Somebody Digital Marks 10 Years of Taking Companies From Good to Great

The quote, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half", often attributed to American merchant and marketing pioneer John Wanamaker, encapsulates the problem many companies have with their marketing functions, where the marketing team is having difficulty justifying their marketing budgets because of the lack of tangible return on investment (ROI).

According to full-service, multi-channel digital marketing agency Somebody Digital, this is what separates good companies from great ones, and, for the past 10 years, it has been helping its clients cross this threshold and move the revenue needle. Most companies' leaders view marketing as a cost centre, but Somebody Digital aims to help transform it into a profit centre.

Somebody Digital was founded in 2013 by John Wilkes and Tobias la Cour, and it operates in all areas of digital marketing, namely paid media, search engine optimisation (SEO), conversion rate optimisation (CRO), social media, copywriting and data and analytics. Since then, it has been nominated for and won multiple digital marketing awards.

According to Wilkes, Somebody Digital's strength is helping companies understand the power of multi-channel marketing, which they are mostly missing out on by working in silos. This results in various teams, such as the SEO, PPC and analytics teams each having their own directions and producing disjointed results.

Wilkes also noted: "One of the things that allows us to take people from good to great is that we know how everything all works together, such as having the paid media guys feeding the kind of keywords they're targeting to the SEO team, while ensuring that the SEO team has the full end-to-end tracking and measurement capabilities in place, allowing clients to optimise the entire process and enabling them to measure data throughout the marketing funnel."

La Cour adds that it is important for businesses to ensure that their marketing efforts and budget are purposely aimed to generate revenue, going beyond simple clicks and downloads. This requires having a coherent and unified vision from the marketing department's leaders.

La Cour said: "We always stress that merely obtaining an email address in exchange for being able to download a white paper is not a marketing-qualified lead. Businesses shouldn't centre their campaigns on that, because, while they may be able to get a lot of email addresses, it could be mostly students looking for material for their research, and not the business clients they are targeting."

La Cour continued saying: "Clicks and downloads, while they are all well and good, should not be the metric to focus on, instead, we tell our clients to go one level deeper and focus on the commercial value of each lead. Nobody runs a company just to get marketing qualified leads – the point of the company is to generate sales. Our philosophy is that marketing should reflect the goals of the company and that everything done by the marketing department should boost the growth of a company."

Somebody Digital specialises in helping company leaders have a different view of the marketing function, which is often viewed as a cost centre. Thus, when a business is going through rough times, it's often marketing that gets cut first, because the leadership does not understand the value it brings to the business.

Through its expertise in all areas of digital marketing, Somebody Digital helps businesses put an ROI figure on their marketing activities throughout the cycle. This will help chief marketing officers have a different conversation with the board and be better able to demonstrate their contributions to the company's profits.

While we often know when something is wrong with our company's performance, we can't always put our finger on what it is. With a clear understanding of the value of diagnosis, Somebody Digital begins by performing a complimentary high-level audit or health check of the client's marketing capabilities, identifying the various gaps and opportunities in their structure and campaigns that they perhaps aren't even aware of.

Once the client signs on, Somebody Digital starts digging deeper, crunching the numbers and embedding itself into the client's customer relationship management (CRM) systems to figure out exactly what the client needs to improve on.

"We believe that most of the time, our clients know what they're doing and they're very good at it," said Director of Operations, Cristiano Winckler.

He continued: "However, they've been so immersed in that environment that they can't see certain things anymore. So, we come in with a fresh pair of eyes and with new ideas, providing a new perspective. And then, we'll conduct an experiment and show the client new things, based on the data we've obtained. This includes identifying their best customers – the most profitable customer is the one that is most likely to convert."

Having been in the digital marketing space for 10 years and having witnessed huge changes in the industry landscape, Somebody Digital is well-positioned to help its clients take the next step in their growth, which, in today's highly competitive market, can only be achieved by making the leap from good to great.