Dimitri Safonov is a Digital Marketing Strategist | Empowering Sustainable Growth

Tag: digital marketing

  • Mindfulness for Yourself and Your Business

    What is mindfulness?

    Mindfulness is your full awareness of a present moment. You do it gently, in a non-judgemental way. It is an open and wide observation of yourself, your own mind and the environment. 

    When people suggest you live your life moment-to-moment and enjoy it, they mean that you need to be mindful.

    Whereas it sounds like a piece of cake, it is not. We are constantly bombarded by stress factors, distractions and real life tragedies. Mindfulness is therefore also allowing us to face all that directly, knowing that it is an event in your life, nothing more. Mindfulness teaches us that our life is exactly what we think it is. The more open and mindful you are about yourself and your life, the happier you will be. It is quite a curious paradox that the more open you are about real crap happening in your life and gently accepting it as just a course of life, the happier you are. If you don’t believe me, try it!

    How can you train to be more mindful?

    Now, sit and simply tell yourself to be mindful and not think about such and such. I can bet you won’t be able to do it, your mind will on contrary stick to whatever you want to get rid of. It is in its nature, we are all wired like that. So what can one do?

    People are practicing mindfulness meditation in order to cultivate and train their minds and become more mindful. It is more of a journey rather than a quick course where you go from level 0 in mindfulness to a pro in that many weeks. Though, scientists have proven that mindfulness meditation practice in just 8 weeks of daily 30 minutes meditations significantly improve people’s attention, ability to concentrate and also feeling less stressed and more emotionally stable and calm. It allows them to overcome their bad food habits by changing their relationship with food, but also help with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, lower blood pressure and simply have a better response to whatever life throws at them. I find it fascinating.

    That is why I have started my own little venture called Ahimsa Meditation. It is a non-profit social enterprise that aims to promote and practice nonviolence by means of mindfulness meditation. I won’t go into much detail about it here, you can simply visit my website, read meditation instructions, learn more about the benefits of meditation and more. You can also download a short e-book that covers basics of meditation practice, but then extends further to nutrition and livelihood. The latter is what I would like to talk about here now.

    How mindfulness can be beneficial for business?

    Regardless whether you are an employee or an entrepreneur, you can reap all the rewards that mindfulness offers. Yet for the business in general it means that you will be able to make more mindful decisions, they will be more value-based, and you can grow and contribute to your business better. 

    Whilst it can sound a bit theoretic at the moment, I invite you to contemplate on a few things with me here. Being more composed, less stressed and emotionally stable, it will allow you to apply the same to your business. My belief is that your business is created to solve a problem, do good and serve others. So if you will be more mindful to yourself and then extend this to others, you will be able to find ways to serve them better. It is a very straightforward and logical chain of thought. 

    Another positive aspect of it, as I also found for myself, it allows you and the business, to pause, reflect and decide on a better response. We do make many decisions based on a quick snappy judgements that are sometimes are emotionally-based. Hoping an ability to delay your response allows you to be kind not only to yourself (we are sometimes blaming ourselves for failures and so on), but also to others. I found myself to becoming  much better negotiator when I am more compassionate to others. It happens because you consider their own needs and wants, and then creating a solution that can satisfy both parties. That’s the key to negotiating a deal that will be mutually beneficial and therefore will last.   

    What can you do today? How to start practicing meditation?

    Mindfulness is a state a mind, but it can be cultivated by means of mindfulness meditation. I invite you to check my own instructions how to meditate. I offer completely secular meditation practice. My advice is to start from a concentration meditation (on breathing).

    The main thing is that you do not need anything for it – you can sit just now and dedicate 10, 20, 30 minutes of your time to start training your mind. 

    Within Ahimsa Meditation project, I am also happy to help whether you will have any questions on your journey, so sign up for the updates, download my own meditation guide and you are all good to go. 

    Need help with mindful digital marketing?

    Your own practice will help you to shape your business thoughts and direction, help with your career if you are employed and simply make your life better with the eyes wide open. If you want to discuss mindful digital marketing, contact me through this site and we can discuss how to set up ethical digital marketing campaigns, optimize your marketing communications, so they are nonviolent and truly serve others. 

    Thank you!

  • Marketing Issues of Eastern European Companies Selling in the ‘Western World’

    Having been working in the United Kingdom, Gibraltar and Malta for over 10 years, I can confidently say that you ca almost ‘smell’ an Eastern European company from the way they communicate, do marketing and sell. That smell isn’t pleasant in most cases.

    To start with, there is a silly mistake with business etiquette and blatant ignorance how people are used to do business there. Examples include rather annoying e-mails that start without saying ‘hello’ and finish without a customary ‘Best Regards’. I am now even touching a so called ‘small talk’ that can work miracles in many cases, but a very simple structure of an email. What happens as a result, Western people tend to think of Eastern Europeans as rude and that doesn’t help at all. This applies to customer service, simple e-mail correspondence and negotiations too.

    Hence it also negatively impacts digital marketing that anyone invests in and expects a decent return. Yet it doesn’t happen simply because of these silly errors.

    There are deeper issues than one-to-one communication. If a company doesn’t understand its digital marketing strategy, consumer behaviour of their Western customers and market forces, it will pour money down the drain.

    Straightforward examples include understanding the motives of those customers located in the UK, EU or USA. They might be different, the way they think, operate and deal with their money is different.

    When I discuss marketing with my clients, the question of creating a specific and measurable value for exact segments of customers is key. Understanding the customs of those consumers and also knowing what they are accustomed too is important too.

    Eastern European companies therefore are in need of (either or):

    • establishing a subsidiary
    • hiring consultancy
    • attracting expats
    • hiring people who have extensive work experience abroad

    When discussing your issues, I’d recommend to prepare a short brief with your background information, such as whether you have a website ready to sell, or not; do you have shipping or fulfillment facilities; do you sell services worldwide? This can be followed by your current view on your strategy, marketing focus and tactics in mind.

    External consultant or a hired expert can then also help with tailoring marketing tactics to those markets. Imagine you spend thousands on Google AdWords, but the ads are written by a copywriter with no exposure to those markets. How can they speak the same language?

    Similarly, your affiliate marketing campaigns, paid and organic search, social media and media buying should all be ideally carefully managed by people who have had experience managing e-commerce in the UK, USA or EU. And they did with a fair bit of success.

    We are talking about much more competitive markets and every small mistake, typo or omission could be very costly.

    Please do share your thoughts with me. If you had relevant experience or on contrary in need of some help and would like to schedule a chat, do not hesitate to contact me. I also speak Ukrainian and Russian (я также говорю по-украински и по-русски) should it be of any help.

  • Digital Marketing Audit

    The main aim of the digital marketing audit is identification of strengths and weakness of the current digital marketing strategy and its execution. 

    Structural approach and also extensive expertise are needed in order to know where to look for and what for. It is not an analysis for the sake of a fancy report, but to divide a plan how to improve and grow your business. After such list is developed and a business owner and/or senior manager do know where the business is in terms of digital marketing and what are possible directions for improvement, the real work starts. 

    Yet I find it much more effective to do the audit first prior to simply fixing search engine marketing or approaching SEO. In many cases there are issues at the strategy level – poor identification and selection of target keywords, product or pricing decisions that can be improved and so on. Similarly, only after mapping a user journey and experience, business can start to efficiently automate these processes.

    Bigger picture and roots of the digital marketing issues

    It many sound a bit theoretical now, but it is actually very down to specific details of your business, its business model and revenue streams. Digital marketing audit can identify some flaws in overall strategy too. My ability to look at the bigger picture helps with that too.

    Another huge benefit of conducting a digital marketing audit is not only to identify the issues and start developing ways to overcome those, but also to get to the very roots of those issues. As my experience shows, sometimes those causes are linked to wider problems with profitability, business models, targeting and positioning. My belief is that it is better to start from those causes and change digital marketing strategy and the use of the channels accordingly. 

    This creates a holistic approach to marketing strategy. It is linked to value generation and how are customers subsequently satisfied. 

    Contact me to discuss your questions or concerns. 

    Example of digital marketing audit flow

    In the meantime, let me show a quick example how it may look like.

    1. We start with outlining the background your business operates in. It doesn’t need to be much, just its core – values, proposition, business model, about its market and customers in brief.
    2. Does actual digital marketing strategy exists? What are the signs that it needs improvement? (i.e. acquisition is too costly, retention is too low, etc). It does not happen very often, but there are rare cares when there is no actual issue with digital marketing, but there are doubts whether it goes ‘as planned’, if the initial audit finds out that this is the case, I’d say so. In our current dynamic business environment, there is no point of wasting time.
    3. Taking some warning signs aside, we want to look at the very core of marketing strategy – audit positioning, targeting and branding together with strategic choices and direction mid- and short- term. Does this need to be changed or tweaked somehow in order to deliver better results? Again, at this point we do not make gross assumptions, we develop suggestions based on current background and business model of the company.
    4. When the main strategic choices are examined and modified, tactics isn’t going to be very difficult to tweak. We start with 7P model, where we audit and at the same time modify decisions about Product, Price, Place, Promotion and so on. Similarly, we tackle Marketing Communications Mix with digital marketing in mind.
    5. Measurement is usually the final step in any marketing plan, here we double-check how business analyses its indicators and how the new and improved digital marketing strategy and plan would be measured. Analytics is a great asset to any company as it brings the ability to learn and capitalize on strengths. 
    6. Final step is to draw an action plan. In many cases this action plan, which is based on the recommendations of the digital marketing audit, is then executed by the company’s marketing team or outsourced to an agency. I am happy to join either way to help fine-tune how different digital marketing channels perform or to set up one from scratch. I have been setting up Search Engine Marketing and Affiliate Marketing for dozens of companies to follow through on my recommendations. 

    The beauty of the digital marketing audit is in its simplicity. Business is an entity that needs to deliver profit to the stakeholders. It does not care about an ego or some complicated 100-page documents. At this point it needs actionable recommendations based on facts and the essence of the business itself. 

    Please do get in touch if you want to discuss some details.