KIK mobile app, a new way for brands to engage the Nigerian youth, too

Since last week’s article on Conversational Marketing was published, I’ve had requests from people wanting to know how they could best use this marketing communication tool. Today, we discuss more on one app that is making waves facilitating engagement with consumers.

More than 1.4 billion people used a chat app in 2015, according to eMarketer. By 2020, according to the Ericsson Mobility Report, there'll be 6 billion smartphone users in the world. These are huge numbers, and the smart brands, marketers and advertisers don’t want to be left out of the party.

The Internet is changing, and chat is at the centre of it. Chat apps like Kik offer brands and developers the opportunity to reach consumers in a more intimate and direct environment, where consumers choose who they want to engage with.

Kik has more than 300 million registered users. On top of a chat experience that has seen young consumers spending average 35 minutes every session in the app. Kik now hosts bots, providing a new way for brands and developers to engage with consumers.

Bots are like mini apps that live in a conversation thread. Consumers can chat to bots as if they were chatting to a friend or a waiter. Bots help people find information, have fun, or get connected to the real world through the scanning of Kik Codes. A bot can share rich media, including videos and images, or just simple conversation. It's like a native ad for chat.

In the words of Ted Livingston, founder of the Kik Messenger chat app, ordering lunch “felt a bit like the first time I tapped a button and an Uber car appeared three minutes later–the magic of what many in the tech industry call online-to-offline, the ability to order physical products or services from an app. Except now, you don’t even need a new app–you can just chat your way to a richer life.”

Rather than wasting money pushing an app on an unwilling public, businesses are taking their business to services such as Kik, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp that their customers are already using to text, he said.

Kik bots can reach Nigerian teenagers, young men and women too, where they are most comfortable. Brands can engage them via this app, and Nigerian youths can get the best lifestyle experience by choosing whomever they want to engage with from downloading the app.

The big question for businesses however, is who on their end is going to handle all the chatting? But of course, they can hire humans or train their existing customer service people to do it, but a new option is emerging: they can just go with robots; they’re a cheap alternative to Nigeria’s grossly lax customer service agents.

Kik’s big advantage is the demographics of its user base: 50% are teens, and its “trust and safety” team has been keeping the lid on the high levels of porn, bullying and underage hookups that occur on the app like most other apps.

Teens are the most hotly desired demographic on mobile today…they’ve never experienced buying on a desktop website, they first browsed the Web on a smartphone, and they’ll be the first to use bots to power the world around them, says Livingston.

Besides Kik, some of the biggest players in chat include Facebook Messenger, WeChat/Weixin, LINE, and Whatsapp (also owned by Facebook). Businesses and brands are encouraged to make the shift.

Edited by ‘Dele Dele-Olukoju, a Marketing Communication consultant and publisher of the online Marketing Communication Digest. He writes from Lagos, Nigeria.