CopernicaTV - Thinkable Digital - Partner interview

In the Copernica partner interviews we highlight a partner from the Copernica network. In this partner interview we speak with Mike Gracia, Strategy Director of Thinkable Digital.

Topics covered are:

• Tying several media together in a multichannel strategy
• Challenges of content marketing and content driven SEO
• Improving the quality of web traffic
• How to differentiate from competition
• Setting up scalable one-to-one marketing
• Implications of mobile and responsive to your marketing
• The importance of a proper strategy

Thinkable Digital, are a UK-based digital marketing agency located in Bristol. Mike Gracia generally heads up the strategy, so taking an overview of various campaigns and the strategy generation for them.
Thinkable consists of graphic designers, programmers, SEO, PPC and different experts in those individual areas.

If you look at the shifts in the market, what do you see as the biggest challenges of today?

The move towards higher quality content marketing and content driven SEO. Hopefully SEO's have always been producing content that is useful and designed for the user. but we all know that not every agency has been doing that and I see a big shift towards most agencies now trying to play catch-up. Getting to the level where they are producing content that is actually designed for the user rather than SEO optimized.

How could you increase the quality of web traffic using all the channels that we have available?

Really, it balls down to relevancy and usefulness.

If content is relevant and useful it will succeed. In general terms, obviously one of the most important things there is to know your demographic. Because you need to understand your market audience. You need to know what their needs are and work out their needs and make sure that you answer their needs as concise were it is possible and be as useful as possible

So that is really how you drive relevant quality traffic, because the more useful you are to your audience the more useful the articles or guest posts. Guest posts for example are a really good way of getting traffic. It should be about building brand, and connect to your customers and you shouldn't care really if the links are given follow or no follow SEO terms. It doesn't matter. No follow links are fine.

If the article
- connects with your audience
- is on a blog or site that you know your audience go to
- is answering a question you know that your audience frequently have
and you have a really good answer helping them, then you will drive relevant traffic.

If all of our businesses would be writing decent and quality content how can we differentiate ourselves from our competition?

Mmm, that is a difficult one. Quite a lot of market places are saturated these days online. And how to stand out balls down to branding. It has always been the case. Even before the internet, there was competition in the market place. And how a brand stood out was by really strong branding.

That could be a focus on customer service, having a brand identity and be consistent and stick to that brand identity. Because if your brand becomes known for being really useful to people in the sector and you have a really strong sense of identity, people have got something they can identify with. If however your brand doesn't have a strong identity it is difficult for people to identify with you and to feel brand loyalty towards you.

You can't feel brand loyalty towards a brand that doesn't exist. You need strong branding and really how to differentiate yourself from the competition is to have a strong sense of brand, stick to that and be consistent and be really, really helpful. Customer service is vital in the age of internet. We are more on one to one marketing. It is ironic, that something as big as the internet which connects to millions of people, actually means you need to focus more on one to one marketing especially with social media.

What I found very interesting about what you just said is that companies who master SEO, master all the digital marketing move more towards or move back to branding to differentiate themselves. Whereas for most brands, the branding has been something they have been moving away from for the past couple of years.

Yeah. Really the two should be seen as one and the same. Having a good brand and having a good online brand are the same thing. You shouldn't separate. This is where tying everything together is really important. Branding should be included with online as well, so it is quite usual for big brands to have brand books and brand guide lines and that should be taken online as well. That really is an extension of the brand online and that is something that is missing.

This is something that small business can do as well, not just big businesses. You know, for big businesses it is important that they convey the brand messages they already have online. And small businesses they need to really take a leap out of the brands books and learn what it is to brand and how to brand. And that a brand really should focus on customer service.

You also mentioned in combination with brand marketing, one to one marketing becomes more valuable as well. How do you see one-to-one marketing developing in the next couple of years?

More people are going to be doing it, if they want to be successful that is for one. Especially for e-commerce platforms, personalized data, so using platforms like Copernica for example. If you have the right systems in place, for example with a Magento integration, you can be sure to deliver personalized messages based on user activity on the site, so you can send them emails you know they will find interesting. So you have to set-up rules obviously, so that if someone performs a certain action or visits a certain product page, you can send them tailored messages in a scalable way. Scalable because it is automated, you set-up the rules and it does it for you.

Whatever platform and whatever device the user is accessing your emails from, it needs to work. It actually harms the brand more, by sending an email that doesn't render properly on mobile devices, then if you never send it in the first place.

Getting a bad email can put people off, and cause them to unsubscribe.

Responsive design has become more of a commodity for a brand?

Yeah, absolutely, it is becoming essential. Mobile growth or mobile internet is soaring. Mobile commerce as well is soaring, so, for an ecommerce business to be sending out personalized emails in a mobile responsive format is really going to be key.

Mobile is here to stay. The year of the mobile, every year is the year of the mobile. It is just one slice of the pie, but its slice is growing year by year.

You've started as a Copernica registered partner a while ago. What made you decide to partner with Copernica initially?

In the past we've used a combination of technologies to deliver content marketing style work, that has involved several email marketing platforms, the standard auto-responders. We really wanted a way to tie everything together, and be more useful. We looked at a lot of marketing automation software, but some of them just didn't deliver what we wanted.

One of the great things about Copernica is, it is so versatile. You can configure it and do amazing things with Copernica.

Even to the level, and I was really impressed, where you can personalize PDF files. So if you are doing a white paper as part of your content marketing plan, you can. Lots of solutions will let you personalize an email, but with Copernica even the PDF that is attached to it can be a personalized PDF. Which to me, is excellent, someone gets a personalized white paper, which not a lot of people are offering. And to be able to go to that level of personalization to me is really impressive.

And then the fact that a lot of marketing automation software charge for training on top of the normal fee. Copernica doesn't. And to me that is really a testament to how Copernica feels about its partners and its customers. They really care. That is proven by the fact, well, with this video now, and by the communication we've had throughout the sign-up process and getting started with Copernica. We felt supported every step of the way. And that helps us in turn to support our clients, and to be confident that the solution we're offering has the support there to support the clients with what we need to do. So yeah, really happy. That is really the reason; how configurable it is and the level of service you get there, is second to none. And that's why we went for Copernica really.

We have been discussing the added value of Copernica and why you like the tool. Why should our users like Thinkable Digital? What could you bring to the table for our users?

OK, so what we bring to the table is a lot of experience in the multichannel approaches. So we can help the
client to hold sessions with them to understand what they want to get out of using the software, first of all. I get a really good understanding of what they are looking to do. It may be that they know exactly what they want to do, maybe they have an end goal, but not really know how to get there. They don't know what filters to set-up, what selection. We can help with that. We can help understand their business goals and translate that into how the software can be set-up to achieve those goals.

We can work just setting that up, and leave them to do it. Or we can work from a fully managed, where we set things up exactly how they want. Measure, adjust and tweak as we go on and provide reports. So really, it is taking any stress away from them and taking their business goals and using the software and our knowledge of the software to make sure that we deliver on those goals and measure results.

Taking the stress away and delivering what you promise, I think our users will like that.

Taking the stress away is good for any business. I find that if you take customers stress away, they will stay with you. Our goal is always to take the stress away from clients, get good results for clients and make clients look good within their company as well. When we can do that, then we win clients and keep clients, and that is our goal.

Is there a tip you could share with an online professional about what they should be doing to improve their marketing?

Absolutely, a lot of things we could come up with, but the most important thing is have a strategy. It
doesn't matter, necessarily if it is not the most perfect strategy. But stick with that strategy and measure the results of it. Give it time to measure the results. Don't go with SEO spam, or anything like that. Make sure that it is an ethical strategy and stick with it long enough to measure the results.

Before you start testing things, try to make it a controlled test and test one variable at a time and see what the results are. Rather than changing lots of things, which is what I see a lot of people do, and it is difficult then to know which changes delivered the results, and is difficult therefore to optimize