Communications Practitioner Profile: Zulker Naeen

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Zulker Naeen is a Head of development of branding and communications in Bangladesh, Veedol International Limited UK. His expertise spans the process for developing a strategic communications plan that embeds the trust of their clients and customers.

Zulker’s know-how and field experience mean he has planned to support their clients in delivery to end-users of trusted solutions for the digital and wireless world.

Zulker Naeen – Head of Branding and Content, Bangladesh, Veedol International Limited UK.

Zulker manages Veedol’s branding, corporate publications and social media. He has been with the company for five years in marketing and communication roles based in Bangladesh and South Asia. Prior to this, he worked in Indruk Communications Limited. Zulker speaks English and Bangla and holds a Masters in Communications.

As a strategic planner of Veedol International Limited UK, how does your company value your social activity?

In Bangladesh and other parts of South Asia, we have been involved in social since late 2016 on a project basis but saw the value to apply to our whole organization and created strategic guidelines in late 2018. As a team, we always follow a campaign-based approach using our blog as the hub for our content. And we have seen the value in terms of awareness and web traffic.

Measuring the effectiveness of social media activity is a focus for corporations now. How does your company track the ROI that its social media activity delivers?

Our objective for social media activity is based on raising awareness for our corporate brand and promoting specific offers such as instant payment, the order in bulk or participatory competition. In terms of awareness, we measure the increased web traffic or followers while campaigns based on webinar inscriptions or whitepaper downloads.

What are the unique benefits of social media over other marketing channels?

Social media is likely to use as part of an integrated marketing campaign and we shouldn’t avoid the other channels. However, it offers many returns in terms of reaching people you couldn’t in a physical context and creating word of mouth, as consumers trust their friends more than a brand’s messages. It is also great for SEO and raising web traffic mostly in light of the latest changes to Google’s search algorithm, which favour frequently updated content-rich sites such as blogs over more static corporate sites.

“Social media needs to be used as part of an integrated marketing campaign”

Is social media integrated into existing marketing strategies? How do you go about social media in a broader marketing strategy?

Social only works well if it is an integrated one into wider activities. So, we work on a series of campaigns to promote the corporate brand and specific solutions where it is just one channel of the marketing mix. The mega campaign could also include a web element, tradeshows, direct emailing, PR, customer magazines and more.

Can you outline a recent marketing initiative that included a social media component? How is your company innovating in this area?

One of our high growth areas is insecure access to existing distribution networks. It is a noisy market and many influencers such as bloggers, consultants, analysts etc.

To increase the engagement, we used our blog, Twitter and agency to reach out to influencers to crowdsource the survey questions. The results became a series of blog posts and a whitepaper, which is for lead generation.

I do not believe the tools exist to track how social contacts become sales.

Is social media offering corporations real commercial opportunities to sell their goods?

There have been examples of consumer goods manufacturers such as Apple selling iPhone via Twitter. However, we work in a complex B2B environment with long sales cycles. So far, we do not have any commercial objective behind our activities – this may change later. Usually, we do not believe the tools exist to track how social contacts become sales.