March 26, 2021 Strategies for Keeping-up with Ever-expanding Web-Marketing Work

Although the state of emergency in the Tokyo metropolitan area has been lifted, there’s still no sign of an end to the novel-coronavirus pandemic. In Japan its presently cherry blossom viewing season, however many parks remain closed for events, and many feel disappointed that they can't even enjoy the changing of the seasons.

So, while we yearn for an end to the coronavirus pandemic and that conventional life returns as soon as possible, there are also a surprising number of measures implemented during the pandemic that I believe should remain in place.

In terms of the way we work, there’s now a common, societal understanding that both online meetings and remote working are effective. Once the pandemic ends, we expect that there won’t be a return to face-to-face meetings as standard but rather the adoption of a system which employs direct, face-to-face meetings for discussing crucial issues with online-formats remaining common practice for almost all other meeting content. As for remote working, we expect that many companies will continue to have partial, if not full-time remote working.

Furthermore, BtoB marketing has also been forced to undergo major changes due to the coronavirus pandemic. Due to the various barriers to performing real-world, offline promotional activities, many companies have been trying to utilize web-marketing as a way to boost both sales and advertising activities in the face of a temporary decline in leads.

So, what will this shift toward web-marketing look like in a post-coronavirus world? As part of my job, I previously attended seminars and conferences to obtain information on RPA and DX, but these events have, of course, now shifted online. As a result, a hurdle for participation in such events has been lowered and I’m able to attend them more frequently, furthermore, I’ve been able to efficiently gather supplementary information by shifting follow-up meetings with vendors online. While I'm not sure if I'm fully comfortable doing everything online right up until the final decision to implement, I feel that for the information gathering stage, performing research and meeting online is sufficient.

People around me have the similar views on the merits of online research, so, even when the pandemic ends, it’s unlikely that we’ll return to fully offline events and face-to-face sales meetings as before.

If this is the case, companies will put more focus and effort into their web marketing initiatives than ever before. This includes not only the running of online seminars and other events, but website improvements, content marketing, listing ads, MA tools, chat tools, social networking and much more.

Competitors will be focusing on web-marketing as well, so to survive companies will need to decide which strategies will work best for their market and develop them quickly.

However, as the number of tasks increases in parallel with the requirement for rapid development and deployment, the issue of resources is bound to arise. It's hard to find people who are proficient in web-marketing and training takes time.

One possible solution to this issue is implementing business process outsourcing (BPO) or automation. If we break down the work of web-marketing, we can divide it into two categories: work that requires much thought and that we, therefore, need to do ourselves; and work that only needs to be output accurately. For the latter, to improve efficiency, companies can either introduce automation technology, such as RPA, or outsource them, through a BPO agreement, to a web services specialist such as Mitsue-Links.

At Mitsue-Links, based on meeting requests from our clients as well as our own in-house needs, we employ technologies such as RPA and API to automate the following tasks:

1. Budget management for listing ads Automatic budget initialization, adjustment, and spend management
2. Generation of log analysis and advertising effectiveness measurement reports Automatic creation of monthly reports.
3. SNS reputation surveys Automatic collection and reporting of reputation surveys performed on Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites.
4. Competing Product Price Surveys Price research for competitor products on e-commerce sites as well as online quotation simulations.
5. HTML generation of column articles for content marketing SEO articles written in Word are converted to HTML in accordance with website design specifications.

If your company needs to automate any of the tasks listed above, we can rapidly customize an existing robot for a low cost, alternatively we can act as a BPO partner and manage the robot's operation and exception handling. Moreover, we can also develop custom robots to meet the specific needs of your organization. If you’re interested, please do not hesitate to contact us.