Co-founder Prince Boakye Boampong, who was in Nairobi at the time, spoke to media update’s Adam Wakefield about how the lifestyle site, which launched in February, 2016 has been so successful and why local is always a good idea.

An indication of the continuing growth of OMG Digital was the announcement in June that they had raised US $1.1 million in seed capital from numerous sources.

Make your content relatable and “hyper-local”

Dubbed by some as the “Buzzfeed of Africa”, Boakye Boampoing says the ascension of the OMGVoice brand is down to two reasons.

“Number one would be creating content that is relatable. Africa is big. You can’t just create one type of content for Africa that will work,” Boakye Boampoing says.

“Our approach is creating hyper-local content for each of the countries that we operate in. That helps a lot. Kenya feels like, ‘This content was created by Kenyans for us’. Ghanaians and Nigerians feel the same way.”

Number two is distribution, with OMGVoice leveraging mobile’s deep penetration across the continent to its benefit.

“Before, you would put content on your website and people would just come. For us, we create the content and distribute it. We find out the places our audience are, like WhatsApp, Viber, SMS, and there are all sorts of ways and means we use to find people,” he says.

“We just give the content to our audience and most of our distribution is done via social media, social apps, SMS, and other ways. We create content and we find where to distribute it. That is what has really contributed to our success.”

Conduct experiments and analyse the results

Localisation of content is a key pillar of OMG Digital and OMGVoice’s strategy, but how did the team learn what counts as ‘local’? According to Boakye Boampoing, the answer is to try, try, and try again.

“Everywhere you go in Africa, if you study most websites, people consume a lot of content. Most of it is politics, politics, politics. As young people, we are interested in politics, but it doesn’t make our world move as we want it to,” Boakye Boampoing explains.

“We decided to create other compelling content for people. It was hard in the beginning. If you are a Ghanaian you wouldn’t know what South Africans want. If you are Nigerian, you wouldn’t know what Kenyans want.”

Figuring out what each market and country wanted saw OMGVoice experiment over and over again until they found content that struck a chord with their target audience.

“We had to create social media pages in each of the countries to test out the kind of content that would work. We also asked ourselves, ‘How advanced are these countries? What kind of content is already there, and what is nobody doing’?” Boakye Boampoing says.

“It’s down to a lot of trial-and-error and a lot of experimentation before we settle on something. We also use a lot of tools - analytics and insight-driven - to test how people react to a post. If they like a post, we create more. All of these factors affect our decision making.”

Create captivating content

OMG Digital and OMGVoice have already partnered up with the likes of Coca-Cola, MTN, and KFC.  Boakye Boampong, and fellow co-founders Jesse Arhin Ghansah and Dominic Mensah, offer what brands crave: a way to reach young, millennial African audiences.

“Finding the right way to approach them without necessarily offending them is the one route. Second, we also use different ways and means. For a fact, advertising is not as effective with the youth as it is with everyone else,” Boakye Boampong says.

“We create video content, we use social media, and we create ads that do not necessarily look like ads but short content that people genuinely want to watch. All of these things are what make brands interested in working with us, combined with our intimate understanding of local markets.”

As emphasised by OMGVoice, that cocktail of localised knowledge and a nuanced content marketing approach is a potent attraction to brands.

Always keep the future in mind

Given the success OMG Digital and OMGVoice have enjoyed in a short period of time, the current focus, according to Boakye Boampong, is video, video, and more video.

“We create great videos for social media and this has been received very well. We are getting about 90 million views every month. For the next two years, we want to build all of our brands and we want to launch four more brands: fashion, technology, travel, and serious news as well,” he says.

Once theese different brands are launched, OMG Digital want to create apps that emphasise their strength in short form video. They also to include influencers, as OMG Digital and OMG Voice work with influencers on various projects already.

OMG Digital create around 400 short-form videos a month for OMGVoice, and partnering with local broadcasters and media, especially those with a young audience, is top-of-mind.

Boakye Boampong underlies their future vision by saying: “We want a video-only platform where you go on there and never have a boring moment.”

For more information, visit omgvoice.com.

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*Image courtesy of OMG Digital. From left to right: Dominic Mensah, Prince Boakye Boampong, Jesse Arhin Ghansah

Content marketing is a cornerstone of how OMGVoice has attracted its audience and brands should take notice. Read more in our article, Brands should harness the power of publishing for content marketing.