I'm from Amsterdam, The Netherlands and I have been living happily in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia since 2016 where I'm the CEO of Saleduck. My career path traced back to the memory of me discovering a closeup image of the moon on the internet for the first time when I was a little boy. From that moment on, I instantly knew that I wanted to do something with the blessing of technology - computers and the internet.
I'm a self-taught programmer by teaching myself how to build websites using HTML, JS and PHP. To further enhance my skills in this particular arena, and also for my love of programming, I went on to study Digital Communications in Utrecht. Shortly after that, I joined a small online fashion company where I worked as a PHP developer with the sole focus on SEM / Marketing. A very educational time of my career, intriguing to say the least.
We are all working remotely at the moment and it's been on-going since the pandemic hit, where the nation was ushered into MCO / CMCO state for health measurement purposes. And since we are a digital company, working from home was not too big of a challenge for us. Our teams are still maintaining healthy online communications every day to streamline efficiencies and make the best out of the situation. Personally, I find it extra important to maintain a healthy workflow as well as communication to make sure everyone is safe and staying positive during this period.
We serve on average about 1 million users per month across 13 of our platforms, covering both Europe and Southeast Asia regions. And I'm glad to say our presence has been demonstrating robust growth in these two regions.
One of the major hiccups was not being able to have a complete overview of our sales data. We have partnerships with plenty of networks and have multiple accounts per network. This in itself comes with multiple challenges, for instance, data tracking issues. To monitor performance, we need to be able to act fast and see the results from our paid media campaigns on the keyword level. For most publishers, this is still a black box. Eventually, we have found ample solutions to our problems with the strategic help of WeCanTrack . Now, we are able to access real-time tracking of multiple networks, all aggregated in one dashboard as well as receiving personalized alerts when one of the many campaigns drops in conversions or increases in declined sales.
We are a very diverse team in terms of nationality and culture, to say the least. We currently have 25 team members working full-time and a few interns from various places in the world. Being present in multiple countries also means that we need knowledgeable employees speaking the local languages and understanding the local lingos. We recruit people from all over Asia and Europe and gather them to our headquarter in Kuala Lumpur for additional marketing training and to blend in with our working culture.
Reach out to the affiliates within your market and understand the reach and influence that they have. Go for quality, not quantity. Partnering up and working closely with the right affiliated network would make a massive difference to a business. There are specialist networks for different verticals for you to explore. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Majestic or SimilarWeb to find the right publisher for you.
We have our own internal tooling for brand mentions where we look at multiple API and data points. A free version to track brand mentions is Google Alert. Google will send you an email whenever they come across your brand name.
Why Content Marketing is playing a keen role in 2020 Covid er? What kind of content marketing are you doing for your brand Saleduck?
It is vital to understand the market that you are operating in. Knowing the culture and understanding of consumer behavior plays a key role when combined with your own data. Take for example, we monitor our market closely and find that the travel sector is picking up tractions within the country. Domestic travels are booming according to our data, to the extent of which geography location has the highest hotel bookings, where are people heading for their beach getaways, etc.
The contrast is big with Singapore whereas Singapore being much smaller geographically, hence the restriction in travel destinations. Singaporeans have little to no options to fly within the country because of the geography limitation. Our content creators will analyze the data to create relevant content to stay in trend as well as keeping our content updated for our users. Google Trends is a tool that is a great assistance to help you stay up-to-date with the world's trend as well as allowing you to narrow down your data to preferred geographical location.
What is your marketing strategy for Saleduck and how do you plan to fight against tough competition in the online deals Industry?
We are always motivated to improve our platforms wherever we can and expanding our knowledge on how we can provide additional value for our users. Starting by always working on our platforms to be more user-friendly and easy to navigate. The following priorities would be closing new partnerships and retaining the existing ones to provide our users with exclusive discounts. The more exclusive campaigns we have, the more the favors would work in our way. This has always been our main focus and the vision will remain the same for the future.
Successfully moving and merging our office in Amsterdam with our Kuala Lumpur office has been a strategic achievement that I am particularly proud of. Lots of challenges and hurdles were thrown at us during the transition and I am more than proud we were able to overcome them. The transition has been great and everything has worked out well for us. My family is in The Netherlands and they have been my biggest supporters.
I am seeing some technical SEO and security issues that shall be fixed to enhance the security of your site and to avoid the possibility of being hacked. This could be a real risk factor, especially when using WordPress combined with external plugins. I will elaborate on these in a more extensive manner in my private email to you.