Vipin Nayar: Challenges, Advantages & Winning Tools for International Business Marketing
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:
What are some of the common challenges businesses can face when trying to market at a global scale?
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.
How should businesses approach creating a marketing strategy for an international audience?
Marketing Strategy should be full-fledge. For instance:
- Beginning Stage: you should cover all aspects, promoting their business across all mediums not just search engine based. You need to build their brand across other medium like social media, PPC and other medium where their audience hangs out.
- Middle stage: You need to plan based on your promotion in beginning stage, you need to check the outcome of those efforts. You need to plan to convert your audience into customers in this stage, and you need to see which medium is giving you more results. You need to check the ROI on the medium. If some of your medium is giving you good ROI then you can focus your budget on that and build a more profitable business.
- Final Stage: You need to maintain your customer in this stage and try to resell your product to them by upgrading them into more services, which pay you more and offer them full-fledged services. Also try to acquire new customers based on your customer experience.
What are the most useful technological tools for successful online marketing today?
These are some important tools that we use at Acodez for our client SEO strategy.
Analytics:
- Google Analytics
- Lucky Orange
Link building and site analysis:
- Ahrefs
- Majestic
- Moz
- SEMrush
- Alexa
Content research:
- BuzzSumo
Outreach:
- BuzzStream
SEO monitoring:
- SEOmonitor
- Woorank.com
- SEO profiler
Content ptimization:
- MarketMuse
- Grammarly
Competitor research paid/organic:
- Similarweb
- AdPlexity
- AdFox
- SpyFu
- SpyFy
- BoxOfAds
- WhatRunsWhere
- CBGraph
Keyword research:
- Keyword Revealer
- SwissMadeMarketing
Creative design
- Canva
- PowToon
- Piktochart
- GraphicStock
SEO reporting:
- Raven Tools
Social media management:
- Hootsuite
Social media reporting:
- Sprout Social
Email auto-responder:
- AWeber
- MailChimp
What tips or advice can you offer other web marketing companies working in an international space?
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.
What trends or innovations are you following in online marketing? Why do they interest you?
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.
What has been your experience working with freelancers who live abroad?
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.”
What are the benefits of working with contractors from around the globe?
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.
What have you found are the most effective strategies for communicating with freelancers who speak different languages or who live abroad?
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.
What are the must-have tools for business owners who rely on contract workers?
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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