Interview with Jimmy Jakobsson, CEO and Co-Founder at Social Media Engagement Company: Ingager

Jimmy Jakobsson

Ingager is the largest Facebook specialist agency in Europe, focused exclusively on marketing solutions for Facebook and its connected platforms, including Instagram, Messenger WhatsApp and Workplace. The agency’s clients include well-known brands such as BMW, American Express and MINI.

Its mission is to help clients increase both sales and brand awareness through the use of data-driven digital marketing services based on proprietary technologies.

Ingager is part of the Northern European media group Egmont and has offices in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Berlin with over 75 employees. In 2020, the agency achieved its best result ever and turnover reached 16 million euros.
 
 
Ingager – The Industry Leader in Facebook Marketing.
 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I was working with Google Adwords back in 2007 when Facebook launched ads, which of course, immediately caught my attention. This was something new and unlike Adwords, it could actually drive consumer interest for a product and not just take care of interest that may have been created somewhere else.

I started to advertise and managed to get some amazing results straight away. There wasn’t much competition around, it was cheap and something new. So, I kept spending money on improving the platform and a couple of years later Facebook got in touch and asked us to start building an advertising tool on their new application programming interface (API). When we kicked off the project, I got to know a lot of great people from Facebook, both in Dublin and San Francisco, and saw an opportunity to create Ingager, a specialist agency. An agency that only focused on Facebook.

I didn’t do it on my own, my co-founder has, of course, played a big part but also my wife Jasmine Jakobsson. She is a successful marketing manager at one of the big European cell phone carriers, taught me a get-it-done approach and pushed me to start Ingager. Jasmine also helped Ingager to find its first office and first client – pretty important.

The growth of the platform and new opportunities like Instagram, Whatsapp, Messenger, and Workplace has been pretty good for us. The platform was young and the general opinion among marketers back in 2011 was that it was for branding and customer service – not sales. As a performance marketer, I saw it from another perspective. If I was able to reach millions of people and track how they interacted with the ads and webshops, I believed it was a performance channel. I still believe that, and today Facebook is a super important sales channel for thousands of businesses worldwide.
 

 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
Like a lot of businesses, everything was going well pre-pandemic and then when it hit, it was a very shaky first month where we lost several of our smaller clients. It was scary days! But we adapted quickly, and our management team worked really hard to communicate daily with co-workers and create a good remote working life for all of our employees at home.

We had a dip in sales for several months, but then we experienced a strong surge in growth for existing clients and have been fortunate to have taken on new clients. In fact, we’ve seen our best results ever over the past few months so it’s looking really positive for the future.
 

What can we hope to see from Ingager in the future?

 
We are looking to expand into new markets and grow our digital offering by continuing to invest in new technologies and developing the platform. We will also focus on creating a great working environment to help support our employees with adapting to the new normal, whatever that may be!