by MarkLives (@marklives) Our new online and mobile tool, Ramify.biz, has been launched to help connect South African brands and marketers to ad agencies, using a freemium model. The objective is to help marketers and entrepreneurs grow their businesses’ brands through easy access to info concerning relevant advertising and marketing communication partners.
The service also extends to service providers and suppliers for agencies, allowing ad agency execs to find project partners, based upon skill sets, to expand project capacity. We believe this will result in growth for small agencies and startups. Smaller and mid-sized brands — or even larger brands with very hands-on marketing execs — will also benefit from using the service.
- Marketers: Register as a site member (no public listing, enables shortlist and comparison data saves)
- Agencies: Register your agency (full service through to specialists) so marketers may find your profile
- Agency suppliers: Register your business so agency execs may find your profile
Democratising and empowering
We believe agencies of all sizes should be able to list their information in a central resource, and that marketers should be able to access it free of charge. This empowers both parties and grows the industry.
Ramify.biz is not designed to replace pitch consultants but to allow marketers an alternative to what is often an expensive and time-consuming process. Many marketers are only familiar with a handful of ad agencies and, while databases with information on possible agency partners do exist, they are generally walled in as paid-for services. Thus we are democratising this information and empowering marketers to find short- and long-term agency partners — quickly.
How does it work?
- Marketers choose the skill sets they require (digital, PR, full-service, BTL etc)
- Our search results return a matching list of agency profiles
- Marketers then refine their search through a variety of options, including specifying
- BBBEE level
- revenue range
- experience in specific industry sectors
- network ownership vs independent ownership
- Marketers then shortlist the agencies/suppliers they prefer, and
- Pull comparative data for reviewing and saving.
Premium Profile
Ramify.biz offers its search functionality free of charge, encouraging marketers and agency decision-makers to make use of the information service. Agency profiles are free, too, encouraging the inclusion of the broadest possible range of agencies in the database.
But how do agencies stand out from the crowd? How do you increase the likelihood that you land upon a marketer’s shortlist? For an annual fee (R11 200), we add a company news service and portfolio to your profile, thus creating a premium profile. As a premium client, you will also receive boosted search visibility and additional exposure upon MarkLives.com.
Currently, the service is only available in South Africa but more African country markets will be added before the end of the year.
Proudly South African
Ramify.biz is a proudly South African initiative. We picked local development specialists, Swarm Digital, to build the service and then tapped into the UX design skills of Prakash Patel of Fogg Experiential Design Cape Town to map our user journeys. Finally, we contracted up-and-coming ad agency, Utopia, to develop our brand identity.
We believe that Ramify.biz will evolve into a critical business-acquisition tool for ad agencies and also allow them to inform the market as they expand their own service portfolios. It is also intended to make the job of procurement easier when it comes to pitching; instead of very broad requests of interest, marketers may now submit a pre-compiled shortlist to their procurement departments to kick off the process.
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