Every campaign is different, every client has unique aspirations, and the rules are constantly changing. Welcome to the wild — and rewarding — world of digital marketing.
The Being Group’s Digital Lead, Lily Harrison, runs our dynamic and growing digital marketing team. Here, she gives her insights into what makes a great digital campaign, getting results for clients, and the special joys of a good weekly report.
Joining the club
When it came to thinking about my future, I didn’t ever have a specific plan like, I want to be Digital Lead at a cool agency. I did a degree in business studies, with marketing and accounting as my majors. I always got my best results in marketing, so it became a natural path.
Although I don’t see myself as the most creative writer, I love writing business reports and case studies because they’re so clear and straightforward. I’ve always found the flow of a good report very satisfying.
In terms of experience, I did an internship at media agency OMD, then got to stay on as a coordinator, working with the team that looked after Apple. After that I went to Club Med, which was awesome. (I love travel!) I was able to be involved in every aspect of the outputs, instead of only buying media. I got to work on the strategy, put the social posts together, decide what we needed to run, and where, depending on what audience we were trying to reach. I learned so much and realised I loved pretty much every aspect of digital marketing.
The meaning behind the metrics
My job is, at its core, about strategy. We have some clients who have never had a digital presence, so we start at the very beginning, writing the strategy for them, thinking about who their audience is and what platforms they should be on. We also have a category of clients who come to us because they want a more hands-on approach than what they may have had in the past.
One thing I take pride in is making sure every client gets individual attention. We take the time to write weekly or monthly reports, and have meetings whenever the client wants, to explain what’s happening. It’s very much about nurturing clients who don’t understand the digital space, but know they need to be there. They’re not the digital marketers — we are — so it’s important we share our knowledge and help them understand the process, and what a good result looks like. They’re worried it might be a waste of money, or they might not understand tracking or the detailed results we can give them in a report.
There’s definitely an education element to this work. We need to help clients understand the meaning of page impressions, engagement, conversions, video views, and benchmarks. There are a lot of metrics to unpack.
The only constant is change
Explaining the difference between short-term sales campaigns and long-term brand building is critical. We always make sure there’s clarity on the ultimate objective, so no-one’s disappointed. If it’s sales clients want, we’ll be driving traffic right to their website.
It’s also important we’re ahead of the curve in developments in digital platforms. If you’re not at the forefront of what’s happening in the digital space, you’re going to get left behind.
We keep a spreadsheet of changes and what they mean, and we’re always updating it. For example, Instagram is making a lot of changes around the user experience and increasing the focus on video content right now. So, we need to understand what impact this will have on our strategies.
But with these changes, there’s always an opportunity to tell a client’s story in a new way.
The best of both worlds
Being Digital Lead at an agency like The Being Group brings me the best of both worlds. Based on the strategy, I’m able to say we need a 15-second ad, then someone else very clever will write it, and another clever person will design it. I get to do what I enjoy, which is setting up the campaigns in the back-end, and allocating and adjusting budgets. It’s fantastic seeing it all come together.
The more projects we execute, the better we get, because we always learn something new to apply to the next campaign. Every client we work with has a different product, different needs, a different target audience and different platforms.
I loved the work we did for Sydney Fibroid Clinic because it was about getting important information out to women who are battling debilitating health conditions. What we did made a genuine difference in people’s lives. We were amazed at the response to that campaign, which meant there were so many people out there hungry for information.
We gained the professional satisfaction of doing good for the community, but also achieved better digital outcomes for our client than they’d experienced before.
The truth is in the detail
Creative is subjective, but with digital everything is measurable. There’s nowhere to hide if no-one’s clicking or signing up.
The results don’t lie. If they’re bad, they’re bad. And if they’re good, they’re amazing. We look after every step of the consumer journey, constantly checking a campaign’s performance and making adjustments in real time.
COVID has put a greater focus on digital, but it’s also made people more cautious about online spending. So, it’s not just changes within the industry we have to consider — it’s also about how we respond to outside forces we can’t control.
Digital marketing is a fresh industry and I think it’s going to be here, in one form or another, as long as people are consuming content. And people are consuming and making more and more content all the time.
Above the line media used to be perceived as a lot cooler than digital, but that’s changed over time as the impact and cost-efficiency of good digital marketing has become better understood. There’s no doubt I’ve ended up in a job and an industry that suit me perfectly.
If Lily wasn’t Digital Lead at The Being Group, she’d be on a beach on a deserted, tropical island… with her laptop.