Degree

Master of Business Administration

Faculty / School

School of Business Studies (SBS)

Advisor

Ms. Varsha Deepak, Visiting Faculty, Department of Marketing

Project Coordinator (Internal)

Ms. Mohini Mayur, Project Reviewer, Department of Marketing

Project Coordinator (External)

Mr.Samir Amir, Director Research, Pakistan Business Council

Client

Pakistan Business Council

Project Type

MBA Research Project

Keywords

Digital Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Strategy

Abstract / Summary

Pakistan Business Council (PBC) is a research-based business policy advocacy organization which could be involved in the debate on taxation, trade, exports, industrial competitiveness, investment, work force and economic reform development in Pakistan. Although it has been able to produce credible research and regularly engages top business leaders, policymakers, researchers and experts in the field of its work, PBC has not consistently been able to show the quality or policy relevance of its institutional work in its social media presence. Its online communication has been mostly disjointed, intermittent and concentrated on reporting and documenting events and incidents instead of being proactive in communicating their sense to various audiences. The capstone project was adopted to find out the current situation in the sphere of social media outreach at PBC and create an effective communication plan that might lead to the successful dissemination of research, involvement of stakeholders, and institutional recognition. The project assessed the performance of PBC on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook; compared its communication efforts with local and global standards; determined platform and content gaps; defined priority audiences; and created actionable content calendars, carousel ideas, implementation suggestions, and performance metrics. There were primary and secondary inputs to the project. The client brief, discussions and feedback given by PBC and the communication received throughout the project were the primary inputs. The publicly visible social media accounts of PBC, the engagement indicators that are publicly visible, PBC reports that have been used to develop the content, and social media pages of the selected benchmark organizations were the secondary sources. The audit covered the quantitative analysis of the number of followers, views, likes, comments, reposts and frequency of posting and qualitative analysis of content formats, captions, hooks, calls to action, visual consistency, platform adaptation, quality of titles and relevance to the audience. OICCI, FICCI India, Dubai Chambers and Pakistan and Counting were chosen as benchmarks as they provided some excellent information on the positioning of the institution, the frequency of the publications, the frequency of the types of content and access to economic communication.

The audit concluded that the key weakness of PBC was that there was no regular system of publishing and distribution and no lack of credible content. PBC already has treasured policy reports, descriptions of events, comments of the experts, interviews with

the stakeholders and research findings. However, these resources are barely transformed into forms which can be transformed into responding to the behavior and expectations of the audiences in different platforms. This will transform social media more of a report of institutional action than the building of the advocacy and knowledge-sharing role of PBC. The channel analysis revealed that PBC had several problems in the channels.

YouTube was becoming more of an institutional repository of long-form narratives of events. The audit discovered that the 51 long-form videos had 4,488 views and 88 views per video on average and 2,728 views and 227.3 views per video on average on 12 Shorts. This showed enhanced performance of short form content and showed the worth of converting entire events into searchable clips, Shorts, playlists and speaker-led extracts.

The least developed platform of PBC was Instagram and the number of followers was low; there was no active posting and no comment on the posts was read. Its more successful Reels, though, showed that well-known speakers and business problems that might be framed would be of interest. Facebook was well-established with approximately 4,560-page likes, but the number of followers was increasing at a slow pace, and activity was low, and this implies that the existing audience was not active. The social media followers of PBC were greatest in X/Twitter (approximately 15,470 followers) although the interaction was very poor. The posts were highly reliant on the external links and had hardly any meaningful reply, reposts, quotes or bookmarks. The most suitable option to reach the core audience of PBC, which is comprised of corporate leaders, policymakers, economists, researchers, and institutional stakeholders, was LinkedIn, which has about 8,800 followers. Its potential as a thought leadership platform was however killed by the irregular publishing and lack of columns of repeat content.

These findings were reinforced by the benchmarking exercise. OICCI got to know the importance of positioning the institution; FICCI India got to know the importance of being continuous and at scale; Dubai Chambers got to know the importance of making technical economic content more accessible with stronger hooks, shorter explanations, and explicit calls to action; and Pakistan & Counting got to know the importance of making technical economic content more accessible with stronger hooks, shorter explanations, and explicit calls to action. All these comparisons confirmed that PBC does not have to come up with completely new material to enhance its performance. It ought to package and distribute its existing research and event material better.

The project, therefore, recommends that PBC should look at social media as

systematic publishing, and a broadening of its policy advocacy position. LinkedIn will be the first platform that will be given priority as it will be used in institutional thought leadership, research summaries, professional carousals, event insights and policy recommendations. Policies, native threads, data points, live event coverage and engagement with journalists, economists, researchers, policymakers and other interested parties will be commented on using X/Twitter. YouTube needs to be informative and a source of short­form content, and Instagram and Facebook need to be augmented with explainers, Reels, video snippets, and visual summaries.

The proposed plan is broken down into 6 content pillars such as Policy Insight,

Report Highlights, Economic Explainers, Event Takeaways, Business Voice and Reform Agenda. The project also developed LinkedIn and X/Twitter content calendar and research-based carousel ideas on issues such as REER dynamics, budget reform, market access, border inefficiencies, and workforce development. They proposed a carousel format, which can be reused - hook, context, evidence, implication, recommendation, and call to action - to make technical research readable in the form of easily digestible content without compromising its credibility.

It is suggested to be implemented in a 90-day plan of phases. The first one must be to establish content pillars, templates, ownership and approval processes. The latter one is to test frequent LinkedIn and X/Twitter posting. The third one is to be carousel, thread, quotation cards and short clips report and event repurpose extension. The last step must be to check performance and update the following quarterly calendar. The metrics to gauge progress should be consistency, engagement, video performance, follower growth, link activity, call to action responses, and platform-specific results, as opposed to the number of followers.

This project concludes that PBC does not need to take an informal or marketing role to improve its performance on social media. It needs to be written more clearly, have more powerful opening messages, regular schedule, platform roles, more frequent use of native formats, and frequent performance review. These suggestions will assist PBC in making its research more noticeable and reach priority stakeholders and actively participate in the economic and policy discussion in Pakistan.

Keywords: Digital Marketing, Pakistan Business Council, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Strategy, Marketing Plan, Digital Transformation

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