Sweans Technologies

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am a process associate for an international footwear manufacturer.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sweans?

We previously focused on offline marketing and hadn’t hired a proper digital marketing team before. With the increased popularity of mobile devices, we needed to make sure we had a solid online presence, so decided to bring in a consultancy that could support that for us.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We have worked with them on a few search engine and Facebook ad campaigns. Our niche makes it difficult to attract inbound website traffic, but Sweans offered a lot of good ideas. We didn’t want to pay for an artificial boost on our Facebook page, so they implemented creative branding ideas for increasing our number of likes organically.

We combine our efforts for content production. We provide them with any special requirements we may have for upcoming events, and generally they are aware of our company policies around branding and content type. That means they can come up with good results and campaign schedules for us.

They’ve done some backend SEO work on our website, but not to a great extent. Most of the engagement has been focused on social media.

What is the team composition?

I’ve been in contact with four people from their group, including one of the senior staff members, who visited us in person.

How did you come to work with Sweans?

We obtained referrals and researched multiple agencies on the market, narrowing it down to three or four options. Sweans had a lot of potential in terms of talent and domain knowledge.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost of their work is $15,000 per month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in March 2016. They continue to support our campaigns and we have some future plans with them.  

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We received a lot of traffic and brand recognition as a result of the first campaign we ran with them. They’re always coming up with new innovations, some of which we plan to pursue in the upcoming months.

One of the Facebook campaigns we ran involved users taking selfies with our products. It was meant to attract likes organically, building a customer base and our branding. The campaign ran for one month and produced a good number of likes and traffic to our page.

How did Sweans perform from a project management standpoint?

They have very clear ideas about our strategy. After sharing some input on our expectations, they’ve been able to come up with good plans about what needs to be posted and when. They also provide very good follow-ups and ensure work is completed on time. The communication is done over the phone.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They have a good understanding of our organization’s profile and policies, which they apply in order to produce good results. They needed to do research into the footwear industry, but after that, they performed at the top level.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They need to work more on content for captions and push notifications.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are one of the largest multisystem operators in India. We provide digital cable services with Cisco set-top boxes, as well as broadband, six cablecast channels, an online shopping channel, and an OTT [over-the-top] mobile service. I was the business head of cable and digital, after which I moved to broadband — where I stayed for nearly 6 years. I now lead the OTT side, which was started 1½ years ago.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sweans Technologies Inc?

After launching our OTT service, we realized that it was not gaining traction and we didn’t have as many downloads as we wanted. We went to several digital agencies, but they were not able to deliver.

What was the scope of their involvement?

All our marketing is done through the online portal and through social media promotions, with everything being handled by Sweans Technologies. They have a full-fledged team of around 8 people supporting our business, including a business development director.

How did you come to work with Sweans Technologies Inc?

We had an informal conversation with Google reps asking them about digital marketing agencies that could support our business, and they recommended a few partners to us. We spoke with Sweans and found that they were in tune with what we had in mind.

One of the reasons for choosing Sweans was that they have a rather large team. Most of the companies we’d come across in India were 1–2-person teams, but Sweans has more than 100 people working for them in one location alone, for both industry research and content production.

How much have you invested with Sweans Technologies Inc?

The cost of their work has been around 60 Indian lakhs, or around $92,000, for the past 8 months.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Sweans Technologies in May 2016. The relationship is ongoing.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We have been very happy with how it’s going. Prior to Sweans Technologies coming in, we only had 2,000–3,000 downloads per month. After they took over our promos, downloads jumped to 30,000–40,000 per month, and we’ve been averaging this amount for the past year. We also received a national award for being the most popular mobile app in India on the basis of content and downloads.

We didn’t have any social media marketing prior to working with Sweans. We entrusted our Facebook presence to them, and in the span of 4–5 months, we have attracted more than 50,000 people to our page, starting from zero. This was a significant result for our market, especially in south India. Sweans has also provided Twitter and LinkedIn support.

How did Sweans Technologies Inc perform from a project management standpoint?

We’re happy with Sweans’ work, and have regular reviews with them. We receive a monthly report detailing what we need to do in order to improve our business, and we also have meetings with Sweans’ team during which they take our input and make any corrections. Their core competency is in marketing, and the project management there is very systematic. Follow-ups and interactions are good, and we have been kept informed in case of problems. Most of the communication is done through email, on a regular basis. Once or twice per week, we get on the phone and discuss what needs to be done.

Any new material is sent to us for approval, and if we find that there isn’t a fit with our path, Sweans will change it. We can rework concepts and come up with new creatives.

What did you find most impressive about Sweans Technologies Inc?

Sweans is focused and committed to the work. They’re able to analyze problems, come up with suggestions, and tell us when our package needs to be changed. We value their input, and if we feel that what they’re saying is correct, we make changes appropriately.

Are there any areas Sweans Technologies Inc could improve?

Our OTT service is not confined to India alone, and we would appreciate more focus on how we could create promos for The Middle East and the US. Sweans can do this, but there is room for improvement.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work in a media company that includes a daily newspaper, TV,  radio, an online news portal, publications, and digital classifieds products. I am the brand manager of two digital products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sweans Technologies?

Here in India, there's a popular free classifieds site, and they are really good at what they do, but they just started in the region that we are in. We started a similar site. The challenge was that everyone knew about the free classifieds site, but they didn’t know about the product that we started. We really wanted to get into people’s minds, especially the youngsters who use the free classifieds site much more than any other site available online. We wanted help from a digital agency who could help us around India getting to the right target audience through social media.

What was the scope of their involvement?

I would like to speak in detail about two of the services that they have given me. One is for the classified site that I had, and I have a daily deal site they’ve been helping out with as well. For the classified site, they did AdWords search, display ads, and social media campaigns. They’ve helped capture people through search on Google AdWords and they’ve done really interesting things for display ads as well. We have done YouTube ads through them and the type of videos they chose to show the ads were really interesting and it really helped us.

In the case of social media, our page got a lot of attention. We had a gap of not really publicizing the Facebook page and still, we got likes for it. It was really helpful and really impressive.

For the daily deal site, we had the biggest challenge of youngsters not getting to know about the site. We have a small ad in our daily newspaper which is the most circulated paper in our region, but the problem we faced was that the youngsters don’t read newspapers these days and weren’t getting to know about such deals. We had deals on pen drives at 1 INR and even those deals, the youngsters didn’t get to know. Our challenge was to get to the right target audience who would be interested in daily deal buying which is always impulsive. We did not want paid likes on our pages, but we are getting a decent number of organic likes on our page. They are doing really good work in promoting the daily deals that we have. We have 11 locations and they promote all 11 deals that we have on the site every day.

On top of that, we have promotional deals that come up at 1 INR. We sell movie tickets at just 1 INR. Once Sweans started promoting that deal for us, we could see a real difference in the time it takes to sell out for those deals. Earlier, it used to take around two to three hours to sell 100 tickets; now the tickets sell out in 15 minutes. We have reached our target audience much better. I found them better to the other people who work for the other products of my team. That’s the reason why I chose them for my second product as well.

How did you come to work with Sweans Technologies?

I did see a few digital agencies that were doing the same kind of work, and I liked the way Sweans presented. They understand your product and they’ll devise ideas that would work for you. Others were just like the common, general things that they do, but these people can give you a solution that will work for your product. They call you in between and they recommend things that you could do that are not even part of their work. The recommendations that they make really help. In the case of this daily deal site, they suggested SEO correction. We have an ad creation agency that referred Sweans to me and they showed me their work. We had a presentation for what they were going to do for us, and that was really impressive.

How much have you invested with Sweans Technologies?

We have spent between $50,000 and $80,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started working with them in July 2015, and the work is ongoing.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Once we started our promotion with them on social media, we got organic likes without pushing for it. We got around 5,000 organic likes in just a few months, which is what we want for a product like ours, which is niche and localized. We even pushed registrations on our site, and we’ve had an increase of 15,000 new users in a month, which has been a brilliant result. We hadn't done too many deals earlier, so it was really slow for us to bring in new customers. Our revenue increased as well.

How did Sweans Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

They have a really brilliant team working with them. I have two people who are in continuous contact with me. If I have something urgent to do I can just call them and tell them and get it done. They are really proactive. I’ve worked with other agencies who wouldn’t do what we wanted because they think it is wrong. Sweans is so active and so young, and they work with you on the same line. They understand what you’re talking about. You don’t have to make an extra effort to make them understand why you’re doing this.

We have weekly reporting on what we did in the week and the results of what happened and what we need to improve on. They send me a weekly report and a monthly report.

What did you find most impressive about Sweans Technologies?

The most impressive thing about them is that their team understands what they’re talking about. They really understand what we want. The second thing is that they study your product. They’ll understand top to bottom and then they devise solutions for it. The next thing that I really like about them is that they’re really updated about what is happening in the market, and they’ll suggest everything new to you that can be used to improve your reach.

Are there any areas Sweans Technologies could improve?

Not really. We’ve been happy working with them.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a real estate company. We do residential as well as contractual projects. It’s a $20 billion company. I head the marketing team for one of the largest waterfront developments.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sweans Technologies?

We do all kinds of marketing activities and we needed visibility of our brand. Ours is a very high-end project. We do TV ads, paper ads, holdings, and internet ads.

What was the scope of their involvement?

They were responsible for developing our website from scratch. They were also monitoring all of our Google AdWords. Anything that has to do with our online presence, Sweans took very good care of it. Lead generation is what we looked for because we need to generate leads and inquiries that converts to a sale. What happened is we were getting very bad hits on the internet. We were not very well-placed on Google. Sweans came in and the first project they did for us in another city brought us a lot of hits and we were getting a lot of genuine inquiries. That’s how we moved them to this team as well. Currently, they handle a lot of our business.

Sweans hooked us up with a team that takes care of all our live chats and things like that. It’s very functional. It’s a very advanced website compared to a lot of other project websites which are running here. I can assure you that we have the best one going on right now. I would say they did a good job.

They manage our social media pages, and take care of the postings. They also took care of all our Google AdWords. They also write articles.

How did you come to work with Sweans Technologies?

They came highly recommended from one of our clients. We’ve been working with them for three years. We reviewed five agencies, and overall, they were the ones who came up with the best kind of references, the best presentation overall.

How much have you invested with Sweans Technologies?

Our current budget with them is 5 lakhs a month.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in September 2015, and the work is ongoing. We’ve just signed them up for a new project. In this state, we have projects in four different cities, and all of the four different cities have their own marketing team, and they have the right to choose their ad agencies. We started Sweans off on a smaller project initially, and they did an excellent job with it. Because of that, all five projects are now under them. They’ve been taking care of us very well.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

They share a report with us every month. My target number of inquiries is around 800 every month. Before I started with Sweans, I got 112 inquiries. There are times I’ve even got less than a hundred. Initially, we spent a lot of money to set up the entire thing. After they came on board, my inquiries increased to 600. My company has a lot of projects going on. If you check any of our sites, we are way advanced in terms of the services, in terms of getting in touch, everything. I think we’re very good. Right now, I would say we have the number one website.

How did Sweans Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re very good. We have a dedicated team and they are always in touch. I honestly would have no complaints about Sweans because, like I said, they have actually been with us from the time the project started. We’ve been working with them for a very long time. One of the reasons we continue the association was the kind of staff support and project support they’ve given us. I think it’s always been excellent.

What did you find most impressive about Sweans Technologies?

There are a lot of small-time agencies here right now, but it’s very hard to find somebody who is established. The team is very good. They are always reachable and they are always very patient and they know the right solutions that you’re looking for. I have worked with other agencies in the past, but I’ve never gotten this kind of help, especially because we are very non-technical people. They have a way of explaining things to us. The work has always been very transparent in terms of the money we put in. They proactively give us a lot of feedback and things to develop our business.

Are there any areas Sweans Technologies could improve?

Their creative team and their content could be improved. There are agencies in the market who are very creative and innovative. I would give Sweans seven or eight out of ten for their creative aspects, especially in terms of ads.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m a co-founder and the director of CyD Technologies. We provide e-commerce software solutions using the WooCommerce platform. We focus on shipping, payment, and many other solution types. I am currently head of the overall marketing activities in the company, especially digital.

What challenge were you trying to address with Sweans Technologies Inc?

We wanted to improve the overall UX [user experience] of our website, drive more traffic to it, and also improve conversion rates. The existing website needed to be rebuilt from scratch in terms of overall technology.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had many discussions with Sweans Technologies from a UX perspective; we gave ideas of what we wanted and also received suggestions from their team. We also wanted to improve search engine optimization and got a few suggestions from Sweans Technologies there as well. Their development team worked based on our specifications and came up with a new theme which was integrated into the site.

The complete purchasing cycle was redesigned, as was the overall performance of the site. We have over 25 products on our e-commerce website, and we wanted to have featured listings on the homepage and highlight certain solution categories. In order to gain credibility, we also wanted some test factors to be listed on the main page. People can go through products in our shop, select the ones they want, go to the details pages, and add them to the carts — it’s a typical e-commerce buying process. Apart from this, we have a download and license activation process which customers have to go through.

There have been 2 designers, 2 developers, and a digital marketing consultant assigned from Sweans Technologies’ team. It was a large project, and there may have been other people involved from their side.

How did you come to work with Sweans Technologies Inc?

One of my partners from another business had worked with Sweans Technologies and referred me to them. There was another company we considered, but Sweans offered everything we were looking for. They have over 10 years of experience in working with WordPress and WooCommerce sites, as well as digital marketing.

How much have you invested with Sweans Technologies Inc?

The overall project cost has been $14,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Sweans Technologies 2 months ago, in March or early April 2017, although initial discussions started in February. We are performing some final tests before launching the site. There are also a couple of changes which we want to make.

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

We have no metrics at the moment, however, we have liked the design — it’s a drastic improvement compared to other sites we’ve seen. The feedback from our internal team and a couple of other people who have seen the site has been positive.

Sweans Technologies has provided consultation on the digital marketing side, and based on their suggestions, we have improved our Facebook and Twitter pages and have started posting regular updates. The new banners and other graphics have received very good feedback as well.

How did Sweans Technologies Inc perform from a project management standpoint?

I have no complaints so far. We haven’t used any project management tools, and have communicated mainly via Skype. Sweans Technologies is a very fast and accessible group.

What did you find most impressive about Sweans Technologies Inc?

Their design and input on digital marketing have brought a lot of value to our product. Sweans made improvements and gave a lot of feedback on our Google Ad Words activity as well.

Are there any areas Sweans Technologies Inc could improve?

I can’t suggest any right now.