Q&A with Alyka Director Zion Ong

Whether you’ve worked with Alyka or not, chances are you’ve visited many websites they created or seen their digital advertising work without even knowing it.
There are many layers behind what makes a great website and digital marketing campaign, and it can be tricky for a small business to decipher the jargon. This is where Alyka shines: Not only do they know truly this world inside out, but they can help you to understand the why behind each decision.
Alyka is the brainchild of Zion Ong and Bernard Chia, and their mission revolves around helping their clients use the latest technology as they strive toward their business goals. Alyka and Carbon have worked together for a long time, and with that relationship comes trust and many lessons. Alyka Director, Zion Ong, shared some insights with us that will be useful for small business owners to learn.

What drove you to start Alyka?

Boredom with our day jobs, plus a love for entrepreneurship and technology.
What’s the main benefit in taking a data-driven approach to making decisions?
Going just with your gut can lead to subjective and wrong decisions.
Decisions need a combination of gut and data. For example, your gut may tell you that your cool marketing campaign is generating you HEAPS of leads because your phone started ringing around the same time you started the campaign. But when you dig into the data, you find out that most of those leads are not coming from your cool marketing campaign and they are coming from a completely different source.

If you made a decision based on gut feel alone, you would have pumped more money into your marketing campaign and less into the source that was actually creating the leads.

What’s Google Trends and why should we use it?

It’s an awesome tool that tells you what is popular, what is not, what is trending up in popularity and what is trending down.

You should look out for upward trends and see if you can rank for those keywords.

Type in “Google Trends” in Google and click on the first search result to access this free tool.

What are the key trends which have emerged during the global pandemic which are of interest?

Self-care is a big one. This includes any kind of product that helps maintain your health and beauty (hand and face moisturiser, skincare, footwear, make up etc).

“How to look good in Zoom” is another popular trend especially with certain Australian states reinforcing restrictions again.

Share your top 3 tips for a company looking to improve its digital marketing

1. Track all your digital data. E.g. Install Google Analytics, Set up Goal Tracking, Install Free version of a CRM such as
Hubspot, Connect your social/Google/PPC accounts to that CRM 2. Set your Goals. What do you want from your marketing? Leads? Brands? Sales? And how much? Try to put a
number on these goals 3. Write a digital marketing strategy.