Perhaps, what we know about Africa is comparable to our knowledge of outer space — we know very little about it. This is especially the case with affiliate marketing. But it’s time to fix that.
In this article, we’re going to talk about how business is done in West Africa.
A little geographic background: according to the UN, West Africa includes such countries as Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha Islands, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
Although all of these countries are parts of the same region, they are very different. The colonial and then the post-colonial periods endowed them with different economic and social specificities, not to mention different cultural backgrounds.
We will describe the current situation in Benin, Nigeria, and Ghana. Probably, in the rest of the region the approaches to affiliate marketing may be somewhat different.
Money exchange services in Nigeria and Ghana
In Nigeria and Ghana most of the population lives, frankly saying, poorly. However, the young people know where they can find millions — in trading, of course! Ambitiousness, a sense of financial deprivation and a desire to get everything at once make the success stories of Forex traders incredibly attractive to young Nigerians and Ghanaians. They associate trading with prestige and financial well-being.
Therefore, in these countries you can test the e-learning offers: courses on how to earn money on the Forex market, as well as any other financial offers that do not require large investments by clients at the start, but promise good profit in the near future, Binance, for example. By the way, the guys from Binance, judging by their ads, understand the audience in the region and fit their campaigns into the GEO context.
More than just a gift
Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, Netflix, as well as many other services that are paid for online are not available to most people in Nigeria today. Not even because people have no money for them, but local banks operate chaotically. Payments go in and out, card spending limits are imposed, etc.
Due to the financial policy, gift cards, which can be used to pay for various online services, have become very popular in the country.
Particularly enterprising young people (and there are a lot of them) make a business out of buying up gift cards for resale. Such deals are usually pushed through Facebook and WhatsApp.
If you decide to run campaigns for gift-cards, you will probably become one of the pioneers, and you will have to search for the offer, but it’s even better — you can collect all the cream if it works out!
Profitable transactions
Imagine the situation:
You need to pay for a handstand course to your favorite gymnastics blogger, but here’s the trouble: you only have one option — your country’s payment system, and the blogger lives in Mexico and only accepts PayPal payments (which are not available to you, because, let’s say, PayPal is not functioning in your country). Then you ask your friend who moved from your country to Argentina to pay for you with their MasterCard, and you then transfer money to their card using your country’s payment system.
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A similar pattern has taken hold in West Africa. The fact is that many families have relatives who live somewhere abroad, be it Europe, North America, or even China. It is expensive to make bank transfers to their families because of the enormous charges. But there appear some creative guys: someone studying in France or working in Canada, for example, who has an account in a non-African bank, and access to Binance. They have figured out that in order to avoid commissions, the transactions could be done not directly, but through an agent, with an account at a more flexible bank. So these agents make money by charging a commission, but less than banks.
There are those who do the transfers alone and whole teams. This business is just like affiliate marketing: you constantly have to look for new approaches, and cards and accounts are constantly getting blocked. Facebook and WhatsApp are full of transfer ads.
Creatives
Internet advertising in West Africa often works on the principle of digital word of mouth. People turn for services, as a rule, to a specific person rather than to an organization, either on the advice of friends or on information found that the person can help.
In this regard, the entrepreneurs here do not really bother with the visual and textual components of the creatives — they just trumpet to all possible channels of communication about what they do. That’s why the creatives most often depict literally what they make money with.
Often there is a lot of adult content in WhatsApp statuses, but even this is just a trigger for people not to pass by and look at the statuses that advertise something from the financial sphere.
For example, there is such an approach: two informative photos about services related to gift cards/transfers/currency market are uploaded to the status, followed by a whole carousel of naked women. Thus, the status icon will display trigger content. So by clicking it, the user opens a status with the ads of financial services.
The African audience is still little known, except for the fact that people there are not very rich and still can be attracted by marketing approaches that won’t work in Tier-1 GEOs anymore. But still, this is a lucrative market in terms of traffic arbitrage and offer promotion if you can monetize it the right way. Now you know a little bit more about West Africa and have an idea of what offers might be really relevant in this GEO.
