Oxedent Technologies was founded in the year 2017 by Biplab Poddar, a Google Ads lover and CRO specialist, this 360-degree marketing agency focuses on the advertiser’s growth and profitability, setting out on the path of success – winning hearts, increasing profits, easing the marketing burden, for clients across the globe.
Being a PPC management agency which focuses on the advertiser’s growth and profitability, Oxedent Technologies believes in going above and beyond providing powerful marketing strategies for clients, by guiding them on how to improve and revamp their overall brand image.
Oxedent Technologies’s Founder, Biplab Poddar spoke exclusively to Medianews4u on its journey and their future plans.
Tell us about how you started Oxedent technologies? How has the journey been and tell us about your services and some clients?
I pursued my B.Tech Degree from Kalyani Government College in Electronics & Communication, like many others, it was expected from me to get a 9-5 job in an MNC and get settled. But it was way too different from what I thought, I started doing paid internships right from the 3rd year of my college and worked as a part-timer to startups in their digital marketing which were just starting up and can’t afford full-time employees. Moving forward, I learned advanced techniques and various channels/vehicles of digital marketing.
One day, I read an interview of a freelancer making $30,000 per annum from consulting digital marketing to foreign clients, then I learned about freelancing platforms like PeoplePerHour and UpWork. I created a profile there immediately and got my first job within a few weeks, it was a London based Law firm, I helped them create Google AdWords campaigns, and they are still my client.
This was the turning point of my life and since then, I never looked back. I was making a handsome sum in the final months of my engineering,I never wanted to join a full-time job but was unable to convince my parents, so I joined a real estate company in Kolkata as a Digital marketing executive.
I paralleled freelancing with my job and continued even 3 months after my college. More companies were inquiring for my services/consultation, and single-handedly I couldn’t deliver them, then finally the fire in me made me quit my job to be on the crest of a wave, hire more digital marketing enthusiasts, and train them to be a part of my team and it was September 2017 when I registered ‘Oxedent Technologies Pvt. Ltd.’
We started as a digital marketing company and we were covering every vertical of digital marketing from content marketing to SEO, email marketing, and PPC. Later on, I realized a lot of companies are in digital marketing so to stand out from the competition I decided to focus on PPC only, also on the other side, the segment of businesses we work need direct ROI from the marketing investment and pay per click advertising is the best channel from grabbing the bottom of the conversion funnel and providing our clients with great ROI. Our average client sees a 6.5x ROI from their Ads spend, meaning every $ they spend with us on ads they get a $6.5 sale in return.
How is the business shaping up in times of Covid-19? What has been the impact of COVID on your business?
Many big and small companies are finding themselves in tough situations as they have potentially lost numbers of business events and major clientele, the same is with us too. The pandemic of Covid-19 has immensely affected almost every sector of the industry. Mobile advertising and marketing are also one of these, as companies have started curtailing their marketing spends and will continue to do so until the situation stabilizes a bit at least. Recession is on its way globally and there have been declines in business spends and surely will have a remarkable impact on marketing budgets at least during the present quarter.
However, due to this pandemic, organic traffic and conversion rates have come to a significant low almost for every industry. Most of the industries have witnessed a huge drop in their traffic during the last few months, with the news and media industry in exception to skyrocketing traffic during this period. There are several times when there is a mass hysteria that makes the news happen, people are full of questions and confusion if they should pause their marketing campaigns, or reduce their budget, etc.
Most notably, costs in PPC are more or less the same even for businesses experiencing massive conversion hits and traffic incoming. There has been a slight drop in the CPC as well but the costs per acquisition have been getting a good rise although the number of searches by people had a significant decline.
If I talk about my agency, more people search for marketing services online and we have seen 27% more searches compared to non-COVID situations. It might take a couple of weeks for results to come and to avoid taking risks of pausing your campaigns or complete shutdown of your accounts. Another major thing is when your competitors are pulling out of the market due to this pandemic situation, your clicks and cost per lead will be lower so you need to pay less money for your leads as the competition is much lesser than usual and hence it’s the right time to hit on!
Any recent campaigns/work/case study that Oxedent technologies was credited for in times of Covid-19? Something you would want to highlight?
Anthyesti funeral services provide end to end solutions and organize professional funerals and post-death rites with utmost care and respect across all communities. They assist you with hearse vans, priests, crematorium services to make the last journey of your loved ones memorable.
Oxedent helps them grow their inbound calls by 225% from mobile-focused Google Ads campaigns, prior to signing with Oxedent, Anthyesti had yet to launch any search ad campaigns. We were happy to work for them and receive a 225% increase in the conversion volume with a 21% decrease in CPC that made Anthyesti quite a well-heeled business during this COVID.
How have brands/clients changed or modified their business strategy? And what has been your advice to all your clients?
“Pause Traditional, bring on digital.” – This has been my go-to mantra for all my clients. Covid-19 is the topic nowadays, everywhere, and it has affected both, small and big businesses. Businesses seek numerous ways to prevent ad spends in this period of economic crisis and business close-downs. Unfortunately, marketing spends are among the first cuts to be made by people and so in-house marketers now are struggling with their teams to keep up their digital sphere, whereas digital agencies see huge swings in spending from their clients.
Due to this pandemic, physical businesses are gradually rolling down their doors, and hence digital marketing will have a more major role to play. Even in the long run, marketing strategies will work for the maintenance of the online presence of your brand and make lives easier for people even after this crisis gets over. So for our clients and brands, we pay more focus on the key metrics and try to optimize the campaign in a more profound way.
But we do not stop our campaigning efforts because the change this pandemic brought would increase the competitiveness of digital space in a fierce way. Thus brands thinking of moving out of stopping their marketing efforts would surely miss the 1st mover’s advantage.
During these hard times, how are you keeping up the morale of your teams that are working remotely? How are you making sure about the mental health of employees so that the lockdown doesn’t drive people crazy?
As I have mentioned to you, Oxedent’s culture has always been workspace free, our associates have the liberty of working from anywhere and at any time. Due to this, we didn’t face many issues in team coordination but yes, post-pandemic for our employees, we focused on mental health. We don’t have a very big team, due to this we are able to conduct informal meets every Saturday, where we discuss anything but work; for morale-boosting. We have also created a buddy system, where one associate is tagged with another associate for 2 weeks. During this span, these two associates exchange every update regarding their physical health, mental health, issues faced and the other person tries to solve them; if not then bring it up to the management. We keep rotating the teams every 14 days, with this, we are able to create a team-building activity too.
What is your experience of working from home? How has the agency adopted the new normals?
Although COVID has forced big corporates and startups to adapt to these new work from home rituals but for us it is not something quite new. Our work culture has always been focused on deliverables of assigned work without any boundaries. Even before COVID also, our employees had the liberty of completing their work from anywhere, I believe that due to this our adoption to the new normal has been very smooth. My team and I enjoy the comfort of our home while working and also stay updated with all our targets and tasks.
How are you making sure that you’re ahead of the curve in these times of uncertainty and crisis?
Our team is building a SaaS platform where the e-commerce business owners can reach engaged shoppers with buying intent and only spend on ads channels and audiences that are likely to generate sales and revenue. The platform will automatically suggest the best advertising channels, keywords, ad copies by scanning their website, and products.
There are an estimated 20 million – 24 million e-commerce sites across the entire globe, with more and more being created every single day. Only about 2M of them generate $1000 per month in sales, on the other hand, 2.05 Billion active people are shopping online. So there is clearly a gap or limitation in the way e-commerce businesses advertise online.
We always focus on key deliverables for our clients, so this new change will also help our clients to understand their marketing efforts in a more effective way. Oxedent is planning to help new budding entrepreneurs and Digital marketers also.
What has been the impact of COVID-19 on your business and the ability to generate new business?
Due to this pandemic, organic traffic and conversion rates have come to a significant low almost for every industry. Most of the industries have witnessed a huge drop in their traffic during the last few months, with the news and media industry in exception to skyrocketing traffic during this period.
Most notably, costs in PPC are more or less the same even for businesses experiencing massive conversion hits and traffic incoming. There has been a slight drop in the CPC as well but the costs per acquisition have been getting a good rise although the number of searches by people has had a significant decline.
If I talk about my agency, more people search for marketing services online and we have seen 27% more searches compared to non-COVID situations. It might take a couple of weeks for results to come so avoid taking risks of pausing your campaigns or complete shutdown of your accounts. Another major thing is when your competitors are pulling out of the market due to this pandemic situation, your clicks, and cost per lead will be lower so you need to pay less money for your leads as the competition is much lesser than usual and hence it’s the right time to hit on! As mentioned earlier, Oxedent believes in performing at the worst of the situations and providing the best of the results.
For the ability to generate new businesses, I would say only one thing, our team has onboarded 18 clients in between these crucial times. The numbers justify our growth and I believe it has been only possible because of our long persistent presence in the market and our stakeholders’ belief on us.
How will businesses shape up post the lockdown?
How the business and growth sector of India would recover after this pandemic is a bit difficult to determine from now on. Although now that there’s a fair bit of agreement that India’s GDP will face contraction, the debate has switched to the shape of the subsequent recovery.
For the recovery prospects, I would like to say that the early shoots of economic prosperity has already started to grow, COVID- Ban China, all these have accelerated our “Make in India” initiatives. This is a great chance for the long-ignored production industries to tighten their shoes, on top of that a very important aspect would be the digital consumerable market of India. Just consider the business news of the past few weeks, from Google, Facebook investing in Reliance Jio to Sony’s merger with Viacom 18, the digital economy of India is going to boom and become top of its h=game by the upcoming years.
Thus it is important to utilize these opportunities by local and sub local brands and bring their marketing efforts to digital.
Any trends that you see emerge post-lockdown?
I would comment on two things here, the digitization process has been accelerated due to this pandemic and this is the best time to grab the opportunity. Brands who have invested in their online presence for the last few years would get the most benefits but also brands that would quickly follow this transition would also be in the same boat. Building online trust of customers is going to be how your company would survive the upcoming 5 years.
Companies and marketers need to embrace an agile culture of innovation and creativity when every day brings a new challenge. Post the complete unlock process, we are forecasting a huge push of consumer purchase and also the consumer behavior is going to change in a very frequent manner. So agility in marketing campaigns is going to be the key here. Tried and tested methods of digital marketing may not show desired results anymore. Every brand needs a more innovative approach. This is the time for creating new trends, as an agency Oxedent is executing in that path only.
