KOMO DIGITAL'S NEW PLATFORM: DRIVING ENGAGEMENT AT ALL LEVELS
An interview with Joel Steel, CEO and Founder, Komo Digital
By Marc Roufeil, Head of APAC & EMEA, Sports Tech World Series
Fans today have more choice than ever when it comes to what content they want to consume, when they want to consume it, and what platform they want to consume it on; so how do you stand out? How do you create real engagement, or drive measurable value for your sponsors?
Perth-based startup, Komo Digital, believe their all-in-one engagement platform is the answer, and they may be onto something! Their new platform is already gaining traction in sport with recent announcements including a partnership with Golf Digest Australia, West Coast Fever, and a 12-month partnership with Softball Australia. However, when you dig deeper you start to see the value the platform can provide outside of sport, to any organisation with a defined community, and the brands that support that community.
We sat down with CEO and Founder, Joel Steel, to find out how they are achieving this, and what the real potential of the platform is.
“Our engagement platform allows you to easily create an online ecosystem where your community can engage with interactive, gamified content/competitions and allows you to incentivise and reward them with personalised digital coupons and prizes. The intuitive technology allows you to create and launch interactive digital campaigns quickly and reward customers instantly while at the same time gathering rich data and non-intrusive market research.”
The central hub at the heart of the Komo platform creates an online ecosystem that enables the subscriber to seamlessly create new content, websites, interactive quizzes, games, and more. Subscribers can also customise the hub to align with their branding, provide personalised digital coupons to users, and make edits and updates in real-time. This makes the platform essentially ‘plug-and-play’, a campaign can be set up once in-house and it can run itself.
This simplicity means that the platform is a legitimate alternative to outsourcing digital content campaigns to an agency, or building a larger team internally to achieve the same results. That means it has the potential to reduce overheads for larger organisations, and open up new opportunities for smaller organisations that previously could not afford the existing options.
“Its one overarching platform made up of multiple products that are built to complement each other to create the ultimate relationship between your online community and your brand… It’s your one stop shop, your ecosystem to send your community to engage with interactive and gamified content and competitions. ”
The purpose of the platform is also very clear, it’s not designed to replace existing community platforms like Facebook or Instagram, it integrates with them. For example, you create new gamified content on the Komo platform, and this content has it’s own unique URL that can then be used, and shared across multiple social media platforms. What this means is your brand, and your content, can be wherever the fans are, or wherever the community gathers. This is essential when it comes to breaking down the barriers between fan and brand, you cannot force them to come to you, you need to be where they are.
The final piece of the engagement puzzle is personalisation, and how it can improve the user experience, and create benefits for the brand, and sponsors. This is where Komo’s unique gamified content comes into play, driving brand awareness, and creating opportunities to conduct non-intrusive market research that can then drive future personalisation.
“It is all built on a “Fan Experience first” philosophy, making sure the end user doesn’t feel like they are being sold to and then using the non-intrusive data and market research collected to instantly create a more personalised experience for the fan… We do a very good job of walking the line between user experience first and generating outstanding commercial benefits for our partners.”
An example of this end-to-end experience could be a simple quiz, with the question “What’s your favourite coke drink?”. What the user selects will then be used to personalise their digital coupon within the Komo platform; select Sprite, and your coupon will be for one Sprite. As the sponsor Coca Cola could then take this a step further and tag the users answer, and use this for future personalised marketing based on the user selection.
It’s this deep engagement, and non-intrusive data collection that’s so exciting for a sports industry that is currently struggling to add, measure, or increase value to sponsors. It’s also why Komo are starting to see the sponsors themselves investing in the platform, seeing it as essential to making the most of any sponsorship. For example, Leading global sports broker, Marsh have added the Komo platform to their partnership with Golf Australia, seeing Komo as a way to add value to above and beyond the existing investment, and to gather first party data and help golf Australia learn more about the 1.2million casual golfers in Australia.
Kirsten Mills, National Manager, Sport, Marsh
“The non-intrusive market research and the ability to engage with our sporting client audience gives us the edge when it comes to innovative partner solutions / value adding proposition – we feel like this platform is fresh and allows us to experiment on a number of levels when learning and providing value to a community”
We can’t ignore the fact that in 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, an organisations ability to truly engage with their fans, or community, has never been more difficult, but at the same time it has never been more important. Komo’s digital platform has the potential to create this engagement in a low-cost way, that has the added benefit of creating new, or increased revenue opportunities through more valuable sponsorships, with real-world measurable outcomes for sponsors.
Want to explore Komo’s platform? Check out these live client hubs:
West Coast Fever – https://feverfanhub.komo.site/
Shopping Centre News (SCN) – https://scnhub.shoppingcentrenews.com.au/
Golf Digest Australia – https://scnhub.shoppingcentrenews.com.au/
Partners Hub – https://partners.komo.site
