startup marketing Archives

For today, I interviewed a fellow blogger. I love interviewing bloggers that focus on technology and business, because, obviously, these are two things that I love, too! Today, I’ll be interviewing Sherwin Ramos-Yeo of Techglimpse.

Sherwin Ramos-Yeo is the founder of Techglimpse. With his passion on technology, he decided to gather all his research into one repository (the current site). He studied in De La Salle University with a degree in BS-Information Communication Technology Management. Sherwin started his career as an IT professional then shifted his focus to digital marketing, focusing now on eCommerce. Through this, he has learned a lot through his different projects, including the ins and outs of using technology for marketing. He also took up several certification courses to strengthen his skills.

Outside the “digital” world, he also joins billiard tournaments and plays the guitar. He is the eldest among the 3 siblings.

Techglimpse’s Story

Ginger: What is your brand or business, Sherwin? Please tell the readers what is it about and how long have you been in business?

Sherwin: My blog started as a tech blog, but it focuses on innovations like AR/VR, tablets, mobile apps, etc. I have always been fascinated with technology, and how it affects our life. I had a shift in career, now focusing on digital marketing. I’m not a marketer. I graduated as an IT professional. Digital marketing lead me to see “creativity” and on how technology can be used as a marketing tool. Since then I started to do consulting from watch brands, restaurants, etc.

Ginger: Who is your target market? Why did you choose this market? Can you give us the insight behind this market?

Sherwin: My target market would be the the SME’s who don’t understand how they can leverage on digital platforms for their business. And my other market are people who are tech savvy, since I feature tech innovations. When I started with the blog, it contained most of my research and findings. Later on, I saw the line between innovations in technology and digital marketing has become blurry.

Ginger: How did you come up with this idea? What made you decide to start this kind of business?

Sherwin: Everybody is into tech/digital nowadays, whether you are just an individual who most likely from time to time try to be updated with the latest gadgets and technology. Now the challenge for the entrepreneurs is how they can maximize this changing lifestyle. Small entrepreneurs can’t afford big ad agency to help their business, so this is where I come in. My aim is to focus on the SME’s or those organizations that are in the stage of “exploring” digital as one of their channels. Big agencies tend to amplify a digital campaign, what I can offer is lay down the basic foundation of your digital strategy. From building your social presence, to understanding how the data you collected can be maximized.

Ginger: Do you believe that everyone should become entrepreneurs?

Sherwin: As much as I want everyone to be an entrepreneurs, not all are fit to be one and has the mindset to go into entrepreneurship.

Ginger: Were there any obstacles that you faced when you decided to pursue becoming an Entrepreneur? What are these?

Sherwin: I’ve met with different clients, I tried to solve their problems. Even though all my solutions were good and all of them were theoretically correct but not all didn’t meet the right objective which mostly is creating additional revenue. Clients hire you because mainly they want to increase revenue, and be able to justify their ROI. I started with focusing the whole strategy for the client while the client wanted instant change.

Ginger: What are three traits that you think an Entrepreneur/Startup Founder should have when starting their own business?

Sherwin: Always continue learning. I have always been insecure with my skills. I’m not a marketing graduate and I’m just your average IT student in school. Competing with others who graduated cum laude, masteral degrees, marketing graduates, I was thinking of how can I stay competitive compared to others? I started reading about digital marketing everyday before anything else, I open my favorite websites to keep me updated on what’s happening. Since I’m not a marketing graduate but doing actually marketing strategies, I took up a diploma course on marketing to at least gain my foundation on basic marketing principles. As of today, I already have more than 10 certifications from marketing, digital marketing, operations, excel, etc.

Ginger: Unforgettable moments or lessons that you learned as an Entrepreneur/Startup Founder

Sherwin: It is definitely getting that first client. When I started my blog I didn’t have the intention to earn from it, all I wanted was to have my own website. I then tried adding a section on my website offering my services, then eventually someone emailed me. After my first pitch/meeting with the client, it was a success, she actually made a follow up meeting inviting the rest of the team to discuss my plans for the company. It was then that I realized that I can actually be good at this, this is something that not all is knowledgeable with.

Ginger: What advice can you give to other Entrepreneurs?

Sherwin: Being an entrepreneur is not about having your own office, flexible schedule, or generating more income. It always goes back to doing what you love. It may sound cliche, but really when tough times come, the only thing that will get you moving is doing what you love. For me, the exciting part of being an entrepreneur is the challenge. The challenge of solving problems of your clients, seeing satisfied clients and thanking you on how you have contributed to their business.

Ginger: What are ways that you can do to raise capital?

Sherwin: For now I’m using up my personal money for my expenses, since it is still minimal. What I usually do is use my earnings from the business to expand the business. In this way I can always improve what I can offer to my clients.

Ginger: How do you market your products? Growth strategy?

Sherwin: Since my website is a blog, I usually write content that is made for my audience and potential customers. This is to establish my skill and knowledge in the field. Currently I have no plans yet of expanding the services since I still handle the business on my own. For now, the focus is on digital marketing + eCommerce, I feel that this will be the next shift in digital.

Ginger: What are tech tools that you use for your business?

Sherwin: First important thing is to put your files on the cloud. Whether that’s dropbox, google drive (which i recommend), etc, It is always important that you have access and control towards your files. You may never know when you would need them. Website is another must have for any entrepreneur. You can start creating your own website for free, or invest with a freelancer which will cost you around Php 10,000. A website is your online business card, it will showcase what you have to offer and provide information to your potential customers.

Ginger: Thank you for spending your valuable time, Sherwin, in answering our questions for my readers. For those who want to contact Sherwin, I have placed different ways on how you can get in touch with him.

Talk to you soon!

Contact information:
Website: www.techglimpse.ph
Email address: sherwin.yeo@gmail.com
Mobile Number: 0917-5328482
Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/techglimpseph
Twitter account: https://twitter.com/techglimpseph
Linkedin account: https://ph.linkedin.com/in/sherwinyeo

I was about to skip blog writing today for my blog series. A terrible headache hit me the other day. I had to catch up on a lot of things. One of the things that crossed my mind and had to think about was the growth strategy of Taxumo (startup marketing plan, etc.). For those who have been reading my blog, you would know that Taxumo is the startup company that we built. Taxumo takes care of computing, filling out the forms and submitting the data and payment to the BIR, which is the tax ministry here in the Philippines and to an authorized bank. Entrepreneur magazine featured us just this week:

Filing taxes? There’s an app for that

I was inspired to write about marketing plans and strategies for both startups and blogs. Yesterday, I was studying more about Facebook ads and optimizing these advertisements that I create. I am amazed at the numbers and metrics involved. I think this is what people don’t see and get — that marketing, especially nowadays is a “numbers” game.

We all meet marketers and all of them look like extroverted individuals, who probably just love talking to people and hate math. Haha! I know how people think and have been branded to be such also. I took marketing in college, but ended up in banking, which made people wonder A LOT. But after years of marketing different products and services, as a marketer, the lesson that I learned is we gotta love numbers! Metrics show the real picture. Conversions, engagement, leads, sales — all of these are all measured using numbers.

Now, since we are talking more about blogging in this blog series, how do you effectively market your blog. Obviously, one is to tell everyone you meet that you have a blog, but that would take forever. If we talk to each one, multiply it by the number of minutes, that would take forever to reach a goal of having just 500 visitors a day in your site. Now, this is why I thought about startup marketing plans.

The objective of a startup is to have speedy and steady growth especially for the first year or so. They employ strategies that would result to achieving this. Of course not all strategies are “one-size-fits-all”, but some should be evident in each of the marketing strategies of different startups.

1. Among all the people in the world, it SHOULD BE ME!
People love being the first to tell their friends about this cool thing, this new place, this great deal, etc. In the startup world, we seek for beta testers. These are usually our early adopters. Our early adopters should be able to validate that our guess of who are market is is correct. An example of this is how my friends at Cape marketed their product. I actually want to conduct this experiment and test who among my friends and readers value cheap flights!

IF YOU WANT CHEAP FLIGHTS AT AROUND 50-70% OFF, CLICK ON THIS IMAGE AND SIGN UP!

Now, obviously, I will be able to tell how many of you signed up for Cape’s service because I was given a code to track down how many signed up. Sometimes, these codes can also monitor sales. And if sales are monitored, commissions can also be monitored. This is the reason why there is such a thing as affiliate marketing. This is the gist of what affiliate marketing is (but let’s discuss this topic for another time).

You can employ the same strategy with you blogs. You can announce that you are giving some readers access to something valuable in your site in exchange for their emails. In this environment, emails are very valuable. It allows you to connect with your readers again and again.

2. STAND UP, BE HEARD AND MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

Since early this year, for Taxumo, we have been conducting a lot of FREE taxation workshops. We do this, because we genuinely believe that all you need as taxpayers is an entity who will understand and listen to you, know what your going through, and actually take time out to explain things that you don’t understand about taxes. Once you get it, it’s up to you to use or not use our system. But most of them really do use the system, since the Taxumo team is genuinely there to help them!

If you want to increase engagement in your blog, take time out to reply to your readers. With the plethora of things that I have to do, I still find the time to talk to people who chat me up on messenger, email me, etc. Seriously! You can ask different people. I always try to find time to answer if time permits. Actively engaging with your readers make them loyal followers!

3. Understand the CUSTOMER JOURNEY

Intimately know what they want and what they need. If it’s a blog, intimately know what they want to read about, where they read, when they would read or search for an article and then be there! Bloggers are mind readers. We should know exactly what our readers want even before they search for it!

These are just some of the things that I thought of when thinking about the similarities of creating a startup marketing plan and a blog marketing plan. As for the latter, I think I’ll try to expound on that more in the next posts for this series.

If there is anything you would want to add, please feel free to leave your comment below. Have a great day, peeps!