Digital marketing is the future and Markopolo.ai will take you there

Why do we launch organisations or companies? 

When Tasfia Tasbin, CEO and founder of Markopolo.ai, asked me that question, I did not know the answer. So she saved me by giving one herself - "To solve problems. And that is what we do at Markopolo.ai, we solve marketing problems for business owners."

Her answer made sense. So what is Markopolo.ai and what does it do?

Markopolo.AI is a digital marketing agency based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is a B2B service provider that forks out digital marketing solutions to online businesses and content creators. Unlike a traditional marketing agency, Markopolo.ai is more data-driven and personalised. 

Formed in 2020 amid the pandemic, the company has provided services to more than 40 entrepreneurs, e-commerce, and f-commerce businesses. 

The core team members of Markopolo.ai (L-R, 2nd row) COO Rubaiyat Farhan, CEO Tasfia Tasbin, and CTO Mubtaseem Zaman along with other members. Photo: Courtesy

Problem-solving is the key

"I was always interested in solving problems from an early age. Throughout my undergrad journey, I was heavily involved in robotics and debate. I wanted to be the bridge between tech and management; solve problems for businesses fast and efficiently," Tasfia said. 

That is what Markopolo.AI does now. Markopolo serves the whole advertising pipeline, starting from strategy creation, ad creation, to ad posting and optimisation. They design and choose different strategies for entrepreneurs and clients. These services consist of automated caption generators, AI-generated creatives for branding (graphics, motion graphics) campaign analytics, social media marketing boosting, and so on.

"For example, one of our clients, Booksfare, an online bookstore, needed static advertisement content. While Fleetjoin, a travel agency, needed copywriting for their promotions," added Tasfia. 

That means creating high quality captions for messages they will be posting on different platforms, and visual copies they can use on their designs. Tasfia said Markopolo uses GPT-3 powered caption-writing technology that can generate ten variants for each caption.

Automated caption generator and social-media analytics - these two are the most popular services among their Bangladeshi customers.

Their pricing has four categories - free basic plans cost USD79 a month, advanced plan costs USD149 a month, and enterprise plan has custom pricing, as the contents and strategies are custom-made for this category. 

Digital marketing is the future

While explaining the market, a former client of Markopolo - Anisul Islam Bhuiyan, an advertisement professional and a digital marketeer himself said, "Bigger organisations have their own marketing team or they hire top marketing agencies like Grey or Magnito Digital. But what about small and medium entrepreneurs? They cannot afford to have a physical store, advertise or hire a marketing team. That is where digital marketers come in."

Instead of having a physical store or an establishment, these entrepreneurs might have an online store, a website, social media pages, etc. For maintaining the business they will need the basic components of digital marketing - a digital poster, graphics content, social media platform-based boosting, adverts, captions, marketing plans, and special campaigns on different occasions. 

Now every business wants to have a digital presence because "the world is moving towards digitalisation and more and more jobs are going to be taken by AI technologies. So no wonder digital marketing is the future," said Anisur. 

Then you have the Covid-19 pandemic, which has pushed businesses to the point of struggle where now they must move to a complete digital platform for advertising.  

On 25 June, Markopolo.ai launched its first official website publicly on Product Hunt, the world's biggest software showcasing platform. Tasfia said that within six hours of launching the website, they got more than 200 subscribers from 19 different countries. 

Currently, Markopolo.ai is a 10-members team. Tasfia Tasbin is the CEO who is a sales and marketing expert, Mubtaseem Zaman is the CTO who is a machine learning engineer and backend developer, and Rubaiyat Farhan is the COO who is also the product manager and designer. 

The Markopolo.ai team also has several interns and is planning to hire international advisors, as they intend to venture into the international market. The founders onboarded marketing veteran Kazi Monirul Kabir as an advisor. He is the founder of Spider Digital Innovation, the country director of Httppool, and has previously worked for Google, BAT, and Telenor, among others. 

So how does more than 200 subscribers/clients vs 10-members team work? 

"That is the beauty of artificial intelligence," Tasfia said. "AI technology can produce content and optimise campaigns once we give the commands and necessary inputs. That is why it is not actually about having a lot of workers, like traditional work-spaces." Besides, they are taking help from Hubspot and other software as well. 

The company wants to promote its "Made in Bangladesh" AI-based software on the global platform. Bangladesh is not just about poor villages, floods, or such ideas. "It is time we take ourselves as efficient tech generators.