The 9th and 10th April 2015 will see the second annual East Africa digital marketing summit and show, an yearly event designed to bring together key players in the digital marketing space from the East African region.

The Digital Fair will bring together digital marketing companies, communication and marketing managers in both public and private sector and providers of digital products and services to showcase the latest digital trends at a time.

Digital fair will also be aimed at sharing ideas, understanding the market dynamics, and approaching the market from a common front while showcasing products and services. There will be over 50 exhibitors comprising developers and digital marketing agencies from across the region who will engage marketers from different organizations.

The fair comes at a time the online audience has been on a meteoric rise occasioned by increased penetration of internet enabled phones. According to a report by Price Water Coopers, Mobile phone and tablets remain the internet access point for majority of Kenyans, standing at 13.9 million subscriptions as at the end of 2014, a 5 percent rise from the previous year. The penetration is largely driven by availability of low cost smart phones which are expected to further rise by an average of 40 percent per year between now and 2017.

Deloitte has also sighted growth in global purchases at 1000 per cent in 2015 alone. In the same breath,  penetration has equally birthed customer and company oriented applications with applications such as Facebook, Whatsapp and Twitter dominating.

However, the last two years has seen an explosion in locally developed functional applications such as M-Farm, EasyTaxi, Hello food, OLX which have gained grounds among local customers. The insatiable appetite for such apps will see four times as many mobile apps developed in 2015 than current offerings.

The growing mobile money market has also encouraged eCommerce retailers and digital marketers should focus on creating a smooth mobile shopping experience for customers. Statistics show that about Sh7 billion is transacted through mobile phones in the country every day. With Safaricom's M-Pesa being a world leader in these services and succeeding at it, an increasing number of investors are eyeing the mobile money transfer space.

Applications and online presence has a profound effect, to better understand the impact of smart phones and online information on in-store shopping. As more companies invest in their own applications, the challenge is to create a product that will remain relevant to the consumers' daily routine and as a result be constantly used and accessed.

Study revealed that 71 percent of in-store shoppers who use smart phones for online research say their device has become more important to their in-store experience whereas two in three shoppers who tried to find information within a store say they didn't find what they needed, and 43 percent of them left frustrated.