How To Be A Successful Freelancer | Digital Strategy | Consumer Behavior

The following project highlights my suitability for the role of Digital Marketing Specialist:

Digital Strategy

My Role as a freelance digital specialist began with a promising objective at Rocket Internet SE (Now Alibaba).

The Objective:

The CMO, Mr. Hamal, and MD of Daraz Sri Lanka Mr. Bass needed me to capitalize on the potential of Daraz.lk and that meant a unique user increase achieved organically - sparingly user growth month after month. I was instructed in a meeting that I would be given open communication with all departments of Daraz Sri Lanka and plan out the actions necessary to achieve measurable results to be evaluated within 2 months.

Process and Results

It is important for the understanding of how I came up with the solution to enlighten the premise behind my digital marketing efforts. After being promoted to Regional SEO Manager of Daraz Sri Lanka, I was assigned to manage SEO for all organic traffic efforts for Daraz.lk and inherently the region's digital strategy applications. 

Since I began at Rocket Internet SE as a content writer - I had managed to write approximately above 600 articles of content; including SEO content and copywriting material. My dedicated approach made me of particular interest to my seniors and other department heads. I took this opportunity to use good old fashioned PR and took in every grain of knowledge that came my way. This meant 

• SEO (On-Page & Off-Page)
• Backlinking
• Email Marketing
• CRM 
• Community Management
• PPC
• SEM
• Affiliate Marketing

These were some of the facets, among others, that I learned on the job while it was being done and a lot of times during the campaign seasons - that was a rush. I got my lead as the Community Manager for the second shift on Black Friday of 2018. 

Now back to how I became or more honestly striving to be even more successful as a freelancer - having learned the facets of digital marketing and consumer behavior hands-on I implemented a 'content is king' strategy. Unfortunately, it was working at a much slower pace and inefficiently.

The reason? Well because there weren't enough trained SEO content writers at Daraz.lk, in fact, there was no SEO department in the branch of this eCommerce giant at that time.

This brought about my first exposure to the arena of freelancing but for hiring not working. It did, however, mean that I got to learn what sort of skills were in demand, how they were presented (presentation matter's a lot), first impressions, and the essence of the game - building trust. 

I scaled a budget with colleagues, got it approved, and hired a few freelance content writers. Pieces of training were held via conference calls using Skype, Powerpoint, Chromecast, and pretty much everything else that could be spared to the SEO department. We quickly got to work;

·        All high-value product pages were to at least show on the first page of Google and other search engines. This was achieved through systematic targeting of pages that needed content and other optimizations including on-page URL fixtures. Establishing backlinks with bloggers and other high authority URLs as well as self-maintained blogs to further increase domain authority. Interlinking higher authority webpages with low authority page thereby increasing their rank on Google. There were numerous video calls and Skype conferences in which I explained and presented the strategy, as well as trained newly recruited content writers in Sri Lanka and Pakistan on creating effective digital content and assigned quality check rotations from amongst my other SEO team members - their willingness to help was of great value to the overall objective.

 

 The results were well worth the effort because these techniques successfully achieved the targets set and saw organic traffic increase month after month.

•  Daraz.lk was now getting upwards of 170% user growth in 6 weeks, and an after 4 months we reported a 388% increase in SEO organic traffic for daraz.lk
• The KPI was over-achieved by 180% and these results made the domain just as much a priority for Alibaba as the primary domain of Daraz Pakistan.

Universal Skillset 

 
The role I went on to participate in as a Digital freelancer is no less diligent and proved highly profitable. I believe in hard work and commitment to the job, I am assigned to carry out. 

Creativity is a skill that I use to solve problems and find multiple variations of solutions to get the necessary results to benefit the organization that invests in me. The skillset that I gained through experience is my tool. 

 

 Push Towards Consumer Behavior and Freelancing

In the first few weeks, it was difficult to acquire people willing to hire a newbie freelancer - experience is on paper. People are paying money; they want results. So I offered my services for free for the toughest jobs. One prime example was an English marketing firm that wanted to overhaul their business model for its digital (or online marketing) subsidiary. The task was to last 3months.

Now having been designated responsibility to overhaul the business model of subsidiary brand XYZ Digital - I again dove in, meanwhile working my day job at what was fast moving towards a merger with the infamous Alibaba Group.

The policy of building rapport with your employer never fails because this provided me with very little oversight and micro-management. I was, fortunately, able to achieve improve marketing strategy onto conventional offline to online marketing efforts by effectively maintaining a higher ROI.  

This digital transformation took me for a dive into some deep research, including studying historical trends, evaluating the competition, and consistently studying the practical application of consumer psychology. 

• I was able to formulate and implement a digital marketing strategy (Email Pitching to fulfillment). be directly involved with clients (meetings and presentations) with a successful onboarding and retention ratio of 75%. 

• Devise and execute customized digital ATL strategies (SEO, SMM, SEM & Content) for clients and integrate them with BTL activities as needed.

• Lead and supervise different modes of digital marketing channels especially content development (Visual and Textual). Recording, measuring, and evaluating ROIs and KPIs by establishing a centralized MIS protocol.

• Created, mapped and evaluated the performance of online content marketing for clients.

• Successfully examination of benchmarks and actualized outline for improvement through competitor analysis

The severe sleep deprivation paid off. I was able to not only earn a handsome income from this 2.7-month endeavor but the XYZ client recommended to me his friends and I maintained that network through regular emails, invites on freelancing platforms, and sometimes even directly receiving phone calls for an urgent job that needed to get done. 

The job is never done in freelancing as a digital marting specialist - you have to keep learning and evolving your skillset and the changes happening around you.  My 7 plus years as a generalist content writer and 5 years in the diverse the evolving field of organic digital marketing/brand activation are still not enough because there is always someone better or cheaper willing to do the job that you have been doing. 

If there's one simple lesson in freelancing it's undoubtedly that you have freedom. The phrase be your own boss is nowhere more true than in as a successful freelancer - there are pitfalls, slip-ups, human-errors, disagreements but at the end of the day, you work at your own time. Can set your hourly or fixed rates and choose which jobs or people you want to work alongside. 

*Disclaimer: My experience is an actual account and so are the companies I have worked for but the names of individuals that I have worked with have been fictionalized for privacy.