Digital Marketing - Research Paper Sample

Introduction

Mike Thoonen founded M.T Online Services in 2019. Firstly, the proprietorship started by establishing a digital marketing agency by offering digital marketing and web development for business-to-business companies. After creating websites and doing marketing for several businesses, the company started to look for other online industry opportunities. Because marketing and web-development went adequately, the company decided to expand its business and create webshops for its purposes. The idea to start their webshops is that the company is offering marketing and web-development now, which means they have all the capabilities to start, create, and advertise within the Digital Marketing Agency.

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Running Webshops

Since the company started with creating and running webshops, the revenue has increased to more than €300.000 within four months and has grown to more than three online stores. The target for 2020 is a revenue of €650.0000 stated in March. Currently, the company is focusing on and selling their products in the Netherlands and Belgium. This focus resulted in that the core business of M.T Online Services is changed from a Digital Marketing agency to a webshop business.

One of the webshops is a niche store in the tumbling niche and is selling Air tracks. Air tracks are tumbling mats used in several sports such as tumbling, free-running, and gymnastics. The majority of the revenue has been derived from this store by selling to private individuals. The other webshops are general stores where new products are tested every day to see what products are outperforming and have the potential to create one product or branded store. Suppose a product has a tremendous amount of potential to grow to, for example, a revenue of €7.500 per day. In that case, the company will look if we can brand this product and store it in the Netherlands to offer one-day delivery. This formation will increase the conversion rate, which means it is easier to scale within Europe. This ease is one of the key strategies the company implemented on the Air track webshop called Air Track Specialist. Because Air tracks are summer products, the company is now focusing on general stores where the company offers products from all categories to find winning products that can be branded. The company's products can be from any niche or category as long as there is potential and demand.

Currently, M.T Online Services consist of two employees, one full-time employee and one part-time employee. The full-timer, Mike Thoonen, does all the major work within the company, while the part-timer is purely focusing on customer service. Many projects are outsourced through a freelancer platform called Fiverr.com, where the company pays freelancers per a particular project. Due to growth, the company is now looking for employees on monthly contracts by using Upwork.com.

Most of the products are sourced from China because China's products have a significant price advantage compared to the European market. The main reason for these price advantages is because China has lower wages than Europe, and therefore, the production and manufacturing of products are cheaper than in Europe. The average manufacturer salary per year in China equals $10562 50 in 2018 (WageIndicator, 2018).

Company's Problem

M.T Online Services has experience running multiple webshops, which requires a tremendous amount of work due to outsourcing projects such as video editing and copywriting. Graphic designing, everything has to be checked before launch. Afterward, the advertising starts. The main reason for this is that the company has only one full-time employee who is doing all the major work for 50 hours a week and one part-time employee who is doing the customer service. To run all these webshops properly with a single full-timer requires a lot of time because there are several tasks involved: web-development, web-designing, copywriting, customer service, digital marketing, and product research, translations, and video creation. This requirement makes it difficult to organize and fulfill all these tasks with the desired quality. This difficulty is because the company does not have a professional and organized team to outsource the aforementioned tasks.

A professional and organized team is necessary to scale. The figure below shows the phases in start-up development. Currently, the company is at the validating stage; the company is almost ready to scale but needs a team. During the beginning of 2021, the company's desired degree is rising.

Company's Need

Because M.T. Online Services want to scale the company to multiple countries, there is a need for a high performing team. The company is currently operating with only one marketing strategist who mainly focuses on building product pages and creating advertising, which is time-consuming. In a general working day of 9 hours, there is enough work to run a single webshop.

Conclusion

This formation concludes that there is a shortage of staff and time within the company. To solve this problem ultimately prepares the company to go abroad, a team should get established, automate processes like marketing, product pages, and videos to save time and improve efficiency. More staff is necessary to automate processes because steps within the product launch workflow should be monitored and controlled. This project aims to figure out how the company can automate these processes and make them more efficient. Therefore, the company also needs additional staff.