- February 19, 2021
Sasha Shuga: “Digital marketing allows any business to find their ideal clients and develop in any direction”
Reading Time: 4 minutesSasha Shuga is Head of Marketing at Efir Media. He and his coworker at the Digital Design Agency Tony Zhukouski, who works as UX/UI designer, told Neolo how they work and how to take advantage of digital marketing and web design.
What do you do at Efir Media?
– My name is Tony and I’m a UX/UI designer.
– My name is Sasha and I’m Head of Marketing.
How would you describe your job as a UX/UI designer?
– Tony: Being a UX/UI designer means taking on a new challenge every day, finding and creating better solutions. My work is about analysis and comparison, and its uniqueness is that it lies at the intersection with creativity. How? Let me explain. As a UX designer, I conduct user research and create user profiles to try to understand them and what they need as best as I can. I also create the information structure of a digital product, build its skeleton, and define user flows. As it happens, this work is somewhat similar to architecture. The difference, however, is that in architecture, creativity takes the form of a stone. In UX, this creativity flows smoothly into the UI: the visual user experience, style guides, and general concepts that are neatly superimposed on the UX foundation.
UI is about aesthetics, what the user sees directly and what causes the first emotions and intentions in them, prompting them to follow certain actions.
How do you do branding at Efir Media?
– Sasha: I do research, market analysis, and digital campaigns. I seek to understand who our target audience is, what their needs are, what language we understand each other in, and where we should build our communication. I then build a brand strategy.
My primary goal is to make people happy by providing them with the best services, making every contact with our brand pleasant and impressive. This, in turn, goes hand in hand with my second goal: ensure the business’ growth into the long-term.
What’s your work’s source of inspiration?
– Sasha: I think people and the relationships between them inspire me. Their dreams, their wishes, their art, and their creativity. I like being in a crowd at a rave or a festival, watching movies, or listening to music. Even simpler things like people watching – looking particularly at their outfits, faces, and emotions. Another great source of inspiration are the results of my work. They inspire me to go further every day. If we talk about an online resource, then anywhere there is a visual series. Today, social networks, in my opinion, are the best source of inspiration too.
What work experience can you share with our readers in order to get the importance of web design?
– Sasha: The main thing in business, marketing, and communication between the brand and the customer are the emotions that are generated. A new, unique or impressive digital experience must aim to stimulate the customer with unforgettable emotions, binding them to the brand and making them want to return again and again. That’s what web design is about.
What tools do you use for website design? Do you work with WordPress?
– Tony: The Efir team works in Figma and Sketch. Sometimes customers come to us with their best practices in a particular editor, so cross-platform is an important working aspect today. For prototyping, we use InVision or Principle. If we’re talking about animation, then it’s After Effects – of course.
We work with WordPress, it’s a dynamically developing platform that solves many of the tasks assigned to it.
What tip could you give about content production?
– Tony: Always think about the context of the product first. You need to understand its basic essence before beginning. After dealing with the background context, it will then be quite easy to stretch the thread from there through the entire product. If you manage to do that, it will be complete, understandable, and – most importantly – will retain its essence and what it was originally created for.
What do you think are the advantages of digital marketing?
– Sasha: First of all, it’s an opportunity to work in the global market.
Secondly, it’s faster and easier to start a campaign and quickly analyze the result.
And thirdly, digital marketing brings things closer, making it feel very real to find and work with a target audience where you can set up a fairly narrow target to hit a goal. Thus, it is digital marketing that allows any business to find their ideal clients and develop in any direction.
What marketing tips could you give to an entrepreneur?
– Sasha: There is an opinion that an entrepreneur needs to shoot first and then aim. In my opinion, this is true when starting a business, but not when building a marketing strategy.
The most important thing to start with is to understand what value your business has for people.
What problems it solves or what needs it covers. Who is the target audience? Who needs your specific product or service? Why exactly is your offer the best on the market? And then understand where these people are and how, in what language, to tell them about your proposition as you make them an offer they won’t be able to refuse.
What do you think is the future for website design?
– Tony: The future of web design depends on all of us – design develops with us, with our level of culture, and our needs. If we look at the first stages of the emergence of the Web, we can see it performed a purely utilitarian function – the delivery of information. Today, web design fully engages us. It is, first and foremost, visual communication, gamification, and interactive actions. We are immersed in information, we can perceive it in different ways and explore it. I believe that in the future the process of immersion will continue, and information will not just be presented, but will already be integrated into our lives as standard.
Are you thinking about having your own website?
