Zaidan Farooq
Digital Marketer

Zaidan Farooq

Digital marketing director at Millennium Hotels & Resorts.

About

Zaidan Farooq has over 13 years of experience in online marketing and digital acquisition for large companies across Singapore and India, including Samsung and TripAdvisor. As a digital marketing director at Millennium Hotels & Resorts, he collaborates and executes digital acquisition strategy in the SEA region covering affiliate, display, email, meta-search, paid and organic search campaigns. He also has experience working with major providers like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Naver.

Employment

5 roles
Jul 2019 - Present 6 years 10 months
Digital Marketing Director
Millennium Hotels & Resorts
  • Collaborated and executed digital acquisition strategy in the SEA region covering affiliate, display, email, meta-search, paid and organic search campaigns. (Grew revenue by 9% in 2019).
  • Owned, managed, and optimized organic and paid media activities to drive revenue streams, improve efficiency and ROI, and reduce cost of sale.
  • Forecasted and managed marketing budgets across all digital channels, including display, affiliate, partnerships, PPC, and other digital channels.
  • Worked with the regional revenue management team to develop offers, products, and packages and ensure that relevant landing pages are built on the brand website.
  • Ran and optimize meta-search campaigns to maximize visibility and drive more direct business through the brand website.
  • Liaised with regional stakeholders and GM to drive revenue growth through digital and technology solutions.
  • Oversaw regional marketing cost and allocated budget to different marketing channels.
  • Liaised with corporate CRM and loyalty teams to provide relevant offers, content, assets, and marketing messages for ongoing CRM communications.
  • Developed structure and processes for agencies for tracking, implementation, and analysis of all digital marketing activities.
  • Evaluated, developed, and implemented regional digital marketing plans for seasonal and need periods; identified revenue generating opportunities to run targeted campaigns throughout the year.
  • Measured productivity of campaigns and determined optimal return on investment (ROI).
  • Produced statistical reports on key website metrics which provides detailed results and articulates insights for key stakeholders.
May 2018 - Jun 2019 1 year 1 month
Head of Search, SEA Region
Samsung
  • Guided regional teams to strategize, automate, and optimize online media campaigns with defined process for targeting, optimizing creatives and managing bids (Google auctions).
  • Developed digital marketing play book for business unit in SEA region. Through this play book, their team guided and trained the marketers about strategizing and implementing digital campaigns.
  • Spearheaded SEO/SEM initiatives to develop, manage, and execute implementation of SEO/SEM strategies. Managed nine Samsung websites in SEA region for all their SEO/SEM requirements.
  • Validated concept of integrated search, coming up with a metric which evaluates both paid (SEM)and non-paid channel (SEO) across SEA markets.
  • Worked on an automated dashboard to keep a track on KPI for paid (SEM) and nonpaid (SEO) marketing channels.
  • Led customer experience testing and optimizations throughout the customer journey, including ad creative, ad placement, landing page experience, conversion forms, post-conversion relationship, A/B and multivariate testing, etc.
  • Helped identify B2B opportunities for Samsung in SEA region. Mainly securing new leads through special campaigns in the region.
  • Performed end-to-end tracking of user behavior by using Google Analytics and improve the customer acquisition numbers.
  • Helped Samsung build relationship with key publishers like Google and Facebook. With this effort, their team are on the list of companies who get a chance to test beta and alpha product from these publishers.
  • Strategized and implemented Google’s Store sales direct (SSD) product in SEA region for Samsung. Now Samsung is the only company globally who is using online to offline sales attribution product (SSD) from Google at this scale. Improved customer acquisition by 7%.
Nov 2017 - Apr 2018 5 months
Product Marketing Director
Cocolive

Cocolive is a customer potential needs visualization tool for real estate companies.

  • Developed on-brand market positioning and messaging that differentiates Cocolive products in the market, what value the company provides to target audiences in what packages, through a deep understanding of customers, market, and competitors.
  • Researched out demand in different wards in Japan before launch of product. Pulled data from online resources mainly property site and processed it for meaningful data.
  • Conceptualized digital marketing strategy for APAC markets, which mainly includes SEM, social, email, and SEO strategies. 
Sep 2015 - Nov 2017 2 years 2 months
Online Marketing Manager APAC, SEM Products
TripAdvisor
  • Strategized, optimized, and automated SEM/UAC campaigns for APAC markets. Exceeded targets and achieved 44% YOY revenue growth in APAC (2014-2015).
  • Consulted hotel sale revenue team on OTA onboarding, which basically involves forecasting traffic and probable booking numbers they can get after integration with TripAdvisor.
  • Conceptualized different bidding strategies for APAC markets for search engine like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Utilized metrics like Bounce rate, quality score, revenue per impression, etc. to gain strong impression share in a market and maximize revenue. Also used segments like day of the week, hour of the day, IP geography and mobile bid multiplier as an additional multiplier to enhance accuracy of our auctions bids. Improved bidding efficiency by 22% in APAC region 2014- 2015.
  • Managed search engine marketing creative performance globally. Constantly evaluated the creative on the basis of user interaction, its relevance with the landing page and the revenue. Came up with new metrics to evaluate creative globally named as RIC (Revenue impression contribution). Filtered out good creative around 75% of the time. Revenue improvement was 4-6%.
  • Led ideation, technical development, and launch of internal marketing products for creatives which helped company to leverage learnings from best performing creatives across every market and improve revenue. Automation and creative testing tool helped the company to gain 7% improvement in revenue in 2014-2015.
  • Trained market analyst team before launching any creative product and keep them updated with any new features added to the existing creative product.
  • Worked with stake holders, engineers, and market analyst to prioritize creative product upgrades and suggested changes.
  • Ensured the company is benefiting from ad extension globally. Improved CTR by 11% globally by making review, rich-snippet and callout extension available for all markets.
  • Evaluated and tested pilot programs for creative. Evaluation is purely based on company goals and how the pilot programs will help them to achieve it faster. Actively contributed by submitting comments, suggestions, bugs, and results from the beta test activity. Launched expanded text ads in all markets globally and improved creative CTR by 18%.
Aug 2012 - Sep 2015 3 years 1 month
Senior SEM Analyst, APAC
TripAdvisor India
  • Managed day-to-day operations of the APAC paid search/UAC programs and maintained high standard of operational excellence. Over achieved targets, APAC paid channel revenue grew by 64% YOY.
  • Executed bidding strategies across keywords and different markets, helped team to create a roadmap of initiatives to enable defined objectives.
  • Verified global auction bids send over to search engines every day. The verification process involves going through different metrics changes and histogram spread across 46 markets.
  • Developed active relation between TripAdvisor and Google Singapore team.
  • Managed one market analyst.

Education

Sep 2004 - Jun 2006 1 year 9 months
MBA, Marketing
MONIRBA India