Today we have selected Ferdinand Pasion to take his interview. He is the Digital Architect at Vuemobi Media.
First of all, how the COVID-19 pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
We got affected as anyone else who has a business serving local customers, especially at the height of its peak. Our existing clients and prospects that we met in person are now made through virtual meetings online. Clients with brick-and-mortar locations have to cut staff and business hours. We have observed a chained domino effect that leads to minimizing their marketing spending and, worse, cutting it at all!
Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded an internet marketing company.
I was in a corporate consulting practice working for a BI (business intelligence)/analytics company. My background is in marketing and IT. I’ve developed a passion for photography and online maps throughout the years. While still working on a corporate gig, I became a street photographer and offered my services for free; it was a passion anyway .
I realized there’s a need for it to help local businesses to showcase their location on the map. I’ve started offering these services and have grown since then. Have added services to complement it, like web design and SEO (search engine optimization).
How does your company innovate?
The saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Our work is rooted in an optimized photo, current web design practices, and in tune with the search engine’s algorithm updates guidelines. We developed a local marketing system for businesses to compete equally with the big ones on top of organic searches and map results. Our work is proprietary yet transparent to our clients.
How the Coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?
As a blessing in disguise, we don’t want to say that we have benefited from this pandemic but we have raised a new norm for consumers – an awareness for business owners that customers are more than ever looking, searching, and conducting business online.
We have seen a spike of hits of online search traffic, especially in map listings in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Apple. I have become busier than ever, responding to future customer questions and meetings.
Did you have to make difficult choices and the lessons learned?
It’s a choice between efficiently cutting expenses and delivering the same quality of work to our clients. It allows us to evaluate better the tools that we use and innovate by developing them in-house or working with a better one.
Also, the practices we used to follow may no longer work. The goal is future-proof. It’s a never-ending learning process, an eye-opener for me personally and my team that what works today may no longer work tomorrow.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?
As anyone uses to work efficiently, we use zoom, google meet, live chats, online calendaring, sharing, and collaboration tools.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
We don’t treat the same agencies to be competitors in our business. Vuemobi Media collaborates and shares resources by referring some of our client’s unique needs to partners who are good at that area of specialization. We learn and continue to innovate, provide better customer service, and remain competitive.
Final Thoughts
This pandemic teaches us a lesson about personal interaction. The opportunity that we used in the past for face-to-face, in-person meetings can now be done online. With the proper collaboration and sharing tools, we can work anywhere and possibly work efficiently on some aspects.
• Spokesperson: Ferdinand Pasion
• Company: Vuemobi Media
• Website: https://vuemobi.com