Evaluating the effectiveness of digital content marketing on a premium automotive lubricant brand

Abstract

This report was written based on the internship experience, including the findings of the research undertaken during a three-month placement in the marketing department of ACI Motors PLC, the team in charge of the digital marketing of Liqui Moly Bangladesh through which Liqui Moly is distributed in Bangladesh solely by ACI Motors. This internship was done as a part of the Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) programme requirement and the report is organized in 2 parts that are interconnected i.e. a discussion of the internship experience and a research project on the effectiveness of digital content marketing done by the brand. Through the internship, I became part of the daily operations of the marketing department of Liqui Moly Bangladesh and assisted with content planning, writing captions, scheduling social media postings, monitoring performance, and coordinating functions across the organization. The position offered practical insight into the reality of operating a premium brand in an online setting in a competitive environment sensitive to price, where the brand would have to constantly prove itself to be a premium brand, without driving away the economically sensitive market by its content having to convey messages about quality, technical know-how and the German engineering roots. In addition to the usual assignments, I was able to create a content performance tracking system within Microsoft Excel, I also assisted in competitor observation briefs and also in campaign review meetings that provided me a research aspect of this report. A combination of a practical finding that inspired the creation of the research project covered in the paper titled “Evaluating the Effectiveness of Digital Content Marketing on a Premium Automotive Lubricant Brand” is based on the fact that the brand has an active digital presence and consistently produces content, but the annotations of the effectiveness of this content had been only informal and haphazard. No formal mechanism was in place to know what types of content and what themes create the most response among the audience, or whether the content portfolio was on treating the brand within the premium positioning goals. This gap posed a risk (redistributed creative resources, possible weakening of the brand positioning) but also an opportunity (the possibility to make a data-driven baseline upon the refinement of the content strategy). The research design used was descriptive and evaluative based on mixed methods orientation. The engagement data (likes, comments, shares, and engagement rates) was quantitatively measured to all 47 organic posts posted on Facebook in the course of the observation and correlated with the qualitative measurements of the content qualities, visual quality, correlative consistency, and brand congruency. The content formats (static image, video, carousel, reel) and the categories of content theme (product feature, educational, promotional, lifestyle, event, testimonial) were identified and categorized using a designed Content Evaluation Framework. The results of the engagements were counted using an Engagement Performance Matrix. The three directional hypotheses and one exploratory research question were based on the literature on digital marketing and brand management and were used to carry out the analysis.