Yury Tsoy is a digital marketer who has been working in the IT sphere for 11 years. He has worked at Google Search, Mail.ru Group, ABBYY Mobile OCR, and developed Yandex delivery in foreign markets. Yury told us about how he started his career and how you can bring companies to the top with the help of digital promotion.
Yury, how did you start your career?
I started working as a digital marketer 11 years ago in a children's shop, it was an e-commerce project. I was selling children's tables, dressers and toys via e-mail marketing and Google Search and I still remember all the products. After that I worked on the agency side as a Performance Marketing Manager and my clients included companies such as Royal Philips and MVideo (a major retailer in Russia), there were more than 150 shops under my management in the Yandex.Market channel.
When I was working with marketplaces I realized that the market was changing rapidly and that the main trend in the market was mobile devices and creating software for them. I went to work at Google where I was responsible for mobile advertising and mobile products as a Sales Marketing Manager. It was there that I realized that I wanted to work with IT products, to promote them and help users solve their problems through mobile applications, since then, all my projects have been related to the IT sphere.
You have launched major IT projects in the CIS countries, can you tell us about your contribution to their promotion?
One of the significant projects I was part of is CityMobil, where I worked as Head of User Acquisition. When I started working there the company was a young startup. Under my management, we grew by more than 25-fold and became a competitor to Yandex.Taxi and Uber in Russia. This was achieved because I managed all the advertising budgets in the digital channels, led Product development of websites (mobile and desktop versions) and created Digital marketing strategy.
Moreover, I tuned up the business intelligence system to understand where we could increase or decrease the budget to attract new users and find a perfect balance between customer acquisition cost and potential revenue.
I was also responsible for the development of Yandex. Delivery in large CIS countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Azerbaijan), where I held the position of Head of Performance Marketing and handled related functionality: launching and building systems for analytics, metrics, profitability calculation and economics in terms of managing advertising channels.
You worked in taxi and delivery services and were responsible for order growth in overseas markets such as Europe, the UAE, Israel and Latin America. How have these markets grown during your leadership?
Growth required significant marketing investment, experienced management of marketing channels, launching marketing activities according to a timetable and taking into account the seasonality of each of the businesses.
I was able to grow these markets several-fold. Each of them had similar metrics and attributes, such as the importance of placing ads not only on large channels (Google and Yandex.Metric), but also on seemingly irrelevant channels (TikTok and Twitter), which actually show good effectiveness. Thus, in the UAE and Israel, the number of orders attracted through paid advertising has tripled.
You have launched more than 10 countries at the same time and have been responsible for sales in them. How do you manage so many projects simultaneously?
I think it is very important to be able to work in a team and develop delegation skills, because this is the first thing that helps me to set my focus and priorities. I also need the ability to concentrate on certain advertising channels or placements, and to deal only with them.
I am convinced that only by putting focus and effort into one particular point can any meaningful results be achieved. For example, I have always been responsible for business growth and for the growth of orders through online channels and so I have accumulated solid expertise over 11 years, because somehow or other, I have been involved in similar functionality in different markets in different companies.
You are a member of the community and a member of the jury of the Tagline competition. How has your experience helped this?
This competition is held among the most ambitious teams across Europe, who develop new concepts and are changing the market and the world. I would like to think I am a world changer myself, as I am responsible for distributing creative concepts, I understand the specifics of placement channels, I manage media marketing budgets, and predict and increase companies' profits and growth.
Of course, in order to become a member of the Tagline jury you have to have achievements in marketing, and as I have 11 years of experience and a fairly long list of achievements in the field (raising venture capital for Citimobil (ride-hailing app), growing a business 3-fold in less than one year with minimal investment in the food delivery market, etc.), it was not difficult to become a member of the competition.
In addition, I myself have participated in similar competitions several times and have walked the path from application to winning, and I understand the specifics of the competition and the teams' worries. It is a pleasure to see the same ambitious and budding youngsters that I once was.
You have promoted banking, B2B software, taxis and online shops. What motivates you to develop in the diverse field of Digital Marketing?
The field of digital marketing is very new and as such it is constantly changing, with new channels, new approaches and metrics appearing every year, and the opportunity to experiment with them. This is very motivating and encourages development as a specialist and manager.
Apart from that, I am interested in seeing the results of my work. When I am responsible for paid advertising, for example, we have a certain budget and see a return on our revenue and growth in new clients. In other words, I like to see digital marketing grow in new markets and companies where I work.
