Everything peopleask before theyget in touch.
33 questions, answered in full rather than deflected to a call. If yours isn't here, WhatsApp is the fastest way to get a person on it.
Getting started
What actually happens between reading this page and having someone working on your account.
How do I start working with Magnetic Keys?
Book the free audit. Thirty minutes on a call, then a written five-page plan inside 72 hours: your priorities in order, what each one costs in effort, the likely return, and a straight answer on whether an agency is even the right thing to spend this money on. The plan is yours whether you hire us or not. If a fixed-price package already covers what you need, book it from the pricing page and skip the call entirely.
What do you need from me before the first call?
Nothing. Most of the first call is us asking what you have tried and what happened. If you want more out of it, give us read-only access to your analytics and ad accounts beforehand and we'll turn up with findings instead of questions.
How quickly can you start?
Fixed-price packages usually start one to two weeks after signature. Embedded operators take two to four weeks, because placing someone genuinely right takes longer than placing someone merely available. If an agency promises you a senior UAE operator by Monday, ask which account they're pulling them off.
Do you work with businesses outside the UAE?
Yes. Most of our work is UAE and GCC, with active engagements in Saudi Arabia, India, the UK and the US. The UAE and GCC is where our market knowledge is genuinely differentiated; elsewhere we compete on craft rather than local insight, and we'll tell you which situation you're in.
What is the smallest engagement you take?
AED 18,000, as a one-off project. For ongoing work the floor is about AED 15,000 a month — below that there isn't enough senior time in the engagement to move your numbers, and a good freelancer will serve you better. We'd rather say that now than after two calls.
AI and automation
What AI really does inside a business, what it costs, and where it has no business being.
What should a UAE business automate with AI first?
Lead response, before anything else. UAE buyers message three suppliers in one sitting and expect a WhatsApp reply in minutes, so the gap between an enquiry landing and a human answering it is the most expensive number in most businesses here. Automate the acknowledgement, the two questions everyone asks, one qualifying question, then hand to a person — that alone tends to double contact rates. After that, in order: quotes and proposals, content, reporting, and only then forecasting.
How much does AI automation cost in the UAE?
A single well-scoped automation — lead routing, proposal assembly, a reporting pipeline — typically costs AED 18,000 to 45,000 to build and AED 400 to 2,500 a month to run. A connected set covering a whole function runs AED 90,000 to 250,000. Model usage itself is rarely the cost; integration, data cleanup and the human review step are, and integration alone is usually about 60% of a first project.
How long before an AI automation pays for itself?
Most single automations pay back in two to five months. The calculation is runs per month multiplied by minutes saved per run, divided by 60, multiplied by your fully loaded hourly cost. The variable that dominates is frequency: if a process runs fewer than roughly twenty times a week, payback is usually measured in years and we'll tell you not to automate it.
What is the difference between AI automation, an AI agent and a chatbot?
Automation follows fixed rules you wrote and produces the same output every time, which makes it auditable and cheap. A chatbot holds a conversation within a bounded scope — it answers, it doesn't act. An AI agent is given a goal rather than a script and chooses its own sequence of tool calls to reach it, which makes it powerful for branching problems and non-deterministic by nature. Most businesses asking for an agent need automation.
Will AI replace my marketing team?
No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. What changes is the ratio of production to judgement. Repetitive production compresses three to ten times, so a smaller team ships far more — but deciding what to make, what to kill, and what is actually true stays human, and gets more valuable rather than less. The people who get hurt are the ones whose whole contribution was volume.
Is our data safe if you install AI systems?
We build inside your accounts, with your keys, under your retention settings, and hand over the logic in writing. For anything touching personal data we work to the UAE Personal Data Protection Law: a stated lawful basis, data minimisation, and no customer data used to train a third-party model. If a vendor can't tell you which model provider sees what, and whether that provider trains on it, that's your answer.
What shouldn't we automate?
Anything where being wrong is expensive and being slow is cheap: contracts, pricing exceptions, regulated or medical claims. The first real conversation with a high-value client, because that's where trust is either built or lost. Cultural judgement calls, especially bilingual ones. And anything you could not explain to a customer who asked how the decision got made.
Do you build the automation, or just advise on it?
We build it, in your accounts, and hand it over. The logic, the prompts and the flows are yours to read, change, or take to someone else. An automation living in a supplier's account with prompts you have never seen is a black box you rent — you can't debug it and you can't move it.
AI in marketing
The ones that return money, the ones that return time, and the ones that mostly return a good demo.
Which AI marketing applications actually work?
Four reliably return money: creative volume for paid media, lead qualification and routing, lifecycle personalisation, and listening at scale across both languages. Three reliably return time rather than money: reporting assembly, first drafts, and research. Three mostly return a demo: fully autonomous campaign management, AI-written thought leadership published unedited, and predictive models built on tracking that was never trustworthy in the first place.
Will AI-written content hurt my search rankings?
Not because a model wrote it. Search systems reward content that's helpful, original and sourced, however it was produced. It hurts you when it's unedited, ungrounded and indistinguishable from everyone else's — which describes most of it. The pipeline matters more than the model: a written voice spec, retrieval that grounds every claim in your own material, and a named editor allowed to throw the piece away.
What is AEO, and is it different from SEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation is being cited by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — rather than ranked in a list of links. It overlaps heavily with good SEO but rewards different things: self-contained answers near the top of a page, committed specifics rather than hedged ranges, clean structured data, and being mentioned on sources those systems already trust. A page that says 'it depends' is unquotable, and unquotable pages don't get cited.
How do you measure whether AI is being cited about my brand?
You prompt at scale and count. Define the prompts a buyer would actually type, run them repeatedly across the major assistants, and record whether you appear, in what position, and whether you're cited by name or merely described. It's the emerging equivalent of rank tracking, and unlike rank tracking almost nobody is doing it yet in this market.
Can AI write Arabic marketing copy that actually lands?
It writes fluent Arabic, and that's exactly the risk. Models default to Modern Standard Arabic — the register of news broadcasts — which reads formal and distant in Gulf consumer contexts. The training data also skews Egyptian and Levantine, so 'conversational Arabic' often turns up with an accent a Gulf reader hears immediately. Usable with a native Gulf editor in the loop. Not usable without one.
Pricing and commercials
Published prices, stated exclusions, and the questions most agencies would rather you didn't ask.
How much does digital marketing cost in Dubai?
Roughly three bands. AED 5,000 to 15,000 a month buys a single channel from a freelancer or small agency, usually executed by someone junior. AED 15,000 to 45,000 buys a multi-channel agency retainer with strategy and a senior person accountable, which is where most growth-stage UAE businesses land. AED 45,000 to 120,000 and above buys a full embedded function. Media spend, production, tooling and website builds sit outside all three.
Why do you publish prices when most agencies don't?
Because hiding them wastes everyone's time. If you can't afford AED 18,000, you should discover that in ten seconds, not after two calls and a proposal. Publishing also forces us to define scope precisely — which is what makes a fixed price safe for you, rather than a number we can quietly reinterpret in month three.
Do you require long contracts?
No. Packages are one-off, and ongoing work runs on 30-day notice in both directions. If we aren't the smartest line on your P&L, you should be able to leave without arguing with a lawyer about it.
What isn't included in the retainer?
Media spend, paid direct to the platforms and typically two to five times the management fee. Production — studio days, video, photography, usually AED 8,000 to 25,000 per shoot. Tooling such as CRM, analytics and SEO platforms, often AED 2,000 to 8,000 a month. Website builds, which are a separate project. Influencer and creator fees, quoted per campaign. Every package page lists its exclusions as explicitly as its inclusions.
Do you offer performance-based pricing?
Where attribution is already trustworthy, yes — a reduced monthly fee plus upside tied to a metric we both control and can verify, such as qualified pipeline, contribution margin or payback period. Where the baseline can't be verified, we say so rather than agreeing to a number nobody can measure. An agency that accepts outcome pricing on untrustworthy data is either not reading the data or planning to argue about it later.
Working together
Who does the work, how you hear about it, and what happens when it's going badly.
Who actually works on my account?
Whoever scopes your engagement delivers it. No account-manager layer, no quiet handover to juniors once the ink dries. The team page names who is accountable and for what. When we bring in the wider network for specialist work we tell you who and why, rather than passing freelancers off as staff.
How often do you report?
Weekly, against the numbers that matter to your business rather than platform vanity metrics. Automated reporting assembly is one of the first things we install for ourselves, which is what makes weekly affordable — and weekly reporting changes what gets decided, which is the actual point.
What happens if it's not working?
You hear it from us before you spot it yourself, along with what we think is causing it and what we want to change. And if the honest answer is that the spend isn't returning and won't, we'll say so — walking away from work we can't move is cheaper for us than defending it for six months. That's why 30-day notice runs both ways.
Do you work in Arabic as well as English?
Yes, and as origination rather than translation. Arabic assets are written or adapted by native Gulf speakers, with the register chosen per context — Modern Standard for government-facing and formal communication, Khaleeji for consumer and direct response. Translated campaigns carry the English cultural frame, and the audience can tell.
Can you work with our existing in-house team?
That's most of what the embedded model is for. A senior operator sits inside your team, uses your tools, joins your standups and is accountable to your leadership, without the overhead of a permanent hire or the distance of a traditional retainer. It also tends to be how in-house teams learn the parts of the discipline they were missing.
The UAE market
What is actually different about marketing here, emirate by emirate.
Is marketing in Abu Dhabi different from Dubai?
Materially. Abu Dhabi buying skews toward government-adjacent and enterprise procurement, with longer cycles, more committee involvement and a stronger expectation of Arabic-first communication. Dubai moves faster, is more price-transparent and more crowded on paid media. Running a Dubai playbook unchanged in Abu Dhabi is the most common and most expensive mistake we see.
Which emirates do you cover?
All seven — Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah and Umm Al Quwain — each with its own page setting out what genuinely differs there: dominant sectors, free zones, language mix and where we'd start. For Umm Al Quwain in particular we'll often tell you local SEO beats paid media and that an agency may not be the right spend at all.
Do I really need Arabic content to compete in the UAE?
It depends on who buys from you. For government-adjacent, enterprise and much of the local family-business market, Arabic isn't optional. For expatriate-facing services in Dubai, English often carries most of the demand. The consistent finding is that Arabic search is far less competed than English across almost every category here, so where your buyers are Arabic-speaking it's usually the cheapest demand available.
Why does WhatsApp matter so much in the UAE?
Because it's where buyers actually reply. The sequence that converts here runs ad or search, landing page, WhatsApp, human — and funnels that force an email step in the middle lose people at it. Click-to-WhatsApp ads routinely beat form-based equivalents on cost per qualified conversation. The catch is attribution: unless a reference is passed into the conversation and stored in your CRM, the media that produced those deals looks like it produced nothing.
What does the UAE Personal Data Protection Law mean for my marketing?
In practice: a stated lawful basis for holding customer data, collecting only what you need, honouring deletion requests, and care with cross-border transfers. For marketing specifically it means consent for messaging that's real rather than assumed, purchased lists being a liability rather than an asset, and knowing which third parties see your customer data — including any AI provider in your pipeline.
Ask the one thatisn't on this page.
WhatsApp gets you a person, usually inside the hour during UAE business hours. Or book the free audit and get a written five-page plan within 72 hours — yours whether you hire us or not.