Rajitha Dahanayake, entrepreneur, pioneer of digital marketing in Sri Lanka and Founder and Chief Executive Officer of eMarketingEye, reflects on the journey into a global company with aspirations to expand into North America, Australia and the Middle East.

As eMarketingEye completes its 16th year in February 2023, Dahanayake explains how the company, throughout its journey, assiduously maintained its focus on a niche segment, hospitality, with a strong presence in the Southeast Asian market with a majority of its clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, etc.

“In terms of vision, we aim to become a regional player. In the South Asian and Asian markets, we are well known. But now we want to be a global player and the go-to company for digital marketing primarily for the global hospitality industry,” he said in this interview with Echelon.

Excerpts of the interview are as follows:

Can you give us a brief overview of the tech industry and its challenges? How is eMarketingEye responding to those challenges?

I prefer to approach this from an opportunities perspective as every chance for growth presents challenges to overcome in order to make it a reality. There are several opportunities emerging for tech companies in several areas. For instance, tech companies are increasingly looking at shifting large portions of their operations from developed markets to emerging markets, particularly in Asia like Sri Lanka and India, because they find it more profitable.

For eMarketingEye specifically, being a company that focuses more on the travel and hospitality industry, there are many opportunities ahead; although there is talk of a global recession, research shows that people are looking at taking travel very seriously, so we can expect a boom, especially from the pent-up post-Covid demand.

Globally, if the recession deepens, we expect tech companies to lay off staff, which would be an opportunity for tech companies based in developing countries like Sri Lanka and India. Also, with the Covid pandemic in Sri Lanka, things have become more digital and people have become more tech-savvy, so there is increased demand for digitalization that has opened more opportunities for tech companies like us.

Global tourism numbers are also improving to pre-pandemic levels already for markets like the Maldives and the Middle East, and our clients are already looking at tapping into these opportunities. With more work coming our way, the challenge would be finding the right talent, something most tech companies will face globally.

From a Sri Lankan point of view, as people migrate to overcome the economic challenges here at home, many tech companies, including eMarketingEye, will face a severe talent crunch. To overcome that challenge and strengthen our processes to become more agile and efficient, we are looking at things like AI as well as hiring more people and training them to be ready for the emerging growth in demand.

eMarketingEye has pioneered digital marketing and found success globally. When you reflect on the company’s journey thus far, what are those critical ingredients behind your success?

We work with hotels, and their biggest problem is reducing the cost of distribution and getting more direct bookings. We partner with them to find a solution which can be building a website, running digital campaigns for them or giving them suggestions on what kind of offers they should come up with, what campaigns they need to run, and the channels and mediums they should focus on.

eMarketingEye brings more than an agency perspective to the table: we are more like an extended team, and our relationships with our clients are long-term, some going back more than a decade. In the case of some clients, we’ve grown with them, like for example, certain hotel chains whom we started working with when they were just five hotels, now have 200 properties and still work with eMarketingEye.

That’s from the client’s perspective. The other side is how we look at talent because we are a service organization. We’ve been investing in processes and systems and at the same time invested a lot in people by way of training and making sure they stay longer with us so that they are more knowledgeable about the industry and what has to happen. We also try to source people with passion rather than just talent.

In addition, we diligently keep abreast of advancements in technology, maintaining good relationships with the partners in our industry like Google and Facebook to better serve our customers. For instance, when there’s a beta version out from Google for a particular advertising technique or platform, we get to try it out on our clients at the very early stages.

Employees care about aspiring for a higher purpose. How would you define your company’s purpose?

The purpose of any organization is to make a difference to its stakeholders, be it clients, the people around us, our families or even the country. We always talk about this in terms of why we exist, if it’s just to make money, it wouldn’t make any difference. For example, if we take clients, we make sure that we work with them as partners to solve their problems, while in terms of employees, we want to provide them with a platform to be innovative and learn something while contributing to the company and making sure that they have a work-life balance. Meanwhile, from the company’s point of view, we need to make sure that we are more sustainable and profitable so that we can expand and contribute to the country’s economy.

What are your plans for growth?

In terms of building the business, there’s a lot of talk about AI in the market which I think will have a greater impact on our industry since AI can play a huge role in certain areas. There will also be changes on the platform such as Google and all other big players as well. We are looking to expand into new markets geographically as well. We currently touch 45 countries across the world encompassing South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, the Middle East, etc, and are looking at more aggressive expansions into Australia and the Middle East. We are additionally looking at expanding to non-hotel-related verticals such as restaurants, E-commerce, and finance and exploring opportunities in the North American markets primarily through partnerships.