Digital Marketing agency wants to internationalize their business to Central Europe and the United States, without neglecting the Portuguese market, and retail is the business area where they have more experience.” (Article in Portuguese).
Wise Pirates, digital marketing agency, has recorded exponential growth in the last two years. The company, founded in 2017 by Pedro Barbosa and Daniela Cunha, went from a business worth one million euros to five million and from a portfolio of 50 clients to 200. To respond to the increase, it was crucial to strengthen the team and recruit around 70 new employees. And the whole accelerated escalation of activity stemmed from the need for companies to brand and strengthen their presence in the digital universe.
“With the pandemic, it became obvious to most companies the urgency of investing in digital” and, as Wise Pirates already had a consolidated position in the area, it was selected “by a relevant number” of clients, explains Pedro Barbosa. The agency ended up contributing so that “the national ecosystem maintained its dynamics and managed to secure sales, even in the face of the constraints inherent to the pandemic and the respective mitigation measures”. As the CEO underlines, “more than 200 companies that, in the space of a few weeks, now have a solid, consolidated and operational presence in e-commerce”.
But, after all, what does Wise Pirates do? The activity of the agency, based in Porto, is centred on the definition, implementation and operationalisation of multichannel communication strategies and digital performance. For this, it offers a wide range of services such as marketing automation, e-commerce end to end, marketplaces, customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP), search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM), and also social media and email marketing campaigns. All focused on the definition and measurement of digital metrics.
These services have already won over Banco Santander, Worten, Parfois, Hôma, Mo, Tranquilidade, and Sacoor, but also clients of quite different sizes and positioning. Although the work of Wise Pirates obeys confidentiality criteria, there is one that was very popular and was even highlighted internationally in a Google article: the digital campaign for the internationalization of the masks marketed by Mo. As Pedro Barbosa tells us, the retailer of the Sonae group “went, in the space of a month, from a not very international brand to a very strong presence in some of the most competitive markets of the continent, such as Spain, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom”. And this path was ensured through a digital strategy focused on performance analysis, on constantly listening to the market and on the evolution of sales in each geography, and on working together with Mo’s internal team.
Retail is the most represented activity in the client portfolio but, in the current technological era, there is no sector “that does not have advantages in leveraging its presence in digital”, emphasizes Pedro Barbosa. “We are all witnessing the migration of consumers and businesses, even from a B2B perspective, to digital, so the lack of a professional and effective presence in this area results in significant losses for any organization,” he says. In his opinion, the biggest opportunities in Portugal are in the digitalization of industry and SMEs, in areas such as health, services, and entertainment.
Although Wise Pirates remains focused on Portugal and the national business ecosystem, where there is still much to do, Pedro Barbosa projects for this year’s growth through strategic partnerships in Central Europe and the USA, without a physical presence. For now, his international activities are focused on the Swiss, Spanish, and French markets. In Switzerland, the first country where the agency internationalized its business, it has eight clients. The investment required local staff and the opening of an office in Zurich to meet the demands of the market, although much of the work is done from Portugal. The international area is worth 10% of sales, with forecasts pointing to a weight of 25% in 2023.
Article by Dinheiro Vivo
