The Cherie Blair Foundation for Women empowers women worldwide to start, sustain and grow successful businesses. Flow partnered with the foundation to promote its HerVenture app in South Africa, supporting the economic empowerment of South African women business owners in the country’s low- to middle-income segments. 

The resulting digital marketing campaign, funded by PayPal, exceeded targets and achieved outstanding results. Through targeted marketing, we secured more than 60 000 app downloads and 10 600 registrations by existing and aspiring women entrepreneurs – helping them to turbo-charge their small businesses through tailored learning content.

Research shows that about 38% of South Africa’s small, medium and micro-enterprises are owned by women, principally black women entrepreneurs. Most of these small businesses operate in the informal economy.

However, many of these businesses are surviving rather than thriving; they are rarely able to formalise and grow. Think of the neighbourhood hair salon or taxi-rank fruit vendor. They often lack proper infrastructure and have little access to enterprise funding.

Enter HerVenture, a free, award-winning app featuring easy-to-understand, bite-sized lessons to help women develop their skills, connect with fellow entrepreneurs and succeed in business. It helps them with advice on accounting and marketing, developing a business plan and applying for funding. Best of all, the app works without data, so it can be used offline at no cost.

It’s a fantastic free resource, and the Cherie Blair Foundation wanted to raise public awareness of the app in South Africa and encourage women to download and use it. 

However, barriers had to be overcome, including low levels of digital and financial literacy among parts of the app’s target audience – lower- and middle-income women micro-entrepreneurs. 

In addition, it is particularly challenging to run a campaign to encourage app downloads in South Africa because the population generally has a low propensity to use apps, likely due to high data costs.

All of these factors meant that a nuanced marketing approach was needed.

HerVenture has been available in South Africa for a number of years, but there has been limited awareness of the app in the country’s crowded digital and financial literacy landscape. 

The foundation therefore wanted Flow to reach more women with messaging about the app, specifically female entrepreneurs with established businesses looking to scale their operations and move online.

When determining our campaign targets, we had to take into account informal business owners’ general distrust of digital payment systems and formal financial services providers. Plus, these women typically didn’t see their operations as businesses – they were too busy focusing on putting food on the table to consider themselves entrepreneurs – so this had to be taken into account in the marketing messaging.

Flow mapped out the following target for registrations via the app:

• 7 000 app registrations (adjusted to 10 000 mid-campaign)

Due to the app’s offline nature, it was not possible to set targets for the registrees’ engagement with the various educational resources.

Flow proposed a two-pronged strategic approach: paid digital promotion and in-person introductions to the app. We believed these tactics would maximise our chances of reaching a significant number of women entrepreneurs in South Africa’s formal and informal sectors, within the project budget. 

It would also, we hoped, deliver both qualitative and quantitative results.

The roll-out would be divided into three phases over eight months: 

• Phase one: testing face-to-face engagement alongside digital advertising 
• Phase two: refining the targeting of digital advertising, using insights and learnings gained from phase one, and focusing on app install advertising
• Phase three: fine-tuning and leveraging the “new year, new you” January sentiment among the target audience to further drive app downloads

The first step was to enlist the services of a research insights company to provide face-to-face HerVenture app tutorials in selected communities – specifically, the “survivalist” entrepreneurs who could most benefit from business advice.

Simultaneously, we would compile a targeted Meta and Google Search campaign targeting South African women who were searching for information on how to start a business, and guidance on how to launch an e-commerce enterprise.

The beauty of the collaboration between Flow and the Cherie Blair Foundation on the HerVenture promotion project lay in the iterative and collaborative approach that we adopted to its execution. 

Because we were entering largely uncharted territory in terms of paid digital promotion to a low-income demographic, we decided on a flexible roll-out plan that entailed continuous evaluation, refinement and improvement to reach the most people and achieve the best possible outcome. This was based on the premise that reaching players in the informal sector requires great adaptability and agility, with no one-size-fits-all approach.

This approach enabled us to adapt and fine-tune our digital advertising tactics, including promoting the app in the App Store and on Google Play, in addition to advertising on social media and via Google’s search and display capabilities. 

During the initial roll-out, we gained insights that suggested we would secure the most impact by fine-tuning our marketing efforts to target women entrepreneurs in their 30s with some degree of digital savvy. Such SMME owners were perhaps already accepting digital payments via their cellphones or were otherwise somewhat digitally literate, and were therefore more likely to engage with a digital app than many informal traders who were mistrustful of e-commerce.

We engaged SupplyPal, which specialises in engaging township communities with digital literacy campaigns and surveys, to conduct face-to-face interactions in the low- to middle-income communities we were targeting. They identified suitable small women-owned township businesses and sat down to assist the owners with downloading the app and going through a number of lessons. 

Although more expensive than digital marketing, this in-person approach proved valuable in securing qualitative insights that we could deploy for the rest of the campaign, as well as new app users.

Following phase one of the roll-out plan, we therefore adjusted our tactics and targeting to ultimately lower the cost per acquisition of each app user.

The HerVenture app project exceeded its targets and introduced thousands of South African women to a lively, informative and useful business-building digital resource:

• 10 600 registrations (target: 10 000 new app users)
• 60 600 downloads
• 3.9-million impressions
• 236 000 clicks
• R5.50 cost per app installation, which is on the lower end of the typical range

Plus, the campaign increased brand awareness of the Cherie Blair Foundation, HerVenture and PayPal, and saw thousands of lessons being completed by enthusiastic women entrepreneurs keen to grow their businesses.

Says Flow head of project management Sarah-Jane Viljoen, “With HerVenture, it was extremely valuable to see in practice how pulling different levers and continually implementing learnings can deliver an effective and impactful digital advertising campaign. 

“By tracking the numbers daily and constantly tweaking our tactics, we delivered a campaign that was definitely not ‘plug-and-play’ but rather one that sought to fully optimise the budget. It was gratifying to see the client’s money working as hard as it possibly could to deliver results. Overall, it was a highly successful digital advertising campaign, and it was exciting to see our execution play out in a way that validated our insights and strategy.”

The app’s users were equally lavish with their praise. Said Zandile Manyisa, who runs a paint company with branches in Gauteng and the Eastern Cape, “Unlike a lot of other apps, HerVenture felt like a proper business course. It had quality information that was presented in a structured and easy-to-understand way. Applying the knowledge I gained from HerVenture has helped me double my client base, increase our revenue by 50% and increase our profit by 75%. I’ve been able to create more jobs and change people’s lives.”