In today’s era, businesses are thriving with their online presence and client testimonials—attaining a potential for global outreach. Digital Marketing has enabled businesses to reinvent their marketing strategies to establish better connections with their target audience while aiming for worldwide exposure and staying relevant from the customer’s perspective. It is one of the prospering sectors in the media industry which has taken over traditional marketing techniques. Several digital marketing agencies are emerging to help businesses with their marketing requirements and gain visibility amongst their audience and prospects. Converting leads to the customer, NickMetrics helps businesses in the digital marketing revolution. A digital marketing agency based in Malaysia, it helps brands and businesses elevate to the next level by adopting cost-effective next-gen technology and digital marketing solutions. The agency also helps curate digital strategies tailored to fit businesses and help gain more exposure. NickMetrics is the brainchild of Nick Lai.
Nick’s journey of entrepreneurship is insightful and inspiring. He started working at a very early age. His first long-term job was as a salesperson at a telecommunication company. As one of his old friends invited him to start an online affiliate business, he quit his full-time job and focused on that. He also went back to college part-time studying digital marketing and web design for two years. Although the collaboration was a success, it ended within a year. After that, Nick started outsourcing his design and development team in India to run his business alone at home. Currently, Nick spearheads NickMetrics as the Managing Director and immensely contributes to its growth and development.
During a recent conversation with Mirror Review, Nick elaborated about the establishment of his digital marketing agency and the team while briefing about the current scenario and trends of the media industry. Following are some snippets of the fascinating conversation.
What was the motivation behind establishing NickMetrics? What are the prominent services and solutions offered by the company?
After years of outsourcing my workforce to India, I decided to set up my workforce in 2016. Started with only 3 employees within a small 200 sqft suite office, Nickmetrics currently has two offices in Malaysia and India—with collectively 40 employees. We only serve clients holding a minimum of 300k annual marketing budget. Based on the client’s budget and goals, we design and execute a full-service digital marketing campaign.
What are your primary responsibilities as a leader? Being at the helm of the company, what are your biggest achievements?
Since we are just a small agency, as the head I need to do everything—from sales, design, development, planning, and execution. My biggest achievement is recruiting and training my current team. It can be considered my biggest asset right now.
How do you respond to your clients’ feedbacks and reviews? How do you ensure optimum customer satisfaction?
Our rate of accepting clients is only about 10%. We only accept clients that meet our strict requirements and we also ensure that we can deliver results for them. Hence, we only serve a small number of clients. With that being told, we can ensure that we deliver real results and have maintained good relationships with all our clients.
What was your response to the unprecedented situation induced by the COVID-19 pandemic? What measures did you incorporate to encompass the challenges?
During the first few months, we were not handling the pandemic’s aftermath properly. Although we used to have frequent meetings to discuss the project’s progress, everyone was required to work from home. Moreover, our production team was greatly impacted. Since it involved several third parties such as talents, contractors, the styling team, and others, there has been a lot of delays.
Today, after almost 2 years into the pandemic, we have become acquainted with it and can continue by giving 100% performance in our operations.
What are your views on the increasing skepticism around the media industry? How do you maintain transparency and authenticity in the flow of content and information?
This is a problem within the industry. For instance, you can see that mainstream media usually posts irrelevant and (sometimes) prohibited content. And we foresee that this will become worse.
At NickMetrics, we always ensure that our content is relevant and of the highest quality. We never outsource content. Moreover, our content team occupies 50% of our workforce.
According to you, what are the benefits and probable impacts of the 5G technology on the future of the media industry?
I think the content will be the key impact when 5G is here. It will accelerate loading times by allowing advertisers and marketers to integrate rich, complex, and high-definition video into their mobile marketing channels. It will also secure online transactions, improve user experiences while making it easier to compound user data.
How have customer preferences changed in the past few years?
The ongoing COVID-19 crisis led to widespread social distancing and shelter-in-place norms, disrupting stocks, sales, and supply chains and thereby, consumer preferences. Currently, users have more screen time and hence we think content is getting more important in digital marketing than ever.
What are the upcoming services and solutions in the near future?
We always wanted to open our services to more clients, so we are trying to develop the most efficient and effective SOP to handle each client’s digital marketing campaign. With our experiences in serving more than 30 medium- to-big sizes clients for years, we can provide specific packaged digital marketing services for SEO, Content Marketing, and video marketing. By year-end, we will be launching the packaged services where users can answer few questionnaires and pay online. After that, the involving team will start working on it based on our SOP and the reports and results will be displayed on the user’s dashboard.
As an experienced media leader, what would you like to advise those entrepreneurs seeking to make a mark in the industry?
There is no shortcut in the media industry. Read, listen and watch more. With the current technology, it is super easy to reach out to good content. Learning is never enough—the more you learn, the easier your route will be. According to my suggestion, content will always be the key in the media industry. Hence, focus on that.
