan shillings to reach the same 10,000 people. But for digital marketing you don't reach just 10,000 people. You can reach 1 million people using that 100,000 budget. Wow, interesting. I love the fact that you are talking about reaching numbers, a certain number of people. Now for example for a starting company or a startup or somebody who is starting something and they want to actually have those huge and massive numbers, where do they start from? So the basic point is having a website. Then make sure your website is integrated on all social media platforms accounts from Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. Those are the major ones. Then make sure your website is also linked from those sites so that whoever finds you, whenever they find you, made a bit Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, they have a way back to your website. You know, you are attracting customers to your business. But those social media platforms, they give you a very nice platform for you to explain exactly your services. But when you come up with a website, you are able to list down all your services. Let's say you are selling clothes. So from your website you are able to advertise men's shirts. And then I grow interest in buying or knowing more about that shirt. Then I click on your ad, it directs me onto your website. Then on the website you are able to list women's shirt, children's shirt, whatever. So when I come to your website, I see other products I can buy even for my family. So that's how our website helps you. And that's why it's the basic unit of digital marketing management. Wow, fantastic. At Agency 254 now, for example, a client is watching and they want to approach you to do that. How do they go about with that one? For our strategy, we first have a meeting. We agree what you guys want. You are a gap. The gap you need to fill. What you want to invest in that. What challenges you are facing. We analyze all those problems. And then we come back to you with a proposal. And then we analyze the strategy. We're going to use the period. We're going to do that strategy. From there, we are able now to have another sitting to now agree on the way forward. Wow. In this day and age, everybody wants to be visible on Instagram, especially for people who are in the public domain, or live along anyone who has aspirations, wanting to maybe have some certain number of followers on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or any other social media platform. And they're just posting content. Maybe they're posting small, small videos. Or for agency to FIFO. Just in case somebody wants to maybe make the social media platform visible, what can they do? So when you come to agency to FIFO, the first, we deal with facts there. So we shall tell you followers, they'll never help you. Whatever helps you build your brand is an audience. An audience. And how do you tap into that audience now? So that's where I'm heading. You have to pay audience to review their attention. So you have to be very consistent with what you're doing. Share your story as a company. So that way you'll be able to get a very good audience. You know it's better to have 1,000 audience that supports you. That have 2 million followers. This 1,000 audience. This 1,000 audience will be able to, assuming every 1,000 audience is paying you 1,000 bob per month. That's a lot of money you are gaining. But how do you extract money from the audience itself? So that's why you have to come up with your own story, be strategic on what you're posting. Be strategic on what you're posting. Be consistent. Because you know people pay for value. When I'm going online if you're not paying me value, I'll not visit your page. And it disappears. But if you're offering me value I'll offer you my time and attention. And that will convert to money eventually. Interesting. You reminded me of something. There's a couple of celebrities right about now. Right now you can be a celebrity even this interview can trend and next time you are the CEO of the next big company in town. You've come across I'll say public figures who have 1.2 million followers on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter with over a million subscribers on YouTube. But they are posting and they are only getting 10 likes and 10 views and you ask yourself what is not happening? So what happens personally I am not for influencer marketing because I know not unless you are targeting you are selling some other products but for corporates I would not go for influencer marketing because you see the people who comment let's say a celebrity a Kenyan celebrity posts something the only thing you see there are those fire emojis people commenting there is fire emojis. Or people from other countries throwing in links about Bitcoin and FORX. By that one they don't show any value. So it's better you grow your own brand from scratch you go be focused, targeted knowing what you are offering to these people you want to be your followers. So for me I would even go and advertise with someone with 2,000 followers compared to someone with 1 million followers because I know the people who follow that specific individual 2,000 but are people who can afford my product. So you have to be very strategic with how you do your influencer marketing how you do your digital marketing and so forth. Right. And if you want to maybe you want to change you want to switch audiences and it happens a lot to people who do something called rebranding. Now at agency 254 how do you help someone go with that especially rebranding for companies there's one companies that relaunch other different color them especially corporates even media stations even TV radio they can change from a certain theme color to another with different graphics and what not for you if you are to come in for example for asset Y 244 how would you make us strategize us to actually have visibility online. So what we do is if you want full rebranding we start with your logo your tagline logo tagline company profile brand manual brand manual means brand guidelines that will follow whenever you are doing a poster whenever you are doing a banner you are printing t-shirts these are the color themes that you should use we give you options of the colors one two three four five So you come up with a manual that has all those components business cards t-shirts umbrellas everything so that whenever you want to brand something or you have an event you just extract it from the brand manual and then put it into print format Interesting So that means you'll be able to help the company just have a facelift Right you realize a lot of celebrities let's avoid the word celebrities a lot of talents who come up and they want to be visible and maybe their musicians other creatives let's use the word creatives they just want to be visible they want to be viral can you help someone go viral so that if somebody is watching back at home they can come and pay you there are some business secrets that we do or you have business secrets like if you want to come to me tell me Masha I want to have one million followers how do you attack that you just see results you pay us with you see results and speak of that interesting and speaking of that who are some of the public figures celebrities that you've worked with and you've helped them grow that you say yes I helped this one the number one I would say was Nadia Mukami was my very I think was my that who was the first Lempere Lempere is the speaker of Samburu County was my first client then there was Faridji Africa a company an organization along Gongrod then I think Nadia Mukami was my dad then from there most recently we worked with Coptic Hospital we've worked with Isuzu we've worked with Atlas we've worked with Seven Sunday so many companies so many companies because you know after COVID-19 came there was a wake up call for people to work on technology most companies actually shifted to online and shouted to zoom because you are able to work from home and still be able to get your money and you're not coming physically at work so that's just literally the power of technology continue because you know technology is on the go right there you have your phone you go on Facebook when we boost our product and we want you to be our target market you'll be able to see our ad and that one has disrupted even the mainstream media because people they call it the digital disruption people now if instead of paying Y254 want me to do an ad at 9pm why don't I use the same and target this demographic this age of people because you know you are able to filter the demographic you want by age, by sex by location by their interest maybe you target people who like golfing people who like swimming so you are able to stream it something that the mainstream media is not able to do or they call it traditional media the most important thing who is watching right now is I want to make money I want to earn money from that YouTube video or from that TikTok video that's the most important thing they want to do a younging comes up tells their dad I need iPhone 11 I'll be vlogging how do you make money out of social media so number one you'll be unique that's what I would say because social media came and removed their gatekeeping part in the old media it was very hard for me to get known because there are a lot of gatekeepers you want to come to advertise at KBC you meet so many gatekeepers but now the social media is giving you a platform whereby you go by yourself the way you are so it be unique those flows you have those are your uniqueness use them to gain traffic on your social media how do you use your flows to gain traffic on social media you know if you are a corporate person like myself before posting I think of what people think about me but when you want to gain followers use those flows that you have and then you gain your own audience which will be very huge and you gain audience faster than I will gain because of those flows the things that you were afraid of sharing when you were young like where you come from your originality I see on TikTok people ladies doing mogezi ohangra and then when I look at their followers they have one million followers and they are even not known because they embrace the originality they are unique they embrace their flows so that's how you are able to grow your audience and that's what the celebrities embrace and speaking of that how do you monetize now TikTok because I believe just a description of that you are a web developer in Kenya that is a description that means you help a lot of companies to come up with a visible profile for themselves on the line but now the monetization part conversion statistics impressions, clicks as I told you we don't focus on that much what we focus on is making you visible on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube but then we don't want to know what your conversion is like so what we are interested in is how many clients are coming to you through what we did so that's how we streamline our social media advertisements across platforms and then we are able to give you analytics at each and every end of the month we give you a well detailed report on what people we were able to reach the budget we used and how many conversions we got from our advertisements and postings we can't do this without talking about I've worked in the digital space before at some point we had several tools that we were using to do tweets schedule Facebook posts or Instagram posts what are some of the tools that you've got at agency 254 that you use we were using them before Hotsuit I think CNN uses a lot of Hotsuit to do their content but for us we don't use them we like using normal human beings doing their postings you just write down the post you type it on Facebook you post on Instagram because you know when you schedule your posts you may schedule your posts today and then when you are posting tomorrow on Twitter the hashtags or the topics that are trending they trend just for 4 hours so they will not be trending tomorrow so it will be very difficult for your post to be seen so that's why we prefer when we are doing the posting we do the research according to that specific time and then we post on each and every platform individually and then no software has been able to do that so that's why we use human capacity in that hango interesting we can do this also without talking about the pandemic and you said your company began in 2019 and what I know about the pandemic is that it held everything at a standstill and most companies laid off people others who are in a jobless completely till today at your company how are you affected by the pandemic and how have you recovered your recovery process would you say already in the recovery process are you out of the woods yet it has been a very tough time since COVID-19 came because you see in the service industry we are dealing with clients and then when it comes to these clients they are also in the service industry so they are dealing with citizens so these people became very insecure they don't know what will come tomorrow so they decided on saving their money and not investing on future projects so that's how we were getting affected but then after the COVID struck was almost over up to now we are still recovering post COVID so now the people have now embraced the technology part so for us COVID-19 was a blessing in disguise that's what I can see because it made people know the importance of technology importance of having media management importance of digital marketing doing Google ads and then also making the world a global village because most of my clients are not actually Kenyans because you are saying it's from East Africa we work with people from and across the world India, US, Ghana across the globe do you make profit at your company? do you say because I'm just saying here that you get at least 10% in support of non-profits you believe in that's basically why we are in business whenever we do projects we get paid and that's how we make our profit how many employees do you have at your company so far we have about 10 about 10 quite a good number though interesting now for anyone who is watching right now back at home and maybe they want to join agency 254 what are some of the things maybe they should know or they should be aware of about agency 254 including some of the co-values at your company so most people who would be interested most are developers graphic designers I know those are the most people developers and graphic designers but the education system in Kenya doesn't equip us with the right knowledge to tackle the market you think so? it's a fact you would prove that in court you would prove because I'm one of them in school and court companies are expecting in Kenya they are very different because even myself would I not have done my own research I would not be where I am today because in school you are taught theory but then here you come and meet a client who tells you want a domain you are not shown how to create a domain, how to purchase a domain how to propagate a server how to create emails how to take the website live no school does that in Kenya so you have to learn it day by day so for us we've taken a lot of time learning all those things from scratch I've seen it's also has the IT part now you've mentioned a domain everybody wants to have a blog they'd be like how much do you charge for creating a blog or a domain it depends it depends in many factors like are we the ones doing the content are you providing images that means you can also do content for a client if you go through our website we have content marketing content writing we have graphic design so we have full house service we have a good team to do all that kind of work so when it comes to charging it depends on what exactly you want us to do then we analyze the scope and then we give a good budget how much just to mention maybe for a blog or website roughly that's a hard question if somebody is watching may he leave his number so that I reach out so the minimum charges we do for our website is 100,000 Kenyan shillings that's a good amount of money right it's a very small amount compared to what the value we shall be able to give you because you see this is an investment you are getting into this is something that we grow for over 40 years assuming you are still at your 20s it will be giving you revenue each and every time so if you can create the amount of money to be able to give you in 20 years 100k is very small amount of money and we value that by we are trying to change the industry in Kenya because we know people have been under valuing creative work 2, 2, 2 I agree with you on that one but here we are coming to develop your website that we generate we bring you 50 million in a period of 3 years 3 months 50 million 3 years or if it's something like sport pesa we are doing sport pesa for you to bring you over over that amount 300 million maybe in 3 months so we try to look at that and then we try to argue with our clients you are driving an Audi which is a liability how did you know anyway you invested in it which is a liability it's consuming from you but they are 2, 2, 2 but you are not willing to invest in a business that will be giving you profit profit that will be able to buy you those Audi many of them so that's why we try to make sure our clients understand because you know in Africa they don't understand they don't understand the importance of our website it's something it's like a something you just click and you come back but I love the fact that you are so passionate and enthusiastic about this and it's your profession you mentioned copyright I think hos YouTube channel it must have been Oteela Brown or Bahati or Diana Aida that was suspended and somebody had claimed our graphic was used they mentioned our name and you didn't want to be mentioned how can anybody who has gone through that or who has experienced that avoid that so that they just stay afloat the YouTube is there all day or you are not suspended today YouTube have improved before your video content is approved they have to check whether it's copyrighted by someone else so after that you are allowed to take your video live so it's not easy I think explain first copyright when you mean copyrighted what do you mean for somebody who is watching and they say hey, kwantentiangume kwa copyrighted what does copyright mean so copyright they are regulatory bodies kenya it's kipi kenya industry property industry institute when you come up with a logo or a brand you go there and list your brand they do the search and then they advertise their brand for I don't remember if it's 30 days or 60 days and then if no one raises a complaint about the brand then you are given a go ahead to use that brand so if you already copyrighted a brand like myself is in 254 so if someone else comes there and says registering is in 254 and starts getting money using my company or my brand that had copyrighted so I can be able to sue them and then they do whatever the court will be able to tell them to do to me now for the video so for the video it's the same someone might have done for the video you know it's now about the music sound the music, the beats instrumentals or even some visuals graphic visuals so if someone heard them before and they presented them to kipi, kenya, industry properties so they can raise a claim against you you used our creativity to generate money for your brand or for yourself I've seen videos where influences give they confirm or they mention instrumentals if you go in the description you check instrumentals by blah blah blah or in this nimi the music I'm playing is not mine I do not own rights to the music does that help sometimes even on Instagram live now especially for international artists if you go live on IG and you start playing a couple of the music your live is stopped Instagram will tell you your Instagram live has been paused because the music is not yours unless you put that disclaimer so technically what happens in the IT world not even on social media even when we are using an image and you know you've gotten this image from someone else website you have to credit that person so the same has been applied I see it today even in Facebook the America brought up that you have to if you are using someone else image you have to credit that person it's called the fair use so that people who sees that image can acknowledge the creative work of that original producer because in this day and age there's a lot of duplication and replication somebody wants to trend with someone else's content alrighty let's come back to some of the best websites you've created in Kenya this one is among the top most top known apart from the artist you mentioned Nadiam Kami this one is now for the websites if you go on to that website it's one of the best in Kenya all our websites are top notch which specific website is the best because we do our best and we serve every client of ours as an equal to each other so all of them we've done are top notch so if you want to see our work you can visit agents2fifo.com slash portfolio you'll be able to see our project a summary of your work interesting managing feedback for people who are public figures let's say people who have quite a number they have a lot of DMs responses emails coming through how do you manage that even for an individual company for those that have not hired data social media they call them a social media management person how do they manage feedback so they are think auto responders I don't know whether you are conversant you post you comment on Instagram then you get an instant response so that's how to respond number one number two they are general questions that people usually ask so we answer them number three they are technical questions for example you in a hospital someone asked for these specifications so we are able we proceed and inquire from the company people who are experts in that field so sometimes when it's too technical we have to get someone from the same company who is an expert in that specific area to answer that specific question so we rest with them whenever we are having control of your social media you also have access for that purpose I remember something we are winding up some of the tools like Gramali there's one I think it has escaped if you want to be a blogger there's specific tools used for writing which are some of the ones that you've got at agency 254 especially for writers blogs we have all of them Gramali, tinting because you know when you're doing content you have to make sure it's original it's professional also professional original you have to check your grammar tinting you have to check if it's plagiarized before even posting so those are the most common tools when it comes to blogging that is Gramali and tinting right I think being told we have come to a close just in case somebody who is watching and they want to access you where can they access you is their number is their social media platform that's your camera right there you can follow me on a close up platform that is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter LinkedIn, Mashari Angatia then you can follow our company agency254.com any number somebody can call to reach out to you my number is 0718546247 alrighty thank you so much Mashari for coming through that has been a conversation about social media management just in case you need help or you want to start something into the digital space he's actually the right guy to speak to right about now as we come to a close we ensure that you continue engaging with us on our social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Instagram there's an underscore in minds it's at brian1o1 we are taking a short break when we come back with Val we've got you in so much more so please don't tide the dial