Business & Money | Thursday 17 November, 2016 4:22 pm |

The Digital Marketing Summit – Outreach 2016 successfully concluded its second edition today at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Dubai. The two-day event featured a diverse line up of more than 40 marketing experts, entrepreneurs and influencers from major local and international organizations, such as Twitter, Coca-Cola, DHL, Landmark, Sky News Arabia, Careem, Fetchr, Uber, Visa, Nissan Motors and Sharjah Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

 

The Start Up Rap session on the second day of the summit hosted some of the most prolific entrepreneurs who ran successful digital campaigns that effectively put their brand on top of their respective industry verticals. Ex P&G marketer turned career coach, Samia Hasan, Founder of Direction Dose spoke about her journey from building brands to becoming a brand by leveraging the power of social media and search. From his side, Gaurav Agarwal, Head of Digital Marketing at EsyBuy.com, commented: “The UAE market is more about "build to show build to grow" and that's why social media plays the most important role in defining the overall digital marketing strategy. Search Engine Marketing, on the other hand, plays more of a catalyst”.

 

As social media increasingly finds popularity with government agencies as a channel of 'digital governance', it is interesting to note that citizen engagement through social media is at an all time high. Roland Abi Najem, a Digital Marketing Consultant for the Ministry of Information in Kuwait, believes social media is here to stay. Najem added: “The concept of a two-way communication created by social media   will stay forever, it is up to the marketers to master this concept and lead on or become obsolete in this new digital age'. Roland also spoke about the impact of social media on governance and how it's affecting the citizen-government relationship.

 

The conference highlighted the biggest social media challenges for businesses and how to understand and measure the true value of various social media channels. Targeting customers in the right channel at the right time is key to harnessing the power of social media while generating new business. Pradeep Chopra, Member at SEMPO spoke on frameworks that help in multiplying revenue through social media marketing. He mentioned the tremendous growth, digital marketing has witnessed in the UAE that is being leveraged by organizations to acquire new customers.

 

One of the key highlights of the second day was the Coca Cola case study on real-time marketing by Rafael Prandini, Real Time & Commercial Experiences Director at Coca Cola. Rafael said “The Coca-Cola strategy is evolving year by year. Our real time marketing focuses on being agile, closer to the consumer's pulse and savvier in a way that we invest in our brands in today's digital landscape. The Rio Olympics 2016 was a great opportunity to showcase the huge impact that our real-time marketing capability can have on brand-building and in 'in-the-moment' sales”.

 

Outreach 2016 – The Digital Marketing Summit is organized by Fleming, and sponsored by Lithium, IBM, Latitude, Skyhigh, Xebec, Addbloom, Exaalgia and Uber. The second day of the summit will witness highly anticipated Coca-Cola and Nissan case studies along with the Start-up Rap which will host Dubai's leading startup founders who will discuss strategies that found success in the Middle East market.