 Welcome back to Entrepreneurship Tuesday, our Y254 channel is where you can find us across all our social media platform at michela shira is where you can reach out to me in this particular session we are looking at content marketing so if you own a business you know how important it is to just maximise on your profit and one of the best ways is getting your business on an online space and also the marketing aspect of it is very vital so according to Michael Brina who is actually a CEO of one of the best marketing company in the world says this that content marketing is the gap between what brand produces and what consumer actually wants so you can see how very important it is when it comes to actually taking your business in an online space and the marketing aspects and then today we are looking at content marketing and in studio I am joined by Kimani Pachik who is the CEO of Inversk magazine and a couple of other things that he is involved in when it comes to networking and also involving the young people Thank you very much Pachik for creating time to be with us You are very welcome Michelle, I am grateful to be here Alright, so you are doing well, you look very very dashing this morning Thank you Alright, so starting us off Pachik for someone who is meeting you for the first time who is Pachik Kimani? Pachik is a young Kenyan entrepreneur the founder and the publisher of Inversk magazine and the host for the annual East Africa Seas Breakfast and also the newly launched CalStick which is a marketing agency for companies in Nairobi Alright, before we get into what Pachik does because it's a couple of things that you are actually involved in I'd like you to give us a brief background before you got into the business space Where was your mind at? Where did you grow up? Well, I grew up in a small village in an area called Matundam that is in Murangaa County at the Tanga constituency in the lower part of the Tanga in Kakuzumi to Beiru Ward So that's where I was raised I wasn't born there I was probably born somewhere in the hospital which I don't know where I'll find out I grew up there that's why I went to both primary and high school in the same village and then after that I came to Nairobi I actually spent four years across the fence at the University of Nairobi pursuing bachalas degree in arts and majored in communication Okay, majored in communication so if you're not on the other side you'll be on this other side of my space Not really I didn't want to pursue BA I didn't want to pursue communications I was so much in love with mathematics and economics and I wanted to get into the world of finance but at the same time while other students were I have to do engineering, medicine or such kind of things in my mind I was like I can't be in the village both in primary and high school and at the same time go to the university in the village so I have to be at the University of Nairobi so after my KACC results I had to ensure that I applied for a course through the joint admissions board back then I understand nowadays it's called KUCCPS or something like that I had to apply for a course that could guarantee me a placement at the University of Nairobi and that's exactly what I did so I joined the University of Nairobi in May 2013 and then in BA you have to pursue some 3 disciplines there is around 21 disciplines in BA you pursue 3 during your first and second year and then after that you can either specialize or minor, major or double major so I pursued mathematics, economics and communication and then that's why I ended up majoring in communication and a small minor in economics and that explains a lot when it comes to what you do yes, I would say yes it really influenced part of what I am doing alright, so how did you get into the content marketing business space so to start over as a university student of course we learnt a lot of things to do with communication and marketing at the same time terms of PR and advertising broadcasting and all those things but back then during my university days I used to be interested in politics and at the same time I was doing a motivation of speaking in schools and I had this goal of one day building my own business but I didn't know what kind of business I wanted to get into so I thought I would do a magazine that time being in motivation and everything I wanted to do the motivator magazine and then that was in 2014 I got the name INVASC in 2015 started it out as a personal development blog and then you know as we grow and as we advance and as you get into business more and more you get to learn and get more ideas and your ideas get fine tuned so in 2017 that is after my campus days we transformed it from just personal development blog to a business magazine for startups so we held a launch event we actually held it at All Saints Cathedral and then after that after the launch we grew it as a startups magazine and then we discovered apart from just startups there are so many entrepreneurs even big time entrepreneurs in Kenya who want to share their experience and experts who want to share their expertise how to build a business and therefore we decided instead of just focusing on how one can start there are so many people who are looking at how they can build and scale their businesses so that's how we moved from just focusing on how one can start and we added the aspect of building and scaling that is in 2018 and then as we continued to grow many people discovered that we are publishing content and you are helping people learn how they can build their businesses and even as our blog and magazine gained traction and got more readers we discovered that we can help people distribute their content so you write articles and you distribute and that is how we have been able to learn we can also do content through harnessing our skills in creating beskup content create content we can do it for organizations at the same time they market and grow themselves what business gap did you see from just being a personal development blog to actually a business magazine well in Africa we have a very great gap in terms of getting jobs it is really difficult to get a job in Kenya of any other African country I believe it is the same in the whole world and I wanted to provide a job for myself and at the same time help others get jobs but I discovered the best way in which I can help solve the problem of unemployment is helping create a new generation of entrepreneurs help people learn how they can build their businesses because I believe if somebody reads in vask today maybe an article on marketing maybe an article on finance or any other area that they want to reboot or to change in their business and they definitely change it they will become more profitable they will be able to scale and build their businesses they will be able to employ more so by helping entrepreneurs grow and expand their businesses they create employment so through in vask magazine and through the events that we do like we host the annual CEOs breakfast we have held it for 3 years 2018 2019 and 2020 CEOs come together they learn, they partner together they invest in each other and by doing so they create more employment so we are helping solve the problem indirectly so we will get back to the breakfast CEOs all about what it offers and why young people should be part of it but let's look at for someone who is watching this and they want to start a business how do they go about starting something that they are passionate about because it sounds like you are passionate about what you do well how do you get to start a business number one we have to agree that not every single person can become an entrepreneur you know even during the times of Jesus for those who know him he had to have his vision and he had to have his goal you know and he had to have his assistance that is the disciples so Jesus had the vision he knew what he wanted to do with the gospel but he had to have people to help him advance the gospel and the same thing in business when the government or our leaders in government tell us youth should create employment for themselves because we have people who are cut out to be entrepreneurs we have people who are cut out to you know work for the for the companies that these people will definitely start so if you are cut out to be an entrepreneur and you want to harness your passion into getting into business one of the simple things that you need to look at is you need to identify the areas in which you can engage through your areas of passion let's say for example you are passionate about fashion there is so much you can do about fashion let's say you want to do things to do with the clothes there exist so many gaps in terms of do you want to sell shoes do you want to sell clothes for women, for men for working class individuals, for children you know there is so many things that you have to to look at in terms of where exactly you want to venture into so you have to do your own research and at the same time aligning it to your passion you have to look at what are you passionate about in fashion are you looking at the modern, classy young man or woman or you are looking at the modern business person or the modern executive or the modern child at the same time you need to look at are you looking at people in schools school uniforms and all that alright so what are a couple of mistakes that you wish you could have avoided 3 years down the road when it comes to Invas magazine what are a couple of those mistakes that you wish you could have avoided mistakes are many we make mistakes every single day it is actually part of the process but of course working with the wrong people I started out a partner with 2 people who are not passionate about what I was doing definitely we had to fail out I had sometimes hire the wrong people and they are not even good at what they do and that really slows it slows the growth of the company I have at other times these are very major mistakes that we make as entrepreneurs especially young entrepreneurs when you get a client you are not really keen you are so much focused on the money you will get from the client and forget about the things that you have to do before you do what you do and that is making a clear getting into a clear legal contracts outlining the terms of payments and that has made me lose a lot of money from so many clients usually advice if you are getting into business and you are getting to offer a service or a product to any client have your own terms of payment set out clearly and very well understood to you and to the client that you are offering the service to when it comes to content marketing you decided to just not provide investment business magazine but you also ventured into another company I don't know if it's another company it's actually a whole new company it's a whole new company so what made you move from just the investment business magazine to a new company that deals with content marketing purely I actually didn't move out of it's connected with it's connected with but what we are doing is through Inversk we have been able to create really great content and we have a great content gap in Africa most organizations in Africa focus on selling selling selling selling but you need to nurture your leads companies need to nurture their leads clients are always asking questions and when they ask these questions they ask them on Facebook on Google when you go and search something on Google like for example men's shoes in Kenya or restaurants in Nairobi you will find other suggested searches those other suggested searches on Google are actually things that people search on the internet when you look at genuine real estate companies in Kenya you will see all those things or how to buy land in Kenya and see other suggested searches in Kenya and those are questions that people are asking now I believe that the best people to answer these questions are actually the companies which are offering these solutions so a real estate company need to educate its potential clients its existing clients on everything real estate if you are in a financial service sector you need to educate your clients in terms of everything in the financial services if you are in the banking for example you need to educate your people about loans mortgages and all these things and also at the same time you need to tell people how your services are different from the others using clear value driven content and most companies do not forget that they just do their content hafazadly and even on their website they focus on designing a very good website but you go to that content that is on the website the content copies are designed to inspire and to lead the readers or the visitors of these websites into conversion or into action in terms of purchasing their product and that is the gap that we are filling in we want these companies starting from their product descriptions from their about section and to every single content they create they create value driven content so we are helping them to cooperate their profiles we are helping them to cooperate their websites and we are going even further to help them to cooperate their products to do blogs articles are really good because people talk about search engine optimization and they are only focusing on the basic the tech aspect of it but one thing that is happening is internet and technology is changing every single day the algorithms of google and being and every other search engine are changing every other day when you create a website people focus on setting the keywords and optimizing the website which is really good but every other day google is google crawlers are crawling millions of sites every single day so if you create consistent content with the keywords in your industry google crawlers will definitely crawl your website every single day or every single week they are by ranking your website higher so if you look at a company that is doing let's say even if it's just one blog article in a week or in a month google crawlers will be able to crawl that website and people will be able to when they search on the internet they will see your results on the first page of google and they will be able to learn about your service offering or your expertise you know strategically positioning yourself as a leader in your industry because if I speak on something that I understand and you can see that I can understand and I am offering services in the line of what I am talking about definitely I am the best person to buy from so the same thing with every other company if you are a restaurant let's talk about hotels if you are a hotel your products and how good your place is then definitely people will be reading more about you let's say we are searching for hotels in Mombasa hotels in Kisumu you build the credibility that is exactly maybe I am not travelling to Kisumu today but I will be looking at things that people do in Kisumu and when I do that I will be getting articles from travel agencies I will be getting articles from hotels and definitely the next time I want to travel to Kisumu guess who will come from my mind that travel agency that I read an article from the hotel that wrote an article about things to do with Kisumu and their best amenities and everything is the hotel that will come to my mind that is where I should go and reside within the week or a couple of days that I will be in Kisumu or any other place when it comes to blogging then that is the work of invest but what does the travel agency and the services do so what we are doing Invasq has its own editorial team part of whom are working for CalStik so CalStik Invasq is a distribution channel it is a content discovery platform so when people read articles at Invasq most of them it is not the editorial team who write apart from news and features others are from experts others from organizations that distribute this content for us so the CalStik team actually creates this content for you so we are creating articles we are creating product descriptions for people we are creating profiles for people we are creating brand identity designs including logos product designs all types of graphics design and also social media content and management and digital ads so how do you push the products for your clients that is to just fuel on the sales so how I push because at the end of the day and also your clients so what do you do we have a very new company so we are leveraging on our network part of the subscribers of Invasq is 14,000 plus these are people who read our magazine these are people who have attended CEO's breakfast they actually know us they know what we do best and they have actually experienced our services so for now we are leveraging on them and these are the people we are reaching out telling them what we do and they are actually enrolling into some of the services that we are doing so apart from that we are also using email marketing and social media ads that is really really working for us so in the next 6 months that is what we are doing we are leveraging on what we already have then from there we will do billboards, paid media workings and everything so I would like to find one of our viewers has asked this question and she is asking how does the CEO as such engine optimization work exactly when it comes to marketing your business and just putting it out there so it is the simplest way like I have just explained a couple of minutes ago when you search on google you use particular words which are indexed on the website and then google crawlers so for example if let me give an example of safari kum if your phone is off and I am calling you safari kum has a way of letting me know you are off and when you open when you switch on your phone you get a message so how do I activate I tried calling you so I search on the internet how to activate safari kum you see those words that are used safari kum I tried calling you so google using its crawlers and technology will look for websites who have written content with these particular words so if you are going to index to optimize your website you are going to ask yourself I am in agribusiness solutions I am in real estate number one which words exactly do people use for real estate solutions just to get so that your audience you take it to market can easily access your content so you must ask yourself which exact words do people search let's look at the CEO's breakfast annual summit what is it all about and you guys celebrated the third annual breakfast summit just on february yes on february 7th tell us more about the the CEO's breakfast and what is all about wow Amoli is excited anytime I talk about the CEO's breakfast because I got the idea in November 2017 back then it was young CEO's breakfast and I just cleared campus in 2016 started business no money no resources in terms of networks I didn't have anything to leverage on and I thought business you know that the political temperatures in this country were at the highest holding one election after the other business was disrupted though not during this COVID-19 season apart from me there must be other people in business who are young like me and have experienced these challenges but then I had an office at this corner house and I thought how about I invite like 10 or 20 friends who are in business then we discuss