I lost my job because of COVID, Wowzi is all I've got

Our customer support team recently received this message" I lost my job because of COVID, Wowzi is all I've got"

The statement brought to life the reality of most Kenyan youth. A state of despair, desperation, and a deep feeling of helplessness. Youth unemployment was already a big problem pre-COVID. The current situation has simply exacerbated the problem further.

Could innovation play a role in solving this? Here are some of the ways Wowzi is going about solving the problem of youth unemployment.

1) Big Hairy Audacious Goals: Our plan is to create 1 million gig economy jobs in the next two years. While Silicon Savannah is where we start, the plan is to aggressively expand to major markets across Africa.

2) Democratizing influencer marketing: Before Wowzi, influencer marketing was a reserve for people with a huge following on social media. We've changed that. As long as you have a mobile phone and a social media account, you can now be an influencer. Facebook has about 8.4 million active users in Kenya, Instagram slightly less than 2 million, and twitters slightly below 1 million. On the flip side only 3000 of these have 10,000 followers and above. A big potential market was left untapped. We've filled this gap.

3) The weekly "love message": We dubbed our weekly pay-outs to influencers "the love message". Every week, on Monday, without fail, influencers receive payouts for the influencer jobs they did the previous week. They use this money to feed themselves and their families. It's amazing seeing the impact!

4) 50% challenge: Koffi Annan was once quoted as saying, empowering a woman is the most effective tool for development. We agree. A recent analysis of the pool of Wowzi influencers revealed that 60% of them are male. We've begun a deliberate effort to onboard more women influencers into the platform. We call this the 50% challenge. At the very least, we would like 50% of our influencers to be women at any one point.

5) Wowzi School: We don't look at influencer marketing as something people do on the periphery or on the side. We see it as a profession. This has prompted us to develop the Wowzi School concept that will see our pool of influencers trained and groomed into becoming full-time creators and collaborators for brands they love. A full announcement for this will be made soon. Watch out for it!

6) Wowzi Insights: We've recently launched a new unique vertical. Seeing as we have got a pool of influencers, who double up us as consumers themselves. We are building one of the most authoritative datasets on consumer insights and behavioral economics in Kenya. One that is independent and rich in raw insights from the horse's mouth. We've completed a successful pilot and see this as a natural vertical to introduce. Influencers are incentivized to fill in surveys where they share useful insights. An example is a recent one we ran on the perception on 18-29 year olds on banking brands in Kenya. Super valuable insights came out of that one!

7) Distribution of marketing budgets: Marketing budgets are huge. 2019 digital marketing spend in Kenya was $244 million. $ 1.2 Billion is the marketing budget as a whole if you include the spend on traditional media. What if we could take a portion of this and distribute it in the hands of "millions of marketers?" This is exactly what Wowzi is doing if you think about it from a macro-scale.

8) Make the pie bigger: In addition to getting our hands on the existing marketing budget, we are making the pie bigger by activating the SME market. 98% of businesses in Kenya are SMEs. Most of them will never afford the traditional means of marketing. Before Wowzi, they were left alone to navigate the complex world of digital marketing. The result was most of them simply ended up not spending on marketing. With only $50 dollars, an SME can get up to 37 influencers helping them push their brands.

Feel free to reach out to me if you are a young Kenyan, looking for a new way to earn from leveraging your social media accounts. An asset that you have spent a long time developing.

We are the ones we've been waiting for! Let's build a prosperous future together!

All the best,

Mike

Email:[email protected]

Tel: +254723764118