In the final quarter of the calendar year, my team members and I looked at new marketing strategies to expand the reach of our AdScale Enterprise and Japan Market Entry (JME) solutions. In the end we settled on two main marketing efforts for the first quarter. The first being a sponsored content campaign on a popular digital marketing news portal promoting our JME service and the second being attending an event in Singapore to introduce AdScale Enterprise to local businesses. The setting up of these campaigns was very useful in terms of simplifying the communication of our offering and has necessitated streamlining the marketing process as a whole.

For our sponsored content, we created an ebook, accompanying blog post and banners. The most challenging thing was creating some content which was genuinely interesting on its own while still highlighting the value of our JME service. Given that part of the audience is unfamiliar with the Japanese e-commerce market, it was particularly challenging to write something which first explained the issue facing potential clients before addressing how we can help. The experience however was useful as an exercise in simplifying our message.

The event will also present a challenge, however more on a technical level. To ensure that we are able to present the AdScale platform in the best way possible while maintaining client confidentiality, we need to set up a demo environment to show AdScale’s functions. This will be an invaluable tool for future events, demos and webinars.

As a team we have also been working on improving our processes to be able handle the increase in the number of leads generated by our sales activities:

• Streamlining the contract signing: previously the majority of our partners and clients were large organisations and as a result we would have to sign their NDAs and create custom partnership agreements. Now, some of our smaller clients do not have their own NDAs and our agreements are more standardised. We have started using Pandadocs to streamline this process and drastically cut down on the wasted time.
• Streamlining by automating email campaigns: due to how our sponsored content campaign is formulated we will receive a large number of qualified leads in a limited space of time. Given our resources, dealing with this manually would take up too much of our time and impact other tasks negatively. We are setting up an automated email funnel with these leads to maximize our time.
• Streamlining our onboarding process for clients: particularly for our AdScale agency partners, our onboarding process and the management of client accounts previously required a lot of manual work and moving between different web applications and email to manage. We are moving to a more simplified approach where everything is managed in Asana which also has the benefit of keeping task specific communication within that task rather than spread across a number of different channels and email conversations.

The above measures should make a massive difference by cutting down on our time spent doing mundane busy work and allow us to spend more time on tasks with a higher ROI.

The next month will be crucial to reaching our targets this quarter and I’m excited about putting into practice all we’ve learned and planned in the first weeks of the year.

SOPHOLA, Inc.
Sebastian Benedikz