Written by Samiyah Nur Hasyimah and Nur Hawa Shafiqa
Isobar is one of the digital agencies that provide its clients with variety of business strategies planning. Isobar main objective is to guarantee its clients’ delight by offering them the best at their service. Isobar creates “Ideas without Limits” and provides the clients with strategies of no boundaries. Isobar is the digital marketing agency that was founded in 2003 that headquartered in London. It has won 250 awards in 2016 from all around the world and it is a part of the Dentsu Aegis Network, where it is wholly owned subsidiary of Dentsu Inc.
Isobar in Malaysia is managed by Ben Chew. He acts as a managing director, assisted by two others, San Yen Liew and Birdie Ting. Dentsu Isobar is a full-service digital agency that offers one-stop solutions to meet the need for increasingly sophisticated and diverse digital marketing. Isobar helps clients to reach their goals by combining various solutions to facilitate communication between corporations and consumers.
Mr. Ham Maghazehe, our interviewee is the Head of Social Media in Isobar Malaysia. He graduated in Masters’ Degree in Communication. His major is advertising. Isobar plays its role in combining creative, strategic, technology and brand commerce expertise to deliver positive business transformation for brands including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Enterprise, Google, GM, Huawei, Kellogg’s and P&G.
Isobar’s method in communication planning is divided into three elements. The elements are listening and planning as well as engaging its audiences. The plan starts by monitoring its clients’ social media. While monitoring the clients’ social media, the data of its audiences would be analyzed and from there, they will try to understand their audiences’ demand.
Once Isobar’s staff monitored the audiences, they will begin to come out with the objectives related to what client desired. In order to achieve the objectives listed, they require a number of specific strategies and context.
Afterwards, Dentsu Isobar engages its audience by creating contents that fulfill audience’s demand to ensure the message received successfully to the audiences. Once the content had been published, they will start their connection and try to make conversation with the audiences through the social media.
Dentsu Isobar provides its clients with business planning strategy development. One of the strategies is to run a campaign to get connection with its audiences. Apart from that, Dentsu Isobar does user research communication planning to gain new followers as well as to keep in entertaining the existing followers. This creative agency is a platform for solution development, service and platform development and the client’s technology partners. It is also a product development and gives innovation support to its clients.
The key players are important in determining the market space which is dominated by five different companies which are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace. MySpace was the big players in the social media marketplace long before Facebook has been introduced among society. However, MySpace has not been able to keep up with the rapid growth of social media sites.
There are three main key players for Isobar’s clients which are Facebook, followed by Instagram and Twitter. Isobar uses Facebook as their main campaign to market and advertise its client’s products. Although Facebook is not preferable social sites among youngsters, its main social sites used is Facebook because it is suitable for every product campaigns.
It posts a few contents on Twitter because it is not their main platform in order to engage its audiences even though Twitter is popular among Malay audiences. Instagram is a platform used by them to reach higher audiences instead of depending on Facebook only.
In developing social media presence, there are four basic steps that social media manager need to fulfill. The four basic steps are engaging the audience, content development, promote and evaluate.
In addition, Isobar staffs also make efforts to communicate with the audiences. They give response on their client’s behalf concerning all complaints and questions they got from the social sites. However, Mr. Ham said that should they could not answer some of the questions from the audiences, they will refer to their clients to avoid conflicts in future.
According to Mr. Ham, the contents that were created are based on the discussion after liaising with their client. Once they get the approval from the clients, they will brief the creative team on how to create the creative content for their client in order to make sure it is interactive and suitable for their audience. He also mentioned the creative content that was created is photos, videos and GIF.
He added that the process of managing Facebook fan page will be handled by Social Media Executive to monitor the contents whether it is effective or not for their target audience. If it does not work, they have to liaise with client on the strategy in developing the content.
The promotion method that has been used by Isobar Malaysia in promoting the page and engaging with the target audience is through paid and organic social media. The paid advertisement requires the advertiser to pay small amount to Facebook site where Facebook ads play its role by crossing the newsfeed of target audience that has been set up by the advertiser.
Isobar had mentioned that they use TalkWalker as their tool of evaluation in order to investigate what social media users talking about the brands or products through social listening. TalkWalker has been used by brands and agencies from all around the world where it plays it roles in monitoring and analyzing the online conversations on social networks.
On the other hand, Socialbakers software plays its role to monitor the Facebook page for their client’s page whether the Facebook page performance is good or otherwise. The function of the software is the same as Google Analytic but it is specific on the analysis of Fan Pages activities through Facebook plug-ins.
This circumstance has opened the opportunity towards social media owners to take this advantage by providing space for advertiser to advertise their product and brand by setting up a campaign through social media platform in order to get engaged and be seen by many.
Other than that, social media is an alternative platform for advertiser to advertise their advertisement with efficiency in targeting the audience and it also provides the reasonable price where the advertiser can post the advertisement anytime they feel suitable with their target audience time. Thus, it shows that social media has its capabilities in helping the advertiser to get engaged with target audience and also helps in managing the audience through its networks.