For good quality, you need to be slightly more premium than the others: Manas Gulati

Established in 2013, #ARM Worldwide is a renowned digital advertising and marketing communications enterprise that specialises in developing and implementing digital strategies. As a growth-driven agency, ARM Worldwide focuses on driving measurable results and maximizing the return on investment (ROI) for its clients. They use data-driven insights, analytics, and performance tracking to optimize their marketing campaigns and continuously improve the outcomes.

In conversation with Adgully, Manas Gulati, CEO, #ARM Worldwide, shares about the company’s growth vision and mission, as well as the company's future roadmap, the ICE model, maintaining a premium offering and greater emphasis on quality.

How has the decade-long journey of #ARM Worldwide been?

Our decade-long journey has been filled with multiple learning experiences. We started off with positioning ourselves as a media-centric, media-buying, and selling-centric organisation. With marketing always being an integrated solution, it is imperative that organisations deploy separate teams to manage different services, such as a separate team to manage social media content, tech integrations and developments, and more. Keeping up with this, we have now divided our entire service offerings into 3 parts – Content, Conversion, & Convergence. Content, in multiple formats like social media, long-form, short-form, and video, helps communicate the right message of clients to the right audience. Conversion, including media planning & buying, and SEO, is driven with the content that is created. Convergence is where we have a mix of technology. We have separate teams & separate PNLs for all of them. These 3 parts majorly contribute to the success of our unwavering efforts for clients.

During COVID, all the malls & marketplaces were shut. Since we had a lot of retail clients, this heavily impacted us. With this pandemic, most of the businesses wanted to find their way into the online ecosystem. Taking this into consideration, we decided to launch our vertical, armCommerce, that primarily looks after the entire D2C journey for all categories of clients – not just doing sales online, but also from a discoverability standpoint. Furthermore, another thriving sector during that time was Sports, which led to the rise of ARMstrong Sports, which takes care of everything related to sports & gaming. Additionally, we have expanded our horizon to Europe, Dubai, & Singapore, which are a regular source of revenue for us.

ARM Worldwide has been using the ICE model for a while now. Could you elaborate on that?

The ICE model was initially adopted to prioritise internal growth & communication. In ICE, ‘I’ stands for investment/investors, which help in getting new business onboard. ‘C’ stands for customer satisfaction, which implies keeping the customer at the centre of what we do. We ensure to gauge whether all the services that we offer are up to the mark in terms of the KPI setting. Lastly, ‘E’ stands for engagement. All these central parameters contribute to the KPI setting. We have ensured that the entire ICE model works in a manner that people are ranking themselves in terms of what they did.

What are the key factors that are assisting in the growth of ARM Worldwide?

There are multiple key factors that contribute to the growth of #ARM Worldwide. One of them is doing an interesting tie-up with Meta, to manage the clients well. Adding to this, we recently entered into a partnership with SAP, where we will be assisting them in the sale of their products. To foster a community of growth mindset, we engage with multiple organisations for training and development. Lastly, we use Basecamp for project management, where we keep sharing the learnings from different times at one place which can be implemented for various other projects.

How do you differentiate your brand amid the clutter and competition in the market?

In today's highly competitive market, where numerous brands vie for consumer attention, we have taken proactive measures to differentiate our brand from others. We go beyond being mere digital execution partners. We function as business consultants, partnering with brands to drive their growth objectives, supported with research, strategy,  well defined execution process, analytics & data processing. 

Blending technology & communication, our capabilities extend beyond influencer marketing, media buying and planning, encompassing SEO and content creation on a global scale, establishing us as niche experts in the industry. From crafting digital journeys to driving impactful marketing strategies, we have been at the forefront of delivering business results. We ensure that the quality of service we bring to the table for clients becomes a great differentiator for the business.