Marketing honours students became ‘buddies’ for industry client

Posted on December 19, 2022

In today’s dynamic marketing environment, digital marketing skills are in high demand, considering the rapidly changing digital environment that the world currently operates in. As part of a social responsibility project, the Marketing Management honours students were tasked with creating a digital marketing strategy for BackaBuddy, a South African non-profit organisation. This organisation (backabuddy.co.za) hosts a crowdfunding platform that assists individuals to raise funds for causes they are passionate about. To date, the organisation has raised funds for over 39 811 causes.

The project was facilitated by Michelle du Plessis (lecturer) in collaboration with the BackaBuddy team: Catherine du Plooy (Chief Operating Officer), Zane Groenewald (Public Relations and Marketing Manager) and Simbulele Jezile (Marketing Co-ordinator). As part of the community engagement aspect of the Marketing in Practice module, the students were required to review the organisation’s current digital marketing efforts, offer suggestions for improvement and propose a digital marketing strategy for 2022/2023 while keeping specific marketing objectives in mind.

The students were given the opportunity to develop and describe a theme for an overall campaign, including the design of a catchy slogan, hashtags or other creative ideas. They learnt how to develop SMART goals to measure the effectiveness of the campaign, select appropriate social media channels and motivate their choices. They also had to consider the potential use of Google networks and discuss aspects such as ad groups, keywords, ad wordings, use of images and/or video, and so forth. Finally, they had to provide a detailed budget for each aspect of their campaign, all while keeping the overall marketing objectives in mind.

These marketing objectives were to attract new campaign creators to the website, to increase overall awareness of medical-related campaigns, to boost donations, to increase social following and engagement on Facebook and Instagram, and to expand the digital footprint of backabuddy.co.za on Google. In meeting the aforementioned objectives, the students were given the opportunity to learn valuable digital marketing skills while working with a ‘real-life’ client.

A further challenge given to the students was to present their suggested campaign strategies to the client via the Zoom platform and to demonstrate their creativity by presenting their ideas within this online environment.

On Tuesday, 2 August 2022, with many nerves but also much excitement, the honours students presented their digital marketing campaign strategies to BackaBuddy. Needless to say, the client was more than impressed!

Catherine du Plooy, the Chief Operations Officer at Backabuddy, stated that she was blown away by the students’ presentations. Every group, consisting of four to five students, presented unique and creative ideas and themes. The client has already started implementing some of their suggestions.

"Congratulations to the students on their excellent work. A special thank you also to the lecturer, Michelle du Plessis, a digital marketing specialist and recently qualified Meta Certified Marketing Associate, for sharing her practical experience and knowledge with our students. Thank you also to the team from BackaBuddy for their eager involvement with the students and enhancing their learning process".

Below are screengrabs and edited images from the top performing teams: