ipH Iakovos Photiades Foodstuff Suppliers Ltd. is the agent and distributor of over 50 leading chilled, dry and frozen brands in the Cyprus retail market and covers the complete needs of establishments in the HORECA section.The company is a trusted partner for many international FMCG companies that have assigned it with the handling, distribution and management of their brands. ipH asked Base Element to undertake work  for the Arla Food brands in Cyprus (Arla & Lurpak).

Arla Foods is an international cooperative based in Viby, Denmark, and the largest producer of dairy products in Scandinavia. It consists of 19,000 employees across 30 countries and 12,000 dairy farm owners in Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Arla’s global revenues in 2016 were 9.6 billion euros and it produced 13.9 billion kilos of milk.

Arla is currently undertaking a digital shift on a global scale by centralising its digital operations so that all their partner agencies around the world can have access to the same content and can share their ideas and best practices.

In its effort to safeguard its brands’ image and gain more control of its digital promotion function, Arla has centralised the process on a global scale by setting specific guidelines that expand on content creation, digital campaigns and the KPIs every local marketing operation must meet.

Arla has a rule that every local agency can use 80% of the content that already exists in the global inventory and 20% of localized content. In addition, Arla gives specific directions and has specific objectives and KPIs (engagement, reach, etc.) that every local agency must attain.

However, the quantification of every KPI is decided in cooperation with the local agency that has to work on its own projection, execute the digital marketing plan and subsequently report on the projection it had previously provided.

In addition, every agency can decide on the elements of the Digital Marketing mix as long as it can reach the objectives that it had previously agreed upon with the local Arla marketing team.

Our job is to increase successfully the consumer’s awareness and engagement with Arla brands in Cyprus.

The most important aspect of working with Arla is gaining a clear understanding of the potential local consumer/user of the products and combining its global resources with our unique knowledge of the local market.  We did extensive research in order to determine and quantify the consumer segments that would be more interested in Arla products. In addition, we researched the media that these consumer segments would prefer and the ways to localise Arla content for the Cypriot consumer.

 Our proposal, which has been implemented, consisted of a full-scale, performance-oriented digital marketing plan that entails:

• The buyer personas that we will target
• The content that we will post (within the 80-20 Arla rule)
• The different platforms that we will use to reach the consumer
• The budget that is needed
• The quantifiable results on which we will report back to Arla.

In a nutshell, we sized the relevant audience for the Cypriot market and based our research on the target audience and on a specific budget given to us by the local company.  Furthermore, we quantified the specific KPIs that we are going to achieve through our digital marketing campaigns.