Singapore based Digital Marketing Agency smoothly transitions to a remote workforce with Zoho One
Heroes of Digital is Singapore's fastest growing digital marketing agency that was born in 2015 with a mission to save companies from wasteful, ineffective digital marketing. They help businesses — especially small and medium ones (SMBs) — achieve long-term growth using a data-driven approach mixed with machine-learning tech, which separates them from other agencies in the region.
Heroes of Digital offers digital marketing, social media marketing, SEO, and web design services to a wide variety of clients across industries such as education, healthcare, and retail.
- INDUSTRY Digital Marketing Agency
- Key Apps CRM, Campaigns, WorkDrive, Cliq, Meeting, Social, Sign
The Challenge
When the pandemic struck, Heroes of Digital was faced with the inevitable reality of working from home. Digital marketing agencies have creativity and ideas as their core offerings, the type of work that benefits from collaboration and contact with co-workers as they seek inspiration. Even if they could transition other business functions like operations and finance online, how would they effectively collaborate remotely?
Collaborating across distributed teams with Zoho One
Like any company born in the internet age, Heroes of Digital were using cloud apps for different business functions but soon realized that they needed a centralized platform to run their entire business.
This is common with businesses that use more than one application. There are even instances where teams set up their apps outside the central purview. But as businesses grow, it's imperative to have a unified picture of how the different aspects of the business are functioning.
Thus, Zoho One became the unified operating system for Heroes of Digital.
"Earlier everything was everywhere, but now everything is centralized. If we want to retrieve anything, it is available in one platform."
- Xavier Tan, Co-Founder Heroes of Digital
During the pandemic, their priority was to get different teams to interact with each other. Zoho Meeting, the video conferencing solution present in Zoho One, solved that problem.
For team collaboration, Heroes of Digital relied on Zoho Cliq, not only as a chat application, but also as an information lifeline for the company. Their team members now easily collaborate on multiple projects, attend meetings and screen-sharing sessions, and instantly exchange documents to bring out the best campaigns for their clients.
"We use Zoho Cliq for communication. It helps us feel that we are working together (physically) even when we are not."
To send emails to their clients, a third-party email tool was being used, but due to limitations in creating mailing lists, they sought alternatives. They found Zoho Campaigns, which not only didn't have any limitations in creating mailing lists, but which also offered seamless integration with Zoho CRM. Now they have a singular view of real-time data that gives them context about user engagement and email campaign performance.
The remote client servicing model
Heroes of Digital then went one step further and parallelly developed a remote servicing model by which they could provide a structured approach internally while giving them lots of time to focus on client needs.
In the new model, from the time a prospect chooses to engage with Heroes of Digital till the time that the digital marketing campaign is launched, everything is done with the help of Zoho One apps. The leads fall into Zoho CRM, the contracts are finalized with Zoho Sign, and the creative collaboration process passes through Cliq, Zoho Meeting, and WorkDrive.
All these activities, which were only done through in-person meetings before, can now be performed with similar efficiency through the help of Zoho One.
While other businesses had to scramble for a contingency plan or look for the most suitable digital tool that could support their operations, Heroes of Digital was able to seamlessly transition while making only minor adjustments and without restarting their business processes or needing time to adapt to a new work setup. All of this was possible because their work already resided across the various applications under Zoho One.