Changing The Game: Socialize Founder Akanksha Goel On The Evolution Of Her Digital Media Agency
For a company that started out as a one-woman show, Akanksha Goel, founder and Managing Director of Socialize, centers the company’s accolades to its team: “The truth is, an entrepreneur starts a business, but it is the team that makes it successful.” In 2010, Goel recalls launching the company at a time when social media was dubbed as “Web 2.0,” and social networks weren’t considered as marketing channels. Socialize sought to fill the gap in the market by being an agency that “could help brands connect with the region’s increasingly digitally savvy consumer, and harness the untapped potential of the then-emerging social platforms.”
With a clear vision of the solution, Goel set out “transliterating the vision into a tangible service offering that clients could understand.” The founder emphasizes on the significance of choosing the right people to “maintain the integrity, the purity, and thus the success of the Socialize value proposition,” and thus, has been closely involved in recruiting and onboarding talent. This selectiveness also extends to clients the company works with: “To win in a world that is rapidly changing, due to the disruptive forces of technology, brands need to be nimble. Nimble brands need agile agencies, and agility is impossible in an environment constrained with hierarchy or predefined bureaucracy. Our tight selection of clients and people enabled us to create an ecosystem of like-minded individuals, that came together to do great work, taking Socialize from just a startup to becoming one of the region’s most widely recognized independent agencies.”
The company’s first-mover advantage, says Goel, was the catalyst for their growth to being a one-stop shop for a client’s digital marketing needs. Building a strong foundation of “processdriven operations” was essential: “We’ve adopted a full-service-agency business model and built a truly integrated offering that covers everything from planning and ideation, to creative and technical execution, to social strategy and digital media buying.” With a 40-person strong team and a regional client base including Sony, General Mills, Mercedes- Benz, Bioderma, GEMS Education and Singapore Tourism, Socialize rose at a time when social platforms were being perceived as a way to interact with customers, and not as critical tools to drive business.
On its strategy, Goel explains, “Everything we know in marketing today started with the introduction of radio, and then television. These were the tools that allowed us to reach millions of potential customers, and we believed that if we could get our message in front of people- that motivational, emotional message that caused people to change their minds, that would create business results. Today, that is still true, but the platforms have changed. The message, the creative [content] is still important- but the single platform is no longer available for the single message. The platforms are fragmented across different digital and analog tools, with brands needing to tailor their message for the target audience and for the platform.""Finding the intersection between the appropriate message and ideal platform is key. And the most personal platform we have is mobile- especially in a region that has moved to mobile at record speed and spends more time within social networking apps than anywhere else in the world. This makes the social newsfeed the most valuable media entity for brands, to reach and engage potential customers. And this social newsfeed, is our playground. At Socialize, we help brands leverage social platforms and tools to effectively reach the right audience, with the right message, at the right time– and when done right, this has the power to instantly convert online social engagement into offline business actions.”
So, how has Socialize actually gone about doing this? Goel reveals its strategy to be something she calls “ART + SCIENCE.” “ART stands for thumb-stopping creative,” she says. “In a region where people spend so much time on mobile, a brand’s content/message/story needs to stand out while their audience is scrolling. Our creative team specializes in creating this content that is built for the mobile newsfeed. SCIENCE stands for innovative media, harnessing the power of real-time social data to target audiences with military precision, allowing our personalized messages to be seen by the right people, at scale– driving measurable business growth for clients.”
An example of Socialize’s modus operandi can be seen in a recent project it did for a client. For Mercedes-Benz Cars Middle East, Socialize created an automotive bilingual chatbot called Kamal that “brought the car showroom directly” to the Messenger app. Their target was the younger consumer who’d rather scroll through a newsfeed than through a showroom, while also placing a high importance on speed and convenience of communication- which is why Socialize decided on making use of a messaging app like Messenger for this project. Using AI and natural language processing, customers were able to make use of the chatbot to virtually explore the full range available from the automaker, and get model recommendations based on habits, among others, to get real-time personalized engagement.
Source: Entrepreneur.com
