My name is Vlad Nozdrachev. I am the brand-leader at FEDORIV company. We are the best creative company on the market. And I develop, create and promote brands.

What is special about our company is that we think big when it comes to strategy. We work on creating big brands and we can see the strategy as a whole: how the brand is going to develop on the market, how it is going to look in the eyes of the consumer. These are very core concepts. But when you deal with these concepts, execution is the key. You need to implement everything you have created, otherwise, you will be just a pure strategist who did a great job having created everything, having collected people, having told them about it, they clapped their hands and you are stuck not knowing what to do next.

The competence of execution is a world on its own. When you come to look at it, marketing consists of a great number of subcategories which require very focused and precise competency. And the depth of these competencies often remains inaccessible for big companies, for big clients, since you really need to be an expert in very subtle aspects.

As developers of broad strategies and vision for big brand names, we always work with narrow scope specialists and professionals who help us implement our strategies.

We considered several companies, but we have made our choice in favor of Roman.company because they are nerds in a good sense.

Task

I will give an example of a case we had been puzzling over in terms of implementation and execution. While thinking about the case for a western client, we realized that we were incompetent in their online market. We couldn’t figure out how to implement our grand strategy on the European market; we had to sort out all the figures, all the details and narrow competencies.

It was this nerdiness that captivated us — because we had been looking for exactly such profound understanding of a specific topic.

We needed a clear understanding of implementing certain ideas we had come up with together. On top of that, most ideas were subject to crash-tests and challenged, and questions were asked — uncomfortable ones. It is in this struggle that magic usually happens. When the company has narrow specialization, is competent in PPC marketing in search and social, and has a deep understanding of E-commerce. And this company comes and starts taking your philosophy and strategy to pieces, starts decomposing them into clusters, analyzing how one particular cluster interacts with the customer, how they might react, how to get there, which effect we are looking for. This is when you see the spark. And we had sparks all over it. After several meetings we realized that we wanted to do it that way and with that particular company.

We decided that we needed to understand a comprehensive audit. We were working on a brand, a European brand on the market, which was new and unknown to us. And it was very important for us to understand the digital environment and all the communication channels that this brand was implementing. We had to look into what was going on, what was efficient and not, what was working and what wasn’t. And we called it a comprehensive audit, taking into account what we currently had and where it was going,and whether there was a green light there, or it was red. And that product was the main one for us, the inbound one. We looked into it, envisioned what to do next, cards up, so to say. And it was the first product, which we had formulated.

The next product which we wanted to have was the strategy itself — we wanted to know how to implement what we had envisioned. If you deeply understand and analyze your client, you will understand all the figures, trends, outcomes and analytics. We realized that we had to organize the working process on all sides: on the side of the agency, on the side of the client and on the side of the consumer, so that all the three pieces come together. As well, we needed a strategy on how to promote this product on the market, present it to the consumer, and how to serve the customer distantly from our office.

Moreover, we liked that the guys tried to understand how everything would be implemented, gave their tips on the technical side: “Take certain services, look at certain channels, and buy certain advertising.” They took part in the working group, which was engaged in the process.

Result

The comprehensive audit was the starting point for our understanding of where to go next, how to develop our business, our brand, how to choose advertising, and so on.

The second part is the strategy itself. We have conducted the audit — that’s clear, but nobody knows what to do with it. So, we needed to elaborate a step by step plan: how to proceed, what the creative component and the content would be, which values to promote and what would affect the consumer the most, and most importantly, what our budget would be like.

Value

The fact that I understood what was going on was the most valuable for me. The audit was really awesome. The second part is understanding how to proceed with minimal investments.

Why should I overspend, why should I experiment with the budget when there is some experience, some cases, understanding of the market prices? For example, how much you will pay for the customer in this or that category in this or that market. There is experience, there is a case. And I was ready to pay 3 times this price.
But with the understanding of how to proceed and how to optimize the process I can save money. It’s extremely important for me as well as for the client. Because at the end of the day you’ve got the money in the till, and you have to understand how much your customer costs, how many such customers you need.
This way you form your budget and you, as a businessman, have the foreseen cash-flow for a year. It’s really important for my client to understand this, because he, being a businessman, needs to see how much he spends and how much he gets after 3 months of advertising campaigns and interactions with the customers
All these answers have to be given and have to be transparent in advance, before you plunged into the process. And for us it is the biggest value of cooperation with the agency.

Service fee

Consulting is not a stock exchange market. You can’t take an arithmetic average. You can’t be rational in evaluating why something is better or not.

You have to understand the depth and the step-by-step plan, which you will follow while developing the product. I understood that and the announced service fee was lower than the value I got. And I was OK with that.

Tips

There are such disappointing statistics, that 90% of Ukrainian business lies outside the digital technologies. This is inevitable for Ukrainian business. I bet that in a year it will be a real pain in the neck for all Ukrainian businesses.
Let’s look at some FEDORIV brands, such as Rozetka, Bodo, Concert and many others. All these brands are digital, they sell on the internet, and the competence of operating online is №1 priority for Ukrainian businesses. If you don’t go there, you are kind of a loser, and there’s no future for you. I bet it’s going to take a year, two maximum, for all businesses to realize that they are either sidelined and out of the game, or they are in and dealing with it as closely as possible.

What I recommend is that if the company doesn’t feel it is digitally strong, the owners should develop such competence, use our course at Superludi, use other educational projects, just pump this skill and just go for it. Also, they should network with professionals and experts, those who have successful cases, which you can implement or those who have experience, which you can benefit from. Such experts will help you get more digital and work in the digital environment.
But the owner of the company must be competent, that’s for sure. And nothing can boost your skills better than cooperation with an expert. As soon as the expert comes, they tells you how everything works, how it is organized and how much it costs. This way, you will have a picture to compare with.

And my tip №1 for all Ukrainian businesses, no matter how big they are, is to develop their digital competence, if they haven’t done so yet. This is number one.

The second tip is for those whose marketing department and marketing strategy work well. The difference between an entrepreneur and an expert is that the entrepreneur develops horizontally, he tries to master both finance and sales, marketing, management and human resource. But an expert develops in a different way.
Expert develop vertically. They dig down. And if a business sells online, its expertise, especially in marketing, should dig deep down and get to know the PPC advertising, SEO, Facebook advertising, and other ways of communication with people. Every company that has a website should attract such an expert. It means that if you have a website, even if this is just a landing or anything like that, you should dig deep down and get to know the ropes.

Vlad Nozdrachev
Brand leader at FEDORIV and CEO at Superludi
https://www.facebook.com/nozdrachevUA