Channel Post speaks to Wayin Richard Jones, the CEO of Wayin, about the digital marketing scenario in the Middle East, their new digital marketing CMS called Wayin and the value add it brings to the table
How big is the digital marketing scenario in the Middle East and Africa region? Do you see a shift from print to digital?
The audience for digital in the Middle East and North Africa is growing at a tremendous speed, and the region’s top companies are responding by developing, dissecting, and continually evolving their digital marketing strategies. As measured by digital consumer adoption, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain are among the top countries in the world.
The region has more than 100 percent smartphone penetration and more than 70 percent social media adoption—even higher than the United States. As per the key statistics released by Hootsuite in January 2017, there is a 60% penetration amongst 147 million Internet Users and 93 million Active Social Media Users with a 38% penetration in the Middle East.
Digital marketing initiatives in the region are fundamental to making sure a business keeps moving forwards, builds market share and stays ahead of the curve. Marketers have come to realize that operating with the right tool is imperative to create immersive customer experiences.
Most digital agencies in this region have their own proprietary tools for delivering digital campaigns. In such a scenario, how does Wayin add value and what are the new capabilities it brings to the table?
We founded the company because there was a huge hole in the marketing stacks that companies were using to engage consumers, prospects and customers. Think about it, essentially marketers have email marketing platforms, web content management tools and social media management platforms, none of which were built to deliver interactive campaigns.
Social media platforms are designed to manage social conversations, email marketing platforms are designed to manage marketing databases and send emails and web content management platforms are designed for managing content on websites. So if you a marketer that wants to create a really cool interactive destination for a product launch, or say as the content hub of your EID campaign, what do you use?
Email marketing platforms only have landing page builders that are extremely basic, so if you want to bore your customers to death then go for it. Web content management systems are built for auditing and workflow, they are focused on controlling content, SEO and site navigation, not as a tool for creating awesome digital experiences to engage the consumer on multiple digital destinations.
Social media management platforms are for customer support on social channels and analytics, they don’t have interactive campaign capabilities at all. So what typically marketers do today is go to an agency for say ideas on the campaigns for EID and they spend money ideating, then building destinations manually. They don’t use in-house marketing tools to create interactive campaign hubs or applications.
Wayin is a digital campaign content management systems, we don’t want to replace your web content management system, or your email platform or your social media management platform. What we want to do is to give you a tool that helps you and your agencies deliver great interactive campaigns, promotions and marketing applications at speed, minimising the cost of delivering campaigns that are more than just paying to distribute a video, image or text ad on digital channels. That’s yesterday’s marketing.
Many publishers in the region and globally use Google Analytics (which has become a sort of industry standard) to deliver digital campaigns across various platforms. The tool is also free. How does Wayin fit into the overall proposition?
We love Google Analytics, that’s why we have invested in a great integration making it very easy to add Google Analytics tags across all the pages in campaigns served by our platform.
Does Wayin already work with companies / brands in this region? Can you give us examples?
Yes. We work with a lot of brands in the Middle East region, spread across various sectors like Travel, Retail and Agencies. To name a few, are Etihad, Dubai International Airport and Eassa Saleh Al Gurg: IDdesigns, United Colors of Benettons, Kare and Chattles and more, that use Wayin as platform to deliver authentic campaign experiences across all digital properties in the region.
What factors lead to the creation of the Wayin App Store? Do you offer your API and SDK to developers to develop new modules for the platform?
The App Store was developed because we recognised that marketers react to ideas rather than assets. Digital Asset Management platforms have been around for ages, and they store all your marketing assets. But what about marketing ideas?
We recognised that marketers were investing in creating great digital experiences and marketing applications/campaigns, but there was no way to categorise and store these, so that larger organizations could share and reuse the investments they were making. With our App Store we have a library of 40+ different interactive marketing campaigns that are linked to cultural moments, and when you configure more using our Digital Campaign CMS these can be saved to your organizations App Store with information about what worked.
Over time you build up a great library of interactive digital experiences you can reuse to engage consumers. Advent Calendars for Christmas, Reveal Campaigns for Eid, Competitions for the World Cup, Brand Advocacy Campaigns to improve reputation, Product Recommendation Applications to increase sales etc.
These are all interactive applications that offer real engagement. We don’t believe just paying to spam people with video ads is a digital strategy. That’s what people do when they don’t have a digital strategy. Our App Store will give every company a starting point for a truly interactive digital strategy, with the tools to build from there.
How is Wayin different from similar digital marketing CMS available on the market?
No-one has every developed a digital campaign CMS specifically for creating interactive applications with an App Store to provide marketers with the ideas to power their digital strategy and share ideas across divisions and markets. It’s truly unique.
What is your revenue model? What sort of subscriptions or paid plans do you offer on the market?
We work on a standard software a subscription model with plans for 1, 2 and 3-year subscription terms. You then get access to all the campaigns and activations we add to the library for free. Right now, we are adding 2-4 a week.
