What is your vision of marketing in relation to your role in the company?
My vision is certainly oriented towards the growth of Bofrost but in recent years, especially after the pandemic, there has been a transformation of the vision in which we have placed the customer at the center of everything. All company strategies are aimed at this new objective, so we are focusing heavily on customer satisfaction with a specific focus on the digitalisation of many internal processes to support and improve sales. We care a lot about external marketing but even more so about internal marketing. Bofrost has 2400 employees who are continuously informed and updated to contribute to clear and progress-oriented communication.
What was your path to taking on a senior role in marketing?
I studied foreign trade at the Treviso undergraduate degree, so my path initially did not concern marketing, after which I completed the two-year management course at Ca' Foscari. Once I finished my master's degree, after 3 company internships, I enrolled in a social media marketing course which then allowed me to join Bofrost because, at that time, the company was looking for a figure who followed the digital aspect. Now I deal entirely with the digital part together with an e-commerce specialist colleague and two other colleagues who follow the offline marketing part but each of us manages transversal projects in addition to the primary role, thus giving us the possibility to vary the activities and contaminate ourselves with a lot of information.
Which social platform is more in line with your business model and which is less?
Definitely Facebook because Bofrost's main target resides on this platform and it is the social network where we find the most interactions. In recent years, Instagram has also been emerging because it is the perfect environment for food for everything related to the content marketing aspect, which is why we have started to adopt a Reel strategy which is bringing significant growth. The platform least in line with the company is Tik Tok, where there was also a collaboration with Stardust House which produced enormous growth in followers but with clearly an audience that was not targeted. We always try to approach all channels to test the impact of the brand in visibility but Bofrost is a purely commercial company so most of the actions are aimed at sales.
What do social media represent and how much do they matter for your company today?
Currently direct sales cover 84% of the turnover, 14% concerns telemarketing while online only accounts for 1% so the social ecosystem is important but certainly not the core of Bofrost today. For us, digital marketing is not just social media, site and app but the entire digitalisation of the company to fluidly transmit information. Our salespeople are of different age groups, which means that the training of new recruits is completely different and much more digital than salespeople with less recent expertise. Bofrost's management has a long-term vision and, although everyone within the company is well aware that the core is not online, everyone has a vision oriented towards the importance of digital.
Given the growing relevance of the world of social media, combined with the multitude of activities reserved for the marketing office, have you ever thought about entrusting your company's social pages to professionals?
Before I joined Bofrost, social media had always been managed entirely in outsourcing, including the graphics and website parts. After my onboarding we continue to work with agencies but not to delegate but to carry out a real transfer of skills internally. It is therefore not a full outsourcing, the customer service/care is internal but for everything else, from content marketing to the pay part, it is a 4-hand job, therefore half internal and half external: we like inclusive relationships.
What are the future corporate communication projects?
At the moment I am following the development of the digital flyer in order to allow users to book products quickly through a link. The booking enters directly into our management system, in doing so we approach the new generations by increasingly orienting ourselves towards environmental sustainability. The effectiveness of this project is the speed of the actions we can prepare, a paper flyer needs time to be designed unlike the digital one which instead allows us to exploit real time marketing for dedicated promotions and special products.