Launch aids brands to step into digital era

Many businesses are moving from the traditional operations models into an era of digital marketing. Ambitious youth, Modiri Mogende is an entrepreneur, digital marketing expert and media marketer, who embraced the opportunity to take a step into this era with Launch, a digital marketing firm.

The company offers digital marketing and social media strategy, online crisis communications preparation and management, marketing digitisation and training.

Established in 2018, Mogende, a former journalist, said their ambition at Launch is to help digitally transform marketing teams and create seamless, mutually beneficial online interactions locally. “The world of communication and connection has drastically shifted to online. In a previous role with one of the leading banks, I had the opportunity to see how marketing has the potential to integrate with services and sales to ultimately deliver a delightful customer experience through the use of online platforms, web and social media,” he said.

Currently, they have a diverse clientele ranging from corporate, large scale manufacturers, parastatals, telecommunications; mining companies mainly looking to take their marketing through a digital transformation. “Our industry is significantly saturated with legacy marketing consultancies and agencies and freelancers. We, however, differentiate ourselves by being digital transformation partners that can help optimise marketing teams,” he said.

Further, Mogende said the future for marketing and public communications is for brands to be more intuitive and provide their service experience online, which he said, provides an opportunity for growth in their industry by marrying technology and marketing,” he said.

“The reality is that driving awareness and public messaging is shifting. Our publics have moved online, they are more discerning and demand a personalised service experience from brands,” he said. However, he said one of the biggest challenges they face as an industry is being given low budgets to produce miracles.

“Some of the challenges we face are not unique to us but to the industry as a whole. For the longest time, marketing and PR budgets have always been the first place organisations would cut when times are tough.

However, in digitising and going online, managing your brand has become even more critical. This presents a challenge as we now have fewer budgets to work with,” he said.

Mogender said digital transformation is not an IT only conversation, it is also relevant to marketing and communications, so it is important for organisations to adequately capacitate their teams to adjust their brand management to a digitised world.

He said this will help grow the value of marketing investment and bring much-needed metrics for return on investment.

“Our long term objective is to move marketing from a cost centre to a revenue relevant centre.”

“Our industry is significantly saturated with legacy marketing consultancies and agencies and

freelancers.