Formulating Agency Work Strategy for Clients

Formulating Agency Work Strategy for Clients

Introduction

In general, marketing means creating value for its product or service. Advertising in business is a part of marketing communication that is used to encourage, or manipulate and communicate our audience to take or continue to take some action.

Advertising is normally done by a third party known as advertising agency. An advertising agency is a service based business dedicated to creating, planning, and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client’s products or services. An agency can also handle overall marketing and branding strategies and sales promotions for its clients. Types of ad agencies are

• Full service agencies
• Creative agencies
• Specialized agencies
•  In-house agencies
•  Digital agencies or new media agencies

This report is completely discussing about digital or new media agencies. There was a time when Television was the most popular medium for Marketer to promote, spread awareness and generate leads for their products but now the trend has changed and Digital media has taken its place. Main reason for this change was

• Traditional methods are expensive. Compared to digital marketing channels, you could end up spending thousands of dollars more. In this report, an example is given based on this issue.
• Traditional marketing channels fail to provide instant feedback and reports about who saw or heard an ad, and took action. This data is collected long after the initial ad impression is made (and still then, the statistics are far from exact numbers).

Digital marketing, on the other hand, refers to marketing methods that allow organizations to see how a campaign is performing in real-time, such as what is being viewed, how often, how long, as well as other statistics such as sales conversions.

Digital Media Marketing or Digital Marketing

The term ‘digital marketing’ was first used in the 1990s. In the 2000s and the 2010s, digital marketing became more sophisticated as an effective way to create a relationship with the consumer that has depth and relevance.

Digital marketing is defined as “marketing that makes use of electronic devices such as personal computers, smart phones, cell phones, tablets and game consoles to engage with customers. Digital marketing applies technologies or platforms such as websites, e-mail, apps (classic and mobile) and social networks”.

Peoples often referred digital marketing as ‘online marketing’ or ‘internet marketing’ but it’s wrong. Digital marketing revolves around the Internet, which explains why people tend to believe that digital marketing and Internet marketing are synonymous. Nonetheless, they are different. Internet marketing falls under the category of digital marketing. Internet marketing encompasses digital marketing services such as search engine optimization, display advertising, and email marketing.

BACKGROUND OF COOKIE JAR LTD

Asiatic Events Marketing Ltd also known as AEML is a Dhaka based interactive marketing communication firm dedicated to serving its clients to meet their business objectives and effective market communication practices. It is the leading agency of the country and mainly prioritizes below the line activity from activation to events and direct marketing; newly added Digital (Online marketing). It is under the 360 communication plan of Asiatic group. Aly Zaker and Sara Zaker are the founding members of the agency and it got its operative license from the internationally recognized JWT agency. AEML has been in operation from 1993 and have had huge success rate in the field on BTL (Below the Line) communications since its inception. One of their biggest achievements was to arrange ICC Cricket World Cup which was held in Bangladesh. More than 80 clients are currently having account with Asiatic for all their BTL campaign, activation, events as well as their direct marketing.

The newly added digital wing of Asiatic Events Marketing Ltd was created to cater the demands of the digital and social media marketing for it clients and the name of this digital wing is “Cookie Jar Ltd”. It is one of the first mover companies in Bangladesh market in digital marketing. Currently it is operating one of the biggest brand Facebook page in Bangladesh which is Bondhu Garage of Grameen Phone. It started its operation in digital marketing in 2012 however from January 2013 it started social media marketing for the brand page Aortal Buzz and now it is one of the biggest social media marketing firms of Bangladesh with a semiannually turnover of 1corer taka.

Services offered by Cookie Jar LTD:

Content Management:

We manage contents like image, link, video posts for Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Here it also includes copy writing for the post and post creative creation.

Development:

The word “Innovation” means a lot in our company. Our pool of developers work fast and deliver top end solutions. From a simple landing page to an extensive three dimensional browser game, we are capable of delivering them all.

Online Advertising:

We are always making sure that our contents are good enough to add a value to the timeline of the people the moment they come across it. In Addition, on the other hand we have the ‘difference maker’, which we call Media Campaign Management. With this magical power we can predetermine who do we want to see our contents, when, how many times, in which touch points, and everything.

Relationship Management:

We like to think of ourselves as the voice of the brands we work for. We ensure that we understand what our clients are all about, through and through; and do the regular talking with the customers in a way that would not only earn and maintain goodwill for our clients, but also drive business conversions from the satisfied customers.

Campaign Management:

We run several types of campaigns in order to get more likes, people talking about this, impression and reach. We maintain the campaign with our own strategies. These campaigns can be competitions arranged to engage online customers and give better brand experience. For Example: Recently Square is sunning “Super MOM Selfie Contest”. One month back, we were running “Cholo Bangladesh Crazy Fan Selfie Contest “by GP etc.

The departments working within Cookie Jar Ltd

There are basically four departments in the company. The digital client service department is the one which maintains liaison with the clients, the creative department is the one that fulfills the requirements of the client’s needs and other departments ensure smooth functionality of the organization.

The mission of these departments is to ensure smooth and quality digital social media communication service to their clients. As a result, the digital social media service should increase brand awareness, increase brand communication reach, provide quality online consumer experience and drive them to online and physical stores to generate sales and profit for the firm.

HR Department

This department helps to find out the best people, who can suits with this organization. This department also motivates the employees in various ways.

1. a) Recruiting of new employees is their concern.
2. b) Training and development of the interns are going in a good way is also their concerns.
3. c) Compensation, employee benefit, leave and service rules program and up gradation
4. d) Placement and performance appraisal of employees
5. e) Preparing related reports
6. f) Reporting to the Executive Committee/ Board on related matters.

Digital Client Service Department

The basic function of the client service department is to maintain relationship with the clients and prospects. This is the heart of digital agency. They communicate the thought of both the parties, brands and customers’. They are one of the most important parts of AEML as well because they are the persons who find out the things customer needs and finding the need is one of the most useful ways to keep the client happy. This department is the heart of the whole organization and it co-ordinates within the functions of the various department in the agency.

This department of Cookie Jar Ltd is also important for research purpose. This gives some important information to the AEML authority, like

1. Effectiveness of the digital communication campaign
2. Customer reaction and feedback about the digital communication campaign
3. Finding out the reasons that makes communication campaign fail to have more reach or engagement and brand experience.

This information helps AEML authority to take decisions like

1. Whether AEML digital plan works for the client or not?
2. What type of digital communication campaign is needed to help develop more effective communication campaign?
3. What was the success of the campaign?
4. What change is needed in the campaign? etc.

Creative Department

This is the mind of the organization because it is them whom make Cookie Jar Ltd popular and effective to the clients. They perform certain acts. Some of them are given below.

1. Developing copy for communication on social media
2. Developing weekly post calendar for communication for social media
3. Designing the post creative for digital communication
4. Visualizing the idea of campaign and contest
5. Finalizing layout etc.
6. Google advertisement, Facebook advertisement design adoption of foreign ad ideas according to the prescription by the client in case of multinational advertisement campaign.

Finance Department

The finance department of Cookie Jar Ltd functions like finance department from any other business organization. They do budgeting for any digital communication campaign and contest as well as for online promotion and advertisement campaign.

PROJECT TOPIC (How agency work tale behind a brief).

SUMMARY

I have worked here under client service department. Therefore, the most important part of client service department is to get brief from client and pitch them, make creative, run campaign etc. At the very beginning there will be a short description of the project. After that, the objective, methodology and limitations will be discussed. Then I will discuss the process that is how agency works when they get the brief from the client. In this time, BRAC Bank is our client.

This part contains the total strategic planning that we did for our client and also the result that we got after running this one month campaign. Finally, this report will end with conclusion as a summary of the most important part of this whole project.

DESCRIPTION OF THE PROJECT:

This is the most important part of the report. Here, I mainly discuss about how we work after getting a brief from our clients. For this, I have chosen BRAC Bank for which we launched whole Ramadan campaign. This project report starts with understanding the brief of our client.

OBJECTIVES

• To know the whole process of making plan for clients.
• To know the effectiveness of digital marketing in this competitive era.
• To know the importance of digital marketing for brands.

Reason for not implementing that Ramadan Campaign:

Product Relevant Customers:

Search: This is mainly based on searching with key words. For example, we are searching car loan in Google. Then Google automatically show us car loan in BRAC Bank. Here, we could not do it because BRAC bank website does not provide well information that may help audience to get enough information.

Mobile: BRAC Bank web site is not user friendly in mobile. If it would be, we could show ad to them who uses internet with smart phone.

Email: They do not have proper database that shows us specific information about the client.

Here, we could not make a direct communication with customers. BRAC Bank handled customers through comment replying. Therefore, Clients sometime could not get their answer of queries on time that may cause dissatisfaction of customer.

STRATEGIC PLAN OF PROJECT

Strategy definition was defined in Wikipedia as “Strategy is a high level plan to achieve one or more goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the “art of the general”, it included several subsets of skills including “tactics”, siege craft, logistics etc. the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in East Roman terminology. Now, we are going to describe every three stages of the strategic plan of BRAC Bank Ramadan Campaign that we did to make the campaign successful.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE:

The first stage of this strategy is targeting the right people who are actually our audience. Here, our targeted audiences are both male and female whose age is 24 to above 24. As this offer is only for the card holders of BRAC BANK, we targeted all mid-level to upper level employee who actually attend clubs, attends various social parties, frequent Restaurant visitor, travels abroad and their interest is in Posh brands, Shopping, Exotic Food, Fine Dining. We planned to target them in two different ways. One is by FB targeting and the other one is GDN targeting.

TRGETING RIGHT PEOPLE IN FACEBOOK

Here, based on above category, we can target our audience by showing Facebook post or face book multiple add.

1. Facebook post: There are two things in a face book post. One is creative and another one is post copy. For the post of superstore, we can write, BRAC BANK is offering Tk300 cash back up to your purchase at 3000tk to enjoy this Eid with your family, in our post copy. In addition, creative may contains the picture of meat or vegetables or spices that are available in superstore to grab the attention of our customer.
2. Facebook Multiple add: Here, we can add at least 3 to 5 different post together in one post and also can give five different website link that directly take our audience to land on that website link. The main benefit of this is we can add different links for our different products.

FYI: Sample of Facebook post and multiple add post is provided in the appendix section.

THE RIGHT ACTION

• Total Reach: This is the amount of unique people our communications are exposed to. It says that after boosting a post, how many audiences actually reached in our post.
• Impressions: The number of times the communications been shown to the audience. It shows how many times we reached the same person for our post.
• Engagement: Number of clicks, likes, comments and shares by the audience. We can see this at the bottom of our post.

BUDGETING

If client likes our plan, we send budget to them. After that, there is a negotiation between client and us. When both parties agree with the budget, we execute the plan. Budgeting falls under finance or operating management. After completing the planning, client service department takes is to the operation and finance department. Then, Finance department makes the budget. Here, the budget for BRAC Bank Ramadan Campaign is given.

ANALYSIS

Here, we did an assumption. Suppose, BRAC Banks has 100,000 customers and they send at least 3 SMS to per person. That means per month they send 300,000 SMS that cost 300,000*.60= 180000*12=2,160,000. Now, if they would spend this amount of money, impression would have been served to 25,000,000 people and for each people, the impression would have done for 256 tome where BRAC Bank is reaching to one person in a year for 36 (3*12) times.

Audience Reached:

• Content that we uploaded during this Ramadan, we got 1.4 million reach from this. It means that 1.4 million people saw our contents, posts and ad. Among these, 557,056 people reached by face book post promotion and 842,981 people reached by multiproduct promotion.

For face book post, each people got to know about our post 2.38 times and for multi ad, frequency was 1.11.

Post Engagement:

Post Engagement means how many likes, comment, shares, photo views and website clicks we actually got. Here, we can see from post promotion, our engagement was higher. It is 118,989 and likes are 85,777. However, website clicks is higher in post engagement section that is 34,449.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION

Our result from this campaign was positive. We could increase post engagement, page likes and page impression. Here, all are given below-

• We could reach to 1.4 million people during 1.5 month to aware them about this offer.
• The number of times People liked, shared, commented our contents are 157,083.
• Our achievement is that after is campaign, BRAC Bank is now going to be our regular client.
• BRAC Bank official Facebook page became a strong communication for its audience.
• We could increase the visited rate of audience for their website.

CONCLUSION

The successful completion of this internship indicates that the future of marketing is in the hands of digital. Digital marketing is not only concerned with placing ads in portals, it consists of integrated services and integrated channels. Marketers want to use these components in an effective way to reach target groups and to build a brand. In this digital era, marketer is not the custodian for a brand; people who are connected across the digital platforms are the custodians.

Brands want to build their presence over digital platform, because customers have high affinity towards digital media than other media’s. More than that customers are highly information seekers and digital media is the only platform for two way communication between brands and customers.

Digital media is the best platform to convert a product to a brand. Because it is more cost effective and it provides lot of touch points to marketer. Brands can able to engage their target group in an effective way through digital platforms. Digital media is not only for engagement, brands can increase their customers or they can retain their existing customers. Digital platforms help to increase the impact of brand recall in target groups.

The research focused on the how digital marketing works. Consumers are highly information seeker and they will do research about a product before going to a retail shop. Therefore, brands want to give platforms to consumers to understand their product or to get a really feel of that brand.

I honestly believe that this project report will be at most useful for marketers to understand the digital marketing and also to plan for future strategies. I conclude my research by quoting again that “Brands must pursue digital platform”.