Today we announce the launch of one of our startups Hua Marketing.
It is a really exciting moment, because like CopyPress, Hua has been in the works for a lot longer than the concept of SteelCast.
Introducing Hua Marketing. Hua was born, again like CopyPress, out of a business process need. At both BlueGlass and my previous company Search & Social we had the need to quickly scale labor force with the constant flux of client work. This is a reality for any marketing services company, and thus marketing outsourcing solutions in one shape or form are always a need. We would often go one of two routes:
1) Do it yourself staffing i.e. Odesk
2) MPO (marketing process outsourcing) services based in other countries
What we found for our needs was that both of these services left us wanting. There are several issues with each:
1) Security – When working with solutions such as Odesk security is a major concern. You are essentially operating via Odesk’s TOS with the provider and any data you send to them is at a buyer beware basis.
2) Efficiency of management solutions – Odesk offers some ease of use, but most smaller MPO outfits offer nothing more than email management and IM. It is hard to scale in this fashion.
3) Training of staff – This is the biggest issue with outsourcing. Most of the time we spend more time untraining our staff than training.
4) Weeding through staff to find the winners – There is a reason a lot of the outsourced laborers are available for immediate hire, and in our experience 50% or more of the time is because they are not efficient.
All of these boil down to one major cost; TIME. The solutions we would search for and utilize would end up costing us what we them to aid us in salvaging. These issues brought forward a few major questions:
1) What would an MPO company that centered their entire offering around concrete training, workflows, and tools look like in terms of ROI for clients?
2) What if we took time out of the equation? Most MPO and outsourcing options bill by the hour. What if we billed based on project and performance so that even if specialization was needed the client did not pay for that time cutting costs?
3) What if we took #1 and #2 and put them into a break neck simple management and reporting backend, to allow business owners to save time and limit communication issues
Those three guiding questions are the root of Hua Marketing. It has also guided how we have built our systems out. We are passionate about these factors, so much so that today Hua only has three services ready to offer openly to the public; linkbuilding, social seeding, and marketing assistant services. Why? Because these are the only places we have 100% perfected the training, workflow, and reporting processes. That isn’t to say that we don’t plan on adding more services, or couldn’t offer them today, it is just that those are the only three services that meet our guiding principles.
My vision when I speak about Hua is that is will be utilized by the globe trotting Internet entrepreneur to manage a multitude of marketing services as easily from his mobile device as from his laptop, with billing that is easy to match ROI to. If we can service this segment of the market then we have accomplished our goal.
Our other vision? Well that is to create a company that is giving as much at it is getting in the areas we open offices. Today our main office is in the Philippines, and we are looking to create a sense that we are “THE” company to work for. We take great pride in our staffing, training, and employee retention, and it shows in our work. People have varying opinions on outsourced labor, especially overseas, but for us it is a way to offer an amazing service and opportunity on both sides of the relationship. The Hua team today includes offices in LA, Tampa, and Manilla, each working to provide a portion of the overall experience we are cultivating through our guiding principles. We are going to showcase the skillset of our workers, and the quality of our training on the Hua Marketing blog, so I hope you make your way over there to support the team.