Wowzi secured new funding to expand the reach of its platform, which turns social media users into brand ambassadors, to West and Southern Africa, as it taps the increasing usage of social sites across the continent driven by the proliferation of smartphones and a deeper internet penetration.
Wowzi, which connects social media users with advertisers and provides consumer insights, has secured a total of $3.2 million from investors over the last few months, part of which includes a recently concluded $2 million seed round that was led by the Africa-focused venture capital firm 4DX. The pre-seed round was over a million dollars.
Other investors in the seed round were To.org and Golden Palm Investments. Andela co-founder Christina Sass, former Andela executives Jessica Chervin, Justin Ziegler, and Johnny Falla, as well as Wowzi's chief development and growth officer, took part in the round.
Wowzi plans to use the new investment to set up operations in several countries, including Nigeria and South Africa, where it currently has a physical presence. It plans to use the new hubs to enter more countries.
Wowzi co-founder and CEO, Brian Mogeni, said that the company is focused on expanding across Africa and other emerging markets.
He said that they are adding new product capabilities and features as they continue to develop their technology.
Wowzi makes it possible for brands to work with social media users. This form of digital marketing is different from the norm of using celebrities for marketing campaigns. Wowzi said it is using normal internet users to tap into more authentic engagements from people who interact with these brands on a daily basis.
The platform operates in an automated fashion, which relieves brands from the stress of managing. To post a campaign, brands choose their preferred demographic groups based on factors like gender, location, profession or income levels. Wowzi matches them with the right people. The brands reach out to the people they want to reach based on the content shared and activity levels.
It's difficult to manage an influential person, from establishing contact, negotiations, contracting, ensuring that content is delivered and posted on time to following up on payment. It is a lot of work. Falla said that they manage the entire process with the brand.
Wowzi celebrities are categorized into various categories, and they carry out marketing campaigns for brands via their social media accounts. Wowzi focuses on micro and small social media users with less than 10,000 followers.
Anyone with at least 250 connections on a social site is a good fit for the Wowzi profile, but interested candidates need to go through several levels of verification before they can start making money.
People who use and love products, and can talk about real practical applications, are what brands want to have more authentic engagements with. Our campaigns show that the higher the trust with their following, the better the sales leads will be.
Falla said that brands access a community of their most likely customers and so the campaigns are hyper targeted for them.
Wowzi co-founders are Mike Otieno, Brian Mogeni and Hassan Bashir. Wowzi is the image's credit.
Wowzi works with brands to scale their campaigns. It has worked with many companies, including Coca Cola, P&G, and Absa Bank.
The automated processes mean that brands can use the data to evaluate the reach of the marketing campaigns.
We have a comprehensive reporting dashboard online. Falla said that brands can check in to see exactly what happened, what posts were made by theinfluencers, which ones performed the best and which people were actually reached.
Wowzi was founded by Mogeni, Bashir and Otieno, but the platform went live a day before the first president of the country imposed the first lockdown. As travel and human interaction remained limited, more brands realized that they had to adopt other ways of marketing.
Over 200,000 paid gig have been delivered by the startup so far. Wowzi has grown 20-fold in the last year.
Market research jobs can now be posted by brands, including the engagement ofinfluencers in polls. Wowzi wants to grow beyond an influencer marketing platform to a jobs aggregation.
Mogeni said that they recently rolled out a market intelligence service which enables the same brands, SMEs or development agencies to pull information in a faster, targeted and richer format from their focal segments.
Wowzi is looking for over 1 million job opportunities in the short term as it establishes a strong pan-African presence. This goal is doable for the startup, which has successfully conducted campaigns across multiple markets in Africa.
After being asked to work with them in an additional eight countries, we had our first engagement in Cameroon. Falla said that they have seen that we can scale easily, even without a physical presence.
According to the report, over 300 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are connected to the mobile internet. This is expected to grow to 40% of the population by the year 2025.
