The Top Floor Flat

As I mentioned, I’ll be writing less about travelling and London tourist sites (having reached a bit of a been-there-done-that level with the city) and focusing more on the lessons I’m learning working at a technology start up in London. This is mostly about documenting my own experiences in a way that will be memorable and relevant for my future work in my current role, any future jobs I take, or any companies I start.

A good place to begin is with my own marketing role and how it’s changed in the nearly three years I’ve been working at Spoonfed Media. I think this is an important path for me to remember as, no matter what my job title or role is when I begin a project, chances are that it will evolve as the company grows and changes – even moreso if I’m working in another start up.

This is quite a long post (my role has changed quite a bit!) but there is one key point that characterises each of my role’s transformations – an increase in the metrics available to measure myself, our company’s success and our strategy against. Without those new metrics supporting our activity at every stage of the marketing team’s growth, I doubt we could have been successful in the rapid transitions we experienced. What I’ve come to realise is that, used properly, key metrics within the business have allowed me to grow as a professional and to grow our company’s marketing team from a small time effort to drive web traffic to a consumer website to a fully functioning department within a revenue driven software company.

When I joined the company, there were ten full time staff members, including the two founders, a 7-person editorial team and one developer. There was no marketing department to speak of, “website development” was primarily focused on creating content for our website, an events listing service, and there was no real concept of a revenue model other than display advertising on the site.

In those days, I was responsible for running marketing activity that drove traffic to the website – and kept people engaged once they got there. There was no budget so our primary promotional channels were social bookmarking sites, social networks and search engines. I spent days posting our links on forums, made friends with the power users of StumbleUpon and Digg, and created search engine-friendly site content.

One of the things that is particularly interesting looking back is the relative inefficiency of the work I was doing. Social bookmarking, writing on forums, even going to university campuses to hand out flyers are all immensely time-consuming processes for relatively small payoff in terms of traffic. In my early days in the job, there was nothing to compare our progress to – and certainly no budget for paid promotions – so this not only seemed like the best option but the only one. It was a challenge for sure – in mid 2008, Facebook wasn’t quite the behemoth it is today and Twitter was unknown outside an early adopter community so there were fewer sure fire ways of reaching a large online community at a low cost. One of the issues at the beginning was a lack of metrics by which to measure our success. We saw traffic growing (albeit at a sedate pace in those early days) and that seemed to be enough.

I’m not saying it wasn’t useful or in fact vitally important for the work I do today – in many ways what I learned from doing the manual, hands-dirty labour of trying to get our content out on the web without any advertising spend has provided the knowledge I needed to decide on which audiences to target and on which channels to focus. If I were to take this experience to another start up, one question I might ask is how this initial process of promotion can be made more effective, and more quickly transition into more efficient methods of growing a website. Certainly I would avoid the mistake of thinking that time consuming work that doesn’t directly use cash resources from the company is free. Creating a costing model for the social bookmarking, forum and social networking work around the time spent and as a proportion of my salary would have given me more insight into how much we were indirectly paying for the relatively small amounts of traffic and would have possibly helped us move more quickly into our next stage as a marketing department and to the first real shift in my own role in the company.

As we grew, it became apparent that social bookmarking, forum posts, competitions and the like had been an incredible way to learn about our target audience and about content on the web but were neither scalable or sustainable long term. The next step was to strip away each non-scalable piece of our marketing strategy until what we had left was search engine optimisation (SEO). For the next two years, SEO would be the magic acronym in the office, affecting each part of the company from the developers, who had to think about technical changes to improve the way that search engines understood our website, to the editorial team who at first were sceptical, then fanatical about using SEO to drive more page views to their articles (who doesn’t love to know more people are reading their work?). My days were no longer filled with dubstep forums and leaving comments on blogs about London but instead with spreadsheets of keywords, Google Analytics, search optimised content creation and tracking down the owners of related sites in the hopes that they might link to us from their website.

One of the major differences between this and the first stage of our marketing work was the presence of many additional measurable metrics. Not only were we paying a consultant for help in developing our SEO strategy, but there were keyword rankings to measure, volumes of backlinks to track and the overall ranking of the website to monitor as well as the incoming traffic. What this meant is that we were able to monitor success and failure more quickly – and adjust our activities accordingly. SEO is notoriously a long term marketing activity as work done today may not affect search rankings and incoming traffic for weeks or even months but with a range of metrics to measure, and more concrete checkpoints, I found my work not only more efficient but more rewarding. It’s not surprising that between July and October 2009 we tripled our traffic – something that had taken the preceding year to do with our older strategies.

During this time, while the day to day marketing activity was still focused on growing traffic to the site, overall business strategy was looking ahead to a scalable revenue model – and even with the greatest level of optimism for our new marketing tactics and the potential web traffic available, display advertising wasn’t going to be the answer. The developers were hard at work on a software-as-a-service product that complimented our event listing website and could be licensed out to venue owners, event promoters, theatres or others involved in the events and entertainment space. The completion of that software paved the way for the biggest change in my own role as marketing director yet. While one day I was responsible for driving traffic through low cost online channels to our consumer website, overnight my job became focused on supporting the sales team in a revenue-driven business to business software company. Yikes!

By August 2010 my list of main objectives had expanded to include generation of high quality leads for the Bullseyehub sales team, increasing awareness and traffic for the Spoonfed.co.uk website, producing collateral for other company departments, identifying relevant market groups of potential customers and developing communications and promotions to connect with these audiences. Like the transition from social bookmarking and forum posts to SEO, this shift was not only accompanied by but also successful because of a significant increase in the number of different metrics available for us to measure ourselves against and use to define strategy and progress. An unbelievable wealth of information was now available to track our successes and failures, from number of leads generated to cost per lead to average value per sale to customer retention, not to mention the still-growing site traffic and SEO statistics. The challenge suddenly became seeing the valuable takeaways in the sea of numbers, a welcome challenge after the early days when no measurement was available.

Today, Spoonfed Media has 30 full time employees and is growing quickly. The marketing team, including interns, includes six outstanding individuals who are all contributing to an impressive array of projects that raise the bar for the business daily. The thing that has changed the most over the last three years has been the way our work has become metrics-driven, and as such more efficient. While I never expect my role to be fully static, I feel I am beginning to reach a point where what will change is the reports I generate and the takeaways I receive from key metrics, rather than the concept behind my day to day activities – although that was certainly an exciting experience as well.

Top Floor Flat Takeaways:

• Just because there isn’t a cash charge for promotions work doesn’t mean it’s free. Finding metrics with which to measure early success with less efficient channels can help early start ups move more quickly into more efficient ones.
  
• Focus on scalable marketing channels even if they aren’t the ones that you’re most comfortable with at the beginning. Being really good at something that won’t scale won’t grow the company.
  
• Use metrics to support major changes in strategy, employees within the company and growth to better understand new projects and efforts.
  
• No matter how dramatic a shift in focus within a role or company, having the right supporting metrics can make employees more confident, process more clear and growth more significant.