Wowzi which has a social media service that brings users with marketers and delivers user feedback has a total fund of $3.2 million from investors in recent months, including a $2 million seed round headed by Africa-focused venture capital company 4DX Ventures. A $1.2 million pre-seed round followed this.
To.org, Golden Palm Investments, LoftyInc Capital, Afropreneur Angels, and Future Africa were among the other seed funders.
Christina Sass, co-founder of Andela, along with previous Andela executives Jessica Chervin, Justin Ziegler, and Johnny Falla, who is now the chief development and growth officer of Wowzi, participated in the round.
Wowzi was established in mid-2019 by Mogeni, Hassan Bashir, and Mike Otieno, but the site came online a day before Kenya’s president ordered the first lockdown.
As it panned out, a rare opportunity came up as more firms recognized they needed to diversify their marketing strategies because travel and human connection were still limited.
The Kenyan company spins social media users into brand influencers, has received new capital to increase its scope to West and Southern Africa, as it capitalizes on the growing use of social networking sites all over the continent, fueled by the growth of smartphones and widening internet access.
Wowzi intends to leverage the new funding to establish businesses in Ghana, Nigeria, and South Africa, expanding beyond its existing physical location in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. It intends to use these recent hubs to enter other African countries.
Brian Mogeni, co-founder and CEO of Wowzi, stated that the company is largely keen on growing across Africa in 2022, as well as in other emerging countries around the world.
He went on to say that the company is continuing to enhance its technology and bring more value to the communities by introducing extra product capabilities and features.
Wowzi allows brands to collaborate with social media users on advertisements and promotions. This is a unique type of digital marketing that differs from the traditional practice of utilizing superstars in advertising efforts.
Wowzi claims it is accessing “more real engagements or product endorsements” from consumers who connect with these businesses on a daily basis by leveraging ordinary internet users.
Because the platform is automated, the company also spares brands of the hassle of managing ambassadors. Brands pick out their ideal influencer demographic groupings based on criteria such as gender, geography, occupation, or income brackets before launching a campaign.
Wowzi then links them with the appropriate influencers for their requirements. The brands then narrow their search depending on the material shared or amount of activity and contact the influencers they want to work with.
From initiating contact to negotiating, to contracts, to assuring that content is supplied and distributed on time, Falla showed that managing influencers is challenging. Because it is a huge amount of work, the firm oversees the entire procedure with the brand to ensure its progress.
Wowzi influencers are divided into five categories: nano, micro, mega, meta, and super (celebrities), and they use their social media profiles to carry out advertising campaigns for businesses on platforms such as Tik Tok, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Wowzi, on the other hand, is primarily interested in nano and micro-influencers (social media consumers who have less than 10,000 followers).
Wowzi collaborates and creative agencies to enable them to grow their initiatives. Coca-Cola, Netflix, Safaricom, Diageo, P&G, and Absa Bank are among the companies with which it has collaborated thus far.
Because the procedures are automated, brands can obtain data that can be used to assess the reach of their marketing initiatives.
According to Falla, the firm provides an online monitoring dashboard that is extremely thorough. As a result, advertisers can check in to see precisely what is going on, including what posts the influencers posted, which ones worked best, and demographic data for those who were really engaged.
So far, the firm has partnered with 200 brands, run over 15,000 campaigns, and completed over 200,000 paid gigs. Wowzi has expanded by a factor of 20 in the last year.
Brands can now post-market research tasks that include the participation of influencers in polls or questionnaires. Wowzi’s goal is to go from an influencer promotional tool to a job aggregator.
Wowzi currently expects to create over 1 million jobs in the near future as it creates a strong pan-African footprint. This aim is attainable for the firm, which has effectively run ads in Mauritius, Mozambique, Zambia, and Cameroon, among other African markets.
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