Ed Kuzmin is our client and founder of Digitalizator. It is an online platform for testing and developing digital specialists. Ed told us about systematizing of a marketing strategy for a business and building a remote marketing team.
I have been working in digital-marketing since 2011. I started as a link builder, in 2013 I became an integrated digital marketer, and 2 years later I was the head of the digital marketing department. I worked both in Ukrainian companies and in international ones. In 2018, I decided to become an entrepreneur, put together a team and started a consulting company. We helped small and medium-sized businesses find SMM and SEO specialists, targetologists and marketers. I learned how to test and select staff well and decided to automate this process. This is how Digitalizator was born, where our clients - marketers - subscribe and receive more than 10 different courses and tests that help them get certified and develop professionally. There are three packages: $ 100, $ 375 and $ 750 per year, so that each person, based on their budget and goals, can choose the best option for themselves.
WE ARE SUPPORTERS OF THE SUBSCRIPTION MODEL
Our subscription costs like a regular marketing course. We offer our clients to pass an unlimited number of tests and courses for this amount. We expect a person to complete 10 courses in a year. An additional advantage of the platform is the ability of users to respond to hot vacancies and orders from businesses.
Entrepreneurs can also subscribe and study for themselves or train their marketers, as well as test candidates upon hiring. Our flagship business is premium consulting, a program aimed at business owners. It consists of 12 stages, including the systematization of the marketing department, brand positioning for the target audience, promotion strategy, budgeting, and a financial incentive system. There are no systemic educational programs in digital marketing in Ukraine, and it is not easy to find a good specialist either. We help to find complex solutions.
WITH THE TRANSITION TO REMOTE WORK EMPLOYEE’S PRODUCTIVITY IS INCREASING, BUT THE BURN-OUT STAGE BEGINS
We switched to remote work in the fall of 2019. All decisions are made collectively, so the team voted to leave the office.
During the lockdown, we noticed that employees began to work too much at home, they could not separate work and rest, they began to burn out. Therefore, we have developed the rules: in the evening, after the end of the working day, no work, but only personal affairs, sports, etc.
Summing up, we can say that quarantine did not affect us. At the same time, we observed that the projects of 30% of offline businesses that we consulted were paused for 2-3 months. It took them a while to understand how important it is to build digital marketing, and they returned to us.
Quarantine gave us an understanding of what working in a crisis is. I can say with confidence that marketing can be done remotely with absolutely no loss in efficiency. There are no functions here that cannot be controlled remotely. Owners who fail to do this most likely do not understand management tools, do not know control points and motivation systems, do not know how to correctly record results and pay employees for results.
If the team was transferred to a remote location, and it, feeling freedom, stopped working, then there was no marketing strategy. At Digitalizator, we open the eyes of the business to this and create a unified information field, because there is a big gap between “know” and “apply and implement”.
This year we want to create 50 new online courses and tests and increase the number of users. Now the site is focused on Ukraine and the CIS, but our plans are to enter a new market after we have tested the business model and made a multilingual platform. We will work with foreign experts and develop new courses and tests in various fields in order to attract an English-speaking audience.
We registered the trademark because the name Digitalizator is attractive to use for competitors, at the same time it reflects exactly what we do, so it was important for us to legally protect it.
