Online marketing – How to market your company: A talk by Badar Khushnood from Google Pakistan

Created by umair.shah under General Discussion

Badar Khushnood is one of the leading Google evangelists in Pakistan. As Google’s official country responsibility he has taken the role of educating the majority of Pakistan’s software companies about Google. His recent talk about Online Marketing was recently held in Lahore for new customers looking to use Google tools to acquire new international customers. The talk helped experienced hands tweak their existing online strategies. I had the opportunity to attend Badar’s talk about how businesses in Pakistan need to start marketing themselves online from a Google perspective today.

It’s an interesting concept considering that many Pakistani companies need to explore markets outside of Pakistan considering where inflation and other economic factors have driven prices. People are looking for cost-effective goods and services producers at a very good price, and frankly speaking, we’re good at that. With a majority of the people attending from the technology world, it was a great place to network and meet with other professionals in the industry. Zafar Khan from Sofizar and Jehan Ara from P@SHA were major insights into how Google’s tools can help local businesses capture international customers.

Badar talked about some basic tools that all online marketers need to know inside out. As Google’s official representative in Pakistan, there was a Google-centric focus, but completely validated considering the amount of searches performed by web users using Google. What most users are unaware of is the potential market in Pakistan for Internet and mobile based marketing. Sharing some interesting stats from the presentation are that:

• Pakistan is considered one of the most rapidly advancing countries in terms of broadband internet connectivity and mobile usage in the world. We rank at an impressive number 4 amongst the surveys conducted by international research firms.
• The usage potential in the mobile domain is close to 226% year-on-year-growth. We are number 2 in this area amongst a number of fairly developed countries. We have around 90 million SIMs registered legally with the PTA.

So the potential is there for online marketing, so what’s going wrong? Badar talked about some interesting ideas that we’ve already implemented on our own website. Simple things like SEO, SEM and website optimization are given for tech companies. However for traditional product companies, it’s an important factor that can help drive more international customers to their websites.

Talking about the need for companies to manage their online presence, Badar hit upon something very relevant regarding the design of websites. Many websites are now Flash-laden with fancy graphics and text, etc. He asked the question who should be designing websites? The audience replied with the traditional departments, director, marketing, IT, etc. However, what really hit home was the fact that users should be dictating what your website should be like. Is it giving them the information that they need? If you sell products, you should have product prices available. Do you have pictures available? Contact information that is easily accessible and frequently checked? These little things are what makes you better than your competition and helps boost your online image. The nice thing is that it doesn’t cost you too a hefty budget to keep ahead of these things.

The beauty is that you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of money getting the necessary information from professionals that is readily available through Google’s suite of Internet tools. For example, Insights shows you what people are Googling within your country. Use SEM and SEO to help drive traffic to your site, AdWords and AdSense to create an effective online marketing strategy. For new entrants into the market, it was an excellent way of understanding how powerful Google’s tools are while for experience users, it was a good refresher course on the basics.

For us, as a high-end technology services company, it was a good way to brush up on some basic things that could help increase traffic for our own sites. We’ve been working on the SEO and SEM front so the tips and tricks that Badar emphasized will help on that front. Badar’s talk was extremely helpful in remembering how re-tweaking the basics can easily help change dynamics instantly.

For our local readers, how do you feel Badar’s talk was? We feel that there should be a high-end session for users that already are using these tools. What do you think? Does Pakistan have the potential to become a world leader thanks to the previous research and rapid changes in business methodologies? Leave your thoughts and comments below.