Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Digital Talents is an innovative platform and a hybrid digital agency that connects digital marketing students with small business entrepreneurs, with the help of experienced mentors, professors and marketing experts from Algebra school and Drap agency, to work on real projects for clients. Students engaged in the Digital Talents project will design all the aspects of digital presence for companies, and will make it easier and more efficient for them to achieve their business goals.
The reason for launching this agency was simple – small businesses are simply not in the focus of full service agencies, and students want as many opportunities as possible for practical implementation of the knowledge they acquired during the final years of studies. This example of collaboration between education and economy is one of the few of its kind in Croatia, and is certainly the first in the field of digital marketing.
After successfully completing the undergraduate study program, such as in design of interaction systems, marketing on search engines and advertising networks, as well as social media and social networks, the students, with initial mentor support, are able to provide basic digital services – design of user web experience, development of goals and conversion paths, deployment of web sites based on CMS systems, Google AdWords account setup and campaign management, social networking strategy proposal, Facebook and Instagram advertising, and other digital services. In doing that, students are mentored primarily in the segment of business skills, project management, and customer relationship management because they successfully mastered professional and technical knowledge in the digital advertising segment through their studies.
The Digital Talents project is led by Mario Fraculj, head of the Department of Economics and a lecturer at the undergraduate and graduate digital marketing studies at Algebra. Before his arrival in Algebra, Mario was the CEO of McCann Zagreb, and head of marketing at Kraš. Now he is bringing his rich marketing experience into the Digital Talents project.
“There are many small and medium-sized businesses that can improve their business processes and improve their market position by introducing digital products and services and using stronger digital communication channels. This is a new form of collaboration between the educational sector and the marketing industry, and we have not found anything like this in our environment. There are freelancing platforms at the world level, such as Toptal, but this is primarily a virtual organization that connects large clients with experienced independent professionals, designers, developers and financial experts on complex projects. By launching the Digital Talents platform, on the one hand we recognize this situation in the market that effectively makes it hard for small businesses to hire digital agencies, and on the other hand we are opening new opportunities for our students,” Mario Fraculj said.
“The agency job is demanding, and a large amount of theoretical knowledge, creativity and practical experience is needed to be able to do even seemingly simple projects. You will find it difficult to acquire all the necessary knowledge and skills solely by attending classes or studying independently. Student practice proved to be an extremely effective tool to address this problem, but the current system has a lot of challenges. On the other hand, there is a large range of jobs that senior students can do with proper supervision, for example, many small businesses do not have adequate websites and basic search engine and social campaigns, because such jobs are simply too small for the already low number of digital agencies on the market,” said Davor Runje, founder and director of the Drap Digital Agency.
“The solution to these two issues is a platform that connects clients and students interested in meeting this market need, in parallel with learning and mentoring from their professors and agency professionals. Students are connected to potential clients and mentored not only in technical but business skills as well, all without being detrimental for their responsibilities at the university. Such platforms will be a standard in the future and I am very proud of the fact that we have found a partner in Algebra for this visionary project,” emphasized Runje.
