This piece is the first installment in our Expert Interview Series. Read on for some awesome professional tips from Vipin for starting and running a healthy cross-border business.
Vipin Nayar, Inbound Marketing Manager at India-based Acodez IT Solutions, a social media, SEO and SEM leader with over five years’ experience in online marketing helping clients enhance their online presence and open up new business avenues.
Keeping in step with social media trends, Vipin uses his keen insight into customer behavior to formulate innovative strategies that succeed.
We recently checked in with Vipin to get his take on trends in web development and design today and to learn what role contractors play in growing Acodez. Here’s what he had to say:
Budget: One of the most common challenges businesses face while trying to market at global scale. They do not consider how much to spend on each particular marketing medium. Over time, they get an idea about which medium works when you compare the ROI.
Generating Traffic and Leads: Another challenge that we see when marketing on a global scale is the quality of traffic a business receives. Is the traffic from genuine buyers? Are they good leads? Getting good traffic that has the possibility of being converted into leads is of high value to the customer.
ROI of Marketing Activities: When we market on a global scale, one of the most important factors to consider is ROI – how much you will get back from your marketing activities.
Training Your Team: You need to plan your team according to global scale. Your strategies for reaching a global market should look different than those for the local market.
Marketing Strategy should be full-fledge. For instance:
These are some important tools that we use at Acodez for our client SEO strategy.
Analytics:
Link building and site analysis:
Content research:
Outreach:
SEO monitoring:
Content ptimization:
Competitor research paid/organic:
Keyword research:
Creative design
SEO reporting:
Social media management:
Social media reporting:
Email auto-responder:
We believe that we are in a space where you should not cheat your client, you should frankly tell your client what you require and what you are looking at. You should not give a fake commitment like that in six months all the keywords will be in first position, which is not practically possible. There should be more of an approach toward genuine traffic and leads not based on ranking. And a full inbound marketing approach not just SEO-based ranking.
Social media bots have been created to communicate with audiences and that is offering great opportunities for businesses to communicate with their audiences in a short timeframe. This will be very useful for businesses in an e-commerce industry. Customers can order products directly.
We do work with freelancers mainly for content writing and the experience has been good. We find freelancers on sites like Upwork, PeoplePerHour, and Freelancer.
In addition to content writing, we’ve worked with freelancers for outreach purposes, mainly data mining. We get a good amount of data with a limited budget. The only thing that can create trouble is training, so we do training through Skype and Google Hangouts and tell them what we are actually looking for.
“When you hire workers whose work day starts when yours ends, you have the opportunity to give your client 24-hour coverage.”
The biggest benefit is that you never have stoppages in work – even if you’re on leave in your country, contract workers elsewhere can still be available to get jobs done. Also, when you hire workers whose work day starts when yours ends, you have the opportunity to give your client 24-hour coverage. Finally, you can outsource most of the tedious tasks so you can concentrate on the more important jobs to be done.
I’ve found that English is the common language to communicate in and that Skype and Google Hangout are the most effective tools for communication, as we can teach freelancers how to do the tasks we require.
We also created a YouTube channel with online learning videos for teaching new freelancers with visualization.
We use Skype and Google Hangout, which are both free tools to teach our freelancers. We also use Mikogo and TeamViewer to share screens while working so the we can check their work and help them learn how to correct things they are doing wrong.
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