Ghanaian startup Cocktail Insights, formed at the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) in Accra, is currently beta testing an analytics tool for e-commerce companies, allowing such businesses to analyse the impact of social media marketing campaigns.
Founded at MEST in January, Cocktail Insights began life as a platform that sought to help businesses using a variety of analytics platforms to collate and analyse all their data in one place.
However, co-founder Benjamin Kissi told Disrupt Africa the startup pivoted after three months having encountered challenges such as API access restrictions, and now focuses on measuring and tracking social media marketing return on investment (ROI).
This has seen traction, with Cocktail Insights – currently in free beta – having 40 businesses signed up on its platform with a monthly retention rate of 70 per cent. A paid version will be launched next month.
“We discovered that a lot of businesses allocate financial resources and time to social media marketing, but are not able track the return on investment of their social media activities,” Kissi said.
“Those who are able to collect their data are not able to analyse and comprehend it to enable them to optimise future marketing activities for maximum returns.”
Cocktail Insights is focused on the e-commerce sector, including businesses and merchants using online selling enabling platforms like Shopify.
“The e-commerce industry is ideal for us because they have their sales funnel completely online. This makes it easy to track the impact of their online activities on conversions and sales,” Kissi said.
Cocktail Insights has just graduated from the MEST training programme, and is waiting to see if it can secure funding from the school. Once it begins to monetise, it will do so under a three-tier subscription package. Kissi believes the product can be of real value to e-commerce companies.
“E-commerce businesses and merchants invest a lot of money and time in their social media marketing strategy,” he said. “They want to able to get the most out of their marketing investments and they can only do that if they know what works and what doesn’t work.”
That is where Cocktail Insights comes in, enabling them to create comprehensive comparisons of the performance of marketing campaigns, channels, and content. Merchants can track and measure how their social media activities impact their business and gain insights that will help them optimise their marketing for maximum returns.
The focus is very much an international one. Kissi said Cocktail Insights is currently targeting the United States (US) and United Kingdom (UK) markets due to the growth rate of the e-commerce industry in those countries.
“We currently have an integration with Shopify which has the majority of its merchants in the US and UK,” he said. “In the future we will be expanding to other countries in Europe and Asia.”
