Newscred Rebrands as Welcome: A New Era for Marketing Software

The company previously operating as NewsCred has been rebranded and now goes by the name Welcome.

According to co-founder and CEO Shafqat Islam, this change reflects a significant evolution in the company’s overall strategy. While formerly recognized as a content marketing firm, NewsCred has increasingly concentrated on developing a comprehensive software platform designed for marketers – a platform they themselves utilize.

This ultimately resulted in the sale of their content services division to Industry Dive, a business journalism organization, and its parent company, Falfurrias Capital Partners, earlier this year. Now, Welcome is formally introducing its new brand identity, which will also be used for its innovative marketing orchestration software.

“It’s a rare opportunity for a company like ours to conclude one phase and begin another,” Islam stated. “We essentially returned to a stage similar to a Series A or Series B startup, focusing on iterative development and close collaboration with our customer base.”

Although today marks the official launch of the Welcome platform, Islam explained that the company has been steering the software in this direction for the past year, and this segment of the business has already experienced substantial growth, with daily active users increasing by 300% compared to the previous year.

Islam also indicated that while the timing felt right for a new company name, the possibility had been discussed on numerous occasions in the past.

“With each funding round over the last decade, new investors would invariably ask, ‘What about the name? Should we consider a change?’ ” he recalled. “We were unable to proceed with a change previously, due to the established content legacy and existing brand recognition. However, with this transaction and the launch of the new software, we arrived at the name Welcome.”

Despite the abundance of marketing software currently available, Islam believes marketers require an orchestration system to effectively manage their projects and workflows – many of whom, he says, are currently relying on “general” project management tools like Asana or Jira that aren’t specifically tailored to their requirements.

“Marketing professionals have unique needs,” Islam said. “For instance, marketers operate with campaigns, so the system needs to accommodate specific campaigns, marketing briefs, and marketing-focused processes. Our goal was to develop a solution specifically for marketers, rather than a broadly applicable one.”

He also highlighted that “nearly half of the engineering team is dedicated to addressing interoperability,” ensuring Welcome can seamlessly integrate with other marketing tools, such as HubSpot and Marketo. The ultimate aim, Islam explained, is to become a standard tool for marketers, much like Salesforce is for sales teams.

Islam also believes Welcome will benefit from the accelerated changes in enterprise sales processes brought about by the pandemic.

“I am convinced that the way software is purchased is evolving,” he said. “While traditional methods of client entertainment and selling to CMOs still exist, they are no longer the preferred approach for everyone.”

To accommodate this shift, Islam stated the startup is adopting a more “bottom-up” sales strategy, with a free version of the platform scheduled for release next month.