Marketing is vital for small business owners looking for market access as it creates visibility, helps attract and retain customers, provides a competitive edge, offers market insights, and drives business growth and expansion.

Prinesh Pillay, owner of Nuclear Concepts, and small business growth specialists – have been working together with Fetola for years to help entrepreneurs access market opportunities.

Prinesh was intrigued when he first discovered Artificial Intelligence (AI) based tools.

I came across a few platforms that can make an entrepreneur’s marketing process or journey a lot easier. Here are my five recommendations: I urge entrepreneurs to experiment with these tools, as these will give them the time and space to focus on other important aspects of running their business,” -.

said Prinesh

Content Creation

AI can be used to generate high-quality content that is optimised for search engines and resonates with specific target audiences.

A free AI platform for this is openai.com that uses GPT-4 technology to create written content such as articles, social media posts, product descriptions and business plans. Another tool you could try for content creation is copy.ai.

Creating videos

Pictory.ai is an easy-to-use AI-powered video creation tool that allows the user to create professional-looking visual content in minutes without any previous experience in video editing. These videos can be used on websites, social media channels, email marketing campaigns, and more.

Product photography

If you have a limited budget, try Booth.ai, a clever platform that creates high-quality product images in three easy steps: upload photos of your product, write a text prompt and you will receive quality, visual content that is aligned to your vision and brand in seconds.

Logo creator

Looka.com will save you time and money as it creates professional logos in just a few clicks. You can design, edit and save as many logos as you want, but you will have to pay if you want to download a logo. However, it’s a fraction of the price you will pay a designer to create a logo for you.

Grammar check

Quillbot started as a paraphrasing tool but has been expanded to include correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation and more. It even checks for plagiarism. Quillbot promises to improve your writing by intelligently rephrasing copy.

Here are a few more options to add to your AI arsenal:

. Entrepreneurs can create personalised adverts that are tailored to each customer based on their browsing history, interests, and demographics with Google’s Responsive Search Ads.

· Google Analytics is a great tool because it empowers business owners to make informed decisions, improve user experiences, and ultimately drive business growth by leveraging data-driven insights about their website or app performance.

· MonkeyLearn enables small business owners to leverage the power of text analysis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), helping them to extract valuable insights from social media posts, reviews, and other online content to gauge customer sentiment and identify potential issues.

· AI-powered chatbots, like Tars can be used to provide 24/7 customer support, answer common questions, and even offer product recommendations.

These AI marketing tools are ideal for businesses that do not have a marketing team as they save time, costs and increase efficiency.

However, Catherine Wijnberg, Fetola‘s CEO, advised entrepreneurs to exercise caution: “As use of the exciting AI tools gives you first movers advantage increases it’s important to keep an eye on the standard tech challenges of data breeches and privacy. It is also important to develop internal systems to identify and rectify false information or data bias.”

She added that entrepreneurs should not become reliant on AI and neglect human intuition, creativity, and critical thinking. AI can supplement human decision-making but should not replace it entirely.

Prinesh agrees: “AI-based tools can help to automate mundane tasks. However, entrepreneurs should use AI as a tool, not as a substitute.”

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Coming to grips with the future is now wedded to business strategy

Community WhatsApp groups deal with everything from thwarting abalone poachers to finding lost dogs, but the digital revolution has so much more to offer us than trinkets and fake news.

Embracing this can sometimes feel overwhelming for the less tech-savvy citizen, business leaders included. Yet, with 26.3 million smartphone users in South Africa by 2023 it’s clear that we are already “online” with our digital presence.

A series of factors are defining the business landscape that call or greater efficiencies, resilience and adaptability. Let’s look at inflation, currently on the rise (peaking at 7.8% in July) with predictions the country could also enter recession in 2023.

Consumer price sensitivity is likely to influence demand and increase competitive behaviour. This has a ripple effect throughout the ecosystem from suppliers to bank credit facilities. Reducing production costs, whilst maintaining prices and profit margins via product re-design (process re-engineering) and efficiencies, will be front of mind for business.

Industrial clusters enable cross-entity waste utilization and integrative processes to share energy and material streams.

Collaboration can further improve cost efficiencies and increase market penetration. Much of this can benefit from tech applications.

With our global footprint front of mind, another new kid on the block is the circular economy, its end goal based on efficiencies to design out waste altogether so that business functions within planetary boundaries. Aside from meeting investor or market driven ESG targets, circularity is a societal imperative and makes complete economic sense.

Investment uptake for circularity can be encouraged through Virtual Reality (VR) simulation which walks stakeholders through a digital factory floor.

In this way, resistance to change can be mitigated by highlighting the cost, material, and energy savings in a visually engaging and role-specific experiential way.

Alternatively, Blockchain can sort materials to reduce waste and recirculate materials, or record components that are recycled or remanufactured, enabling companies to quantify their reductions in the use of virgin materials.

There is an additional trend at play – over half a million rural households abandoned farming between 2011-2016 with farms increasingly run by large-scale consortiums. This will mean greater food insecurity and reliance on food imports.

Addressing this by connecting the dots between the entire value chain from farmer to buyer, from logistics to trading, is the e-commerce platform AgriKool.

This proudly South African digital innovation is transforming the agriculture sector, reducing food waste, and improving profitability – and all inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic when the informal sector was forced to shut down. Connecting buyers and sellers could refine supply chains globally.

Precision agriculture is already being used by the farming industry with drones identifying crop health, the specialisation of Field Tech Drone Inspection Services, a youth-owned business that encompasses industrial asset inspections, agricultural mapping, wildlife and livestock monitoring, and property surveillance.

In addition, an app developed by Agriman enables customers to analyse their soil content and customise their organic fertiliser which Agriman then supplies via a circularity collaboration with municipalities converting human waste into a climate-friendly fertiliser.

As a sector responsible for 30% of global CO² emissions, industrial clusters will be a critical player in accelerating the path towards net zero.

Here, multi-stakeholder collaboration has seen uptake by The World Economic Forum which launched a global initiative to support industrial clusters in their paths to net zero where sharing of tech knowledge and resources can really excel.

The Internet of Things can build digital twins, from a manufacturing facility to shopping malls, enabling users “to step inside these digital twins using experiential metaverse technology like VR headsets to get a better understanding of how they work”, experimenting to improve efficiencies or predict breakdowns.

We are already seeing tech applications in retail, where store planners can monitor customer behaviour and footfall in real time. And 3D body scanning is enabling Gucci and Nike customers to try before they buy, minimising the high rates of returned items.

The health sector has embraced 3D printing (agile manufacturing), a process that eliminates the need to store large inventories of stock in physical warehouses from the automotive to the building industry. Another circular economy entrepreneur, Ludada and Associates Orthopaedic Services in Mthatha, has expanded its novel rental model and is now printing prosthetics on demand.

Virtual Doctors turns a smartphone app into a lifeline for healthcare in rural Zambia and Malawi by connecting isolated health centres with volunteer NHS doctors in the UK who diagnose conditions and manage and treat patients virtually.

In South Africa, Zinacare – a small business that provides testing services for sexually transmitted diseases specifically aimed at women, also uses a digital platform to give patients peace of mind and anonymity.

Education is essential to tackling the triple threat of unemployment, inequality and poverty. Australia’s School of the Air was the original education system to embrace technology with children in far-flung stations across the outback who would sit alongside HF radio sets for their daily lessons.

Today, with education poverty still a real issue in South Africa, Syafunda Digital Libraries is creating the future of education with their virtual bookstore and library. This game-changing concept provides learners from school age right through to university with affordable access to videos, e-books and audiobooks delivered to their phones.

Yet, South Africa has a critical skills shortfall of 70 000 ICT professionals. Thulisile Dlamini has taken up the mantle and is passionate about upskilling young people in remote areas through Ikusasa Technology Solutions to empower learners in coding and robotics, bringing the digital age to students who have never even touched a computer before.

Tech is not without challenges. Fetola recently introduced Zoho Project boards as a work tool to diarize tasks. Uptake was initially reticent until they created team huddles to champion each other and gamified performance. Sometimes there is nothing quite like a prize reward as an incentive.

Sharepoint, a powerful virtual storage platform, enables multiple people to work on the same document in real-time, but each individual has their concept of filing often resulting in multiple folders and lost documents. There is still room for improvement.

South Africa is rapidly emerging as a centre for public and private cloud hosting. This has translated into exponential growth in data storage centres – investment seeing “an increase of over 100% compared to the same period last year”.

However, with this digital reliance comes exposure to the effects of loadshedding and to a new threat, cyberattack.

As “states across Africa have emerged as a favourite target of cybercriminals”, with South Africa a regional hub for the likes of Black Axe, a global criminal network specialising in fraud, expect digital crime to increase as a business reality.

In contrast to this threat, Telkom recently backed the first cyber security hackathon at the Southern Africa Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference in George. The challenge, to mitigate against digital identity theft, business e-mail compromise and insider threat in a cloud-based world.

Won by an all-female team, the overall level of young talent demonstrated that South Africa’s digital future is in good hands.

Digital transformation is critical to business futures, yet the speed with which it is innovating can create a sense of jargon-filled overwhelm if it is not in your field of expertise.

Staying in your lane by concentrating on what is relevant to you and your business will make the implementation of these tools digestible. Enlist the support of whole of business tech experts who have your best interests in mind and are impartial. It is well worth the investment.

As customers come to expect instant responses to their queries, world-class online shopping, and 24/7 engagement; and staff demand seamless hybrid and remote working conditions, budget for upskilling in new technology, data-driven business decision-making, and automation of manual and routine workloads. Commit to these changes and anticipate better profit margins and improved customer demand as a result.

To avoid some of the pitfalls and over-ambitious advances, stick to what you know: listen to the customer, define the end goal, do A/B testing, transform in small increments, and recalibrate along the way. “Many companies fail because they focus on finding the technology and not on the processes they’re trying to transform.”

Boiler Plate:

Fetola is a leading provider of scalable, world-class entrepreneurial support programmes that deliver lasting social, environmental and economic impact. Their goal is to grow the economy, create inclusive wealth and generate jobs by helping people build businesses that last.

This is achieved by providing proven business strategy, systems and support, while unlocking the personal leadership power of entrepreneurs who are inspired to leave a lasting legacy.

They are best known for their four accelerator programmes: Youth Startup Accelerator, Circular Economy Accelerator, the Social Entrepreneurship Impact Lab and the SAB Foundation Tholoana Programme. Each one of these programmes has been represented by a business mentioned in the article.

Our country has one of the highest unemployment rates in the world, with 46% of those aged between 15 and 24 without work. But this is the same group whose passion and resilience can transform our economy – if we invest in them, offering them the skills they need.

More than half of our entrepreneurs are youth. And as we know entrepreneurship is one of the best ways to drive economic development and create jobs, it means the next generation is essential for changing our country’s future.

For us to get to that future, we need to support their bold and inspiring business ideas, ensuring that they can create sustainable enterprises that will not just survive, but thrive.

Creating an entrepreneurship ecosystem

South Africa still has a long way to go before we have an ecosystem that promotes entrepreneurship. In the National Entrepreneurship Context Index, South Africa ranked 49th out of 54 economies in 2019. Rankings such as this show us that there are serious challenges facing our young entrepreneurs and that we must act quickly to address them.

But the challenges of South Africa’s entrepreneurship ecosystem aren’t spread out evenly, with the very same people affected by poverty and unemployment also impacted by challenges to entrepreneurship.

Evidence has shown that historically disadvantaged communities are producing fewer entrepreneurs than affluent communities.

While this should not be surprising, based on the fact that access to resources and education has a lasting impact on an entrepreneur’s success, it does have devastating results for South Africa’s informal areas and townships.

With more than 60% of the country’s unemployed population among the 22 million South Africans living in townships and informal settlements, it is clear that these communities urgently need to be the focus of employment interventions. And because we know that entrepreneurship leads to employment, it means we need to focus our efforts to upskill entrepreneurs in these areas as well.

Creating jobs in these areas is likely to have the biggest impact, as these communities tend to have the highest concentrations of poverty. Already, the township economy is responsible for creating 17% of South Africa’s total employment (2.5 million workers) and makes up about 6% of the country’s GDP.

There is no lack of talent in townships and informal areas. They are home to robust entrepreneurial activity supported by their communities.

Township entrepreneurs have proven experts at identifying opportunities in their markets. These entrepreneurs also provide a vital network that sustains small businesses in the township economy, with almost half relying on other small businesses as key clients.

Building entrepreneurs to build South Africa

There are a multitude of challenges facing our young entrepreneurs – everything from high data costs to a failing education system. But there are targeted and tailor-made solutions to help young entrepreneurs learn the skills they need to thrive.

This is exactly what the Fetola Youth Startup Accelerator Programme aims to do. The fresh, innovative one-year programme is designed to help young aspiring entrepreneurs grow and develop their business ideas.

Aimed at unemployed youth, graduates, matriculants, aspiring entrepreneurs between the ages of 18 and 35, the programme will teach 100 young innovators the skills needed to develop their business idea and get their enterprise off the ground.

It’s a solution that speaks to some of the biggest barriers facing young entrepreneurs: a lack of key business skills, access to mentors and the opportunity to test out their business ideas. If any of these key ingredients are missing, our young entrepreneurs could find themselves as among more than half of businesses that fail within the first year.

Investing in these young entrepreneurs is essential.  Entrepreneurial activity is among the highest in people aged 25 to 35, showing us that this is a critical age group to target with interventions.

Not only do we want to inspire our youth to dream of a better future, but we also aim to equip them with the skills that will help them build South Africa.