Transforming Challenges into Opportunities: A Marketing Leader's Journey

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-coffee with experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Aaron Roach, the MD of Zephi Marketing with us. Hey, Aaron, how is it going?

It’s going well, my friend. It’s going well. How are you?

All good, all good. Can’t complain. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to do this with us.

Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Lovely. Aaron, before we move very forward, why don’t you talk us through your journey? Let’s get to know the human behind the mic. How did you land in this digital marketing IT space and what Zephi is all about? Why don’t you throw some more light in terms of what you guys do, what you guys specialize in, and how you guys are different? We kick it off from there.

Yeah, sounds fantastic. So I appreciate being here and talking to you today. So as you say, my name is Aaron Roach. I’m the Managing Director here at Zephi. Zephi is a bit of a unique company, and it’s unique because of my background. So if I explain a bit about myself first, then I’ll get into the company. When I was a young child, I had a lot of interest in IT and stuff like that, and I love building computers. I am somewhere else. As the years went by and the digital boom was happening, I built my first website in 2000 at the age of 12 or 13, that’s how that was at the time, and just really got fascinated with technology. Came to leave college and got a job at a charity, and weirdly, I wanted to do charter training to become a charter accountant because you never find a poor accountant. I thought that sounded like a good career to go in. I was training to become an accountant for three years. During that time, my boss at the place I worked, approached me and was like, You don’t like what you do.

Why don’t some of our websites work for us? I was like, Yeah, why not? That sounds like fun. Let’s do that. I did that half and half. Then to fast forward a little bit, went through the ranks at this charity. I became a web developer, left my career in accounts, and just didn’t look back, really, I became a web developer, became an IT manager, and became an IT and Marketing Manager. Fast forward to 2019, was the global IT Marketing Director, overseeing all their marketing and IT operations globally in 18 different nations. And it was a fantastic stick time. In 2019, I took voluntary redundancy and started Zephi. And because of my background in both IT and marketing, I opened up Zephi is a bit of a Martech company. So basically what that means in my world is we’ve got marketing solutions, which is Zephi Marketing, as you quite rightly said, which does the normal marketing for the website, SEO, PPC, CRM solutions, automation, and all that stuff. But also we have an IT division, and our IT division does the usual MSP stuff, so IT support, network installations, et cetera. But what I like about that, and what we find as our unique selling point, if you will, is the synergy between the two.

Because usually, our marketing department is saying, Hey, this is a great idea, we should do this. And you get an IT guy and say, You can’t do that, or vice versa. So what we found as an agency or as a company is we come with some great ideas, some strategy, some consultancy, but then we come with the technology behind it that can support it and grow it and evolve it. And that’s been where we as a company differentiated in the market. That’s for it that way. That’s me and Zephi in a nutshell.

Lovely. Then starting your agency is not an easy decision. It does not happen overnight. That is quite a journey in terms of making that call to start your agency and then starting it off. What triggered that decision-making? Over the initial days, and it’s challenging for sure, how did your journey look like initially when you started Zephi?

Yeah. As I said, I finished at the charity at the end of 2019. It was a good leave. They even outsourced part. They put the job back to me, which is really good news. Then, of course, we come into 2020, and what happened at the start of 2020, COVID hit. I’m sat there going, Oh, dear Lord, what’s going to happen next? You have the challenges of COVID-19, you have the challenges of trying to grow a business and all these fun things. Of course, in the world that we work in, in the marketing world, what did most people need when COVID-19-19 happened? They all needed a website. They all needed to be found on Google. They all moved their businesses from a physical position to an online position. So we found steady growth very quickly on by the circumstances surrounding the time that we launched. So very quickly, it went from just me in my bedroom, let’s say. I wasn’t physically in my bedroom, but let’s say It led me and myself to a second person, a third person joining, getting offices, and it evolved from there. Now, I’m not saying it was easy. As I’m sure many people who are watching this will know, COVID had its challenges and continues to have a knock-on effect years later.

But what it did for us is it did create some opportunity to help small businesses, to help businesses that had a shop on the high street to go online and all that stuff. We did see growth through that. But yeah, it comes with its challenges and its own set of things that we need to solve out and even today, so much so far. But it’s been a good journey. Five years later, we’re still going strong. The seven of us now, that’s how we evolved how we went.

Lovely. I’m sure it is difficult initially to keep the lights on. I’m glad you see it. Grand Coover is difficult for most of us. But the one thing was there, our industry, especially the digital marketing space, because really what the initial setback, the reason being all these businesses understood the importance of being visible online. That created a boom in the later stages, but initially, it was difficult. I relate to it.

Yeah. I was going to say, just to say- Yeah, sorry. You’re right. What we noticed, especially in the area we are, we’re based in the Midlands in the UK, in Staffordshire. You had two types of clients. You had the client that panicked and started cutting back on marketing, started cutting back on technology, started going, I need to keep the lights on, and panicking about that. You had forward-thinking people. Those are forward-thinking and thrive because they look to go online. They looked to expand their marketing. They looked at new opportunities that they could arise. You have those two balances. I understand there is that panic because ultimately, yes, you have to keep the lights on, you have to pay the staff, and you have to pay the bills. But the ones that were the forward plans or forward thought, let’s say, they’re the ones that you would see success today because of the choices they made back then.

Absolutely. I can’t agree more. You have worked in the nonprofit sector, which has its learning and experiences, right? How is it shared in your marketing approach? Not just for nonprofits, but also for profit. It would have a ripple effect as well. How was it?

In nonprofit and profit marketing, you get different marketers probably disagreeing or agreeing on these circumstances. But I think it’s very similar. The way you market in a nonprofit world to a profit world is very similar. The same principles exist, right? In the nonprofit world, we were attracting or trying to attract donors, people who would donate to the charity. We were trying to attract partners or reoccurring donations so that people would reoccur their partnership every month to the charity. We had products and we had colleges associated with the charity. There were many different things we had to market. We had to market events, we had to market whatever. We implemented a very simple strategy or a very simple process that was the lifeline behind my marketing operations. That was very simply this strategy of awareness, response, and relationship. The way we executed that is awareness is everything you do. That’s your website, we’re on TV, you’re getting adverts out there, you’re on PPC, SEO, all that stuff. You’re doing all these things in your awareness section to ultimately generate a response. A response is people reacting to that awareness. That may be someone donating, it might be someone contacting you, it might be someone calling you, it might be someone messaging on social media, whatever that be.

That response ultimately is pointless in many respects unless you build the third pillow, which is a relationship. They then become a monthly donor to you. They become a person that buys your product every time you’re reading a new book or whatever. They’re a person who enrolls in your courses and then does the courses. And then after doing the courses, they tell people about your courses, which creates the best marketing thing in the world, which is word of mouth. Word of mouth rules a lot of marketing things, a lot of marketing. That was my principle in our nonprofit world. And I brought that into the profit world. And what I mean by that is I think for any business, you could take any scale business, down to your one-man-band plumber to your multinational. Ultimately, you have to do the three same steps. You have to make people aware of what you offer. And That, once again, it’s done through your website, it’s done through getting people to your website, through SDS, you can see, it’s done through social media, it’s done through getting an advert on the bus, if you need to to be. There are many different things you can do in that awareness field.

But there’s no point doing any of that unless you’re going to start generating that response. People asking for a quote, people buying your product, whatever that be. What you ideally want is that relationship with your end client, where basically, let’s say, for example, you’re a plumber and you spend all this money, get your services out there. You get one person that says, Can you unblock my drains? What you want is that every time they’ve got a blocked drain, they always call you. That’s your relationship. Ultimately, the relationship generates that, once again, that returning customer. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if it’s a for-profit or nonprofit. That same principle exists. Even today, when we strategize with our clients, that’s the same basis we use. We may give different terminology with it or whatever, but the same principles exist. I think for me, that’s fundamental marketing. Irrespective of what? To nonprofit, profit, corporate, or one-man band, that same principle can be rolled out very quickly.

Absolutely. I mean, more or less, the crux of it remains the same. You need to get them in front of your consumer size. The theory remains the same there. You also touched upon a very important topic, marketing automation. Your organization or agency is involved in CRM automation, which is quite a crucial part when you talk about marketing as well in terms of as basic as the leads going into showing it up on a CRM and the entire sales journey or marketing journey is captured, the entire funnel for that matter. Talk us through in terms of how important it is and what are the best practices there.

Yeah. So once again, I think automation, especially now we’re in this AI generation world, and AI and automation become hand in hand, I think it’s becoming more and more essential to any company, any agency, anything, is to how to automate your marketing flow, your sales pipeline, the whole thing. So as you incline, we work a lot with different customers. Once again, let’s go back to profit, nonprofit. We work with profit customers and nonprofit customers on systems that help you manage that process. As I say, That would involve things like bringing in that initial sales inquiry and making sure that is a follow-up inquiry. That can either be an automated email or text or whatever and maybe even an automated task to tell someone to fight to phone that person. Then once they’ve phoned that person or an email has been sent or whatever, what is the next action in your pipeline? If you can build automation to help you manage that process and bring you across the funnel, the success we’re seeing with our clients and also us internally is you see a better lead generation, a better conversion rate, and also a more tailored approach to your clients.

As I said, with Zephi, we’re very unique. We have a lot of different services. We also have two other divisions I’ve not spoken about, Fire and Security and Consultancy. We’ve got four different pipelines there. We’re targeting four different clients for very different reasons. But we want to cross-pollinate, and you can use automation to do that. You can say, Okay, they inquired about this. How have they thought about this and this? It’s the whole idea of cross-selling, upselling, that same thing. If you can build and, as I say, get the right tool to help you build, the automation process for that, will make your customer journey with you much more seamless. It will also help with attracting different services. It will also help with, obviously, ensuring that the client is having a good experience with you as a company. I think for me, when we look at marketing, we spend a lot of money, all of us do, on all these awareness things. Once again, SEO, as you We’re very passionate about SEO. We work with our clients with SEO and so did you. We have clients that spend a lot of money on our SEO.

That means that they want to get a return. They want that response. But then if they’ve got a response and they don’t have an automation system to help them manage it to a relationship and keep that relationship going, they’re still spending a lot of money on SEO because they’re just trying to feed that funnel all the time and just dropping clients off on the end. I think that’s where automation and marketing… Sorry, marketing automation and CRM systems help you capture customers and keep them on a journey with you. Once again, there are so many examples I can give you. Once again, let’s go back to the nonprofit sector for a second. Once again, most nonprofits will spend a lot of money a lot of money making people aware of their charities. You look at the TV adverts, that Waterade one, for example, or whatever else, they cost thousands upon thousands of pounds. You want, obviously, those donors, but you want those donors to stay with you. What you need to do in that world is have an automated system to keep informing the donors on what their money is doing, what the success is happening, and what the stories and testimonies are coming out of the money that you fund.

Because ultimately, that generates them to go, I want to keep supporting this organization. It’s much cheaper and more efficient to keep people at that stage than to try and find new donors over here. For me, that’s why I think the benefits of automation and now AI coming into it, when AI can generate so much content, so much strategy with you, I think it becomes more and more essential to a business today to have an automation process and a system to help them do that.

Absolutely. It increases your operational efficiency. We have had interactions with business owners where we can see the numbers going up in terms of the phones ringing and all of that, but then leads getting dropped off. At the back end of it, if you’re not operationally efficient, now what we suggest is if you do not have a process in place, we should get that piece sorted first before we go out and market for the blue ocean out there. If the consumers are not talking well about here, no marketing is better than word of mouth as we see. That is how it is.

You’re right. A lot of companies will go out there and spend all this money on awareness strategies, as I say, SEO, PPC, social, all this stuff. But then they may get a quick sale or something, but there’s so much more value in a client. Also, as an agent, you want to offer your client more value. If we can offer them multiple services or multiple opportunities with the agency, then we’re helping them save money in other aspects. I think marketing automation systems pay for themselves very quickly when they don’t let leads keep dropping off the back end of their funnel. I think that’s one of the benefits now of the world we live in. I think we’re a much more automated world. We need to, as a company owner, as an agency, and any client out there needs to have a solution to ensure that they’re not missing out on sales leads, or opportunities.

Absolutely. In fact, after even the leads, the capture, what stage the lead is in. Because you understand at the end of the day, your client makes money, you do, right? If they grow, you grow. It goes hand in hand, right? After the lead comes in, what stage is it, how the conversions are happening? It’s quite essential. We have a lot of interactions with business owners where we found out the loopholes and it’s majorly, but most of the time being resonates with the fact that they do not have a TD strong back-end operational format, strategy, whatever you want to call it.

I think it comes hand-in-hand with the first thing you need to do as a company. I’m sure most people were aware, of which is to have a strategy. What is our sales strategy? What is our marketing strategy? And how does that hand in hand? Then a system to automate that should come as a resource to that strategy. I think if people can get that part right and can automate it to the point where it’s helping them maintain their prospects, their clients or whatever, we’ll But also on top of that, it manages mundane jobs, let’s call them that, things like the automated follow-up email or reminders, tasks, things like that. Correct. If that can do that, then it takes away administration time, administration stack costs, and all this other stuff on top of it which starts to add up in their own little, right?

Lovely. So, Adam, looking back at your career, you have been on both sides, right? You did work in a corporate setup, and then you have now you’re an entrepreneur with your agency set up. What is one key lesson you have learned that has been most valuable, which is something you’re going to hold for your life?

It’s probably not the best key lesson, but let’s go with it right. My previous boss, my first boss, when I was 18 challenged me to move careers and that stuff, he always said this phrase, and it was, Fake it till you make it. And you know what? I stick by that. I think a lot of people, a lot of agents, a lot of entrepreneurs, we all try and go for perfection from day one, and We all try and strive for perfection. I think my biggest thing is I’m not perfect. I will make mistakes. I will screw up, but I’ll have to fake it until I make it. But I will try and keep persevering and making it and making the best for myself, for the company, for the client, and potential clients going forward. I think for me, that phrase has always been stuck in my head. We will say as a team so many times we’re like, Oh, we feel a bit out of our depth with this, or this is a bit unique, or a bit of a challenge, or we’ve got a learning curve around here. I’m always like, Let’s fake it until we make it, and let’s make it.

Let’s make it happen and let’s educate ourselves. Let’s put some things in process and let’s then make it. That’s for me, probably the biggest thing that sticks in my head the most.

Lovely. We all do come with mistakes. It is about tuning it up and then fixing it as well, right? That is what matters.

We’re all on a learning journey. I think for me, as I say, in my journey, I’ve come a long way since leaving school in 2005 to today in 2024. It’s a long journey, but I’ve got a long way to go. I think We’re all learning, we’re all technology changing, marketing changing. I think acknowledging that and going, Okay, we need to carry on and keep learning and progressing as a company, as an individual, as a company, and with our clients.

Lovely. Great, yeah, Aaron. This has been a lovely conversation. But before we let you go, a quick rapid fire.

Go for it.

All right. What did you do with your first paycheck, Adam?

What did I do with my first paycheck?

Off your life.

What did I do? I bought a laptop.

All right. Your last Google search.

Gosh, I could probably look. I think it was for you. It was for you. It was one of your systems.

I get to hear that quite often.

I was going to say, Nankwatch. That was the last one I did. So that’s right.

All right. Then when Nankwatch is in a bit of sync, right? I can relate to that. Great. The thing that you do not like about your job or what you’re doing?

That’s difficult because I love my job. I love what I do. I’m so passionate.

We are, Lou. Yeah, I always had one thing. Yeah, give us that one thing.

One thing, probably the financial part of it, having to balance the checks at the end of the month, that thing. That’s probably the biggest part of the pain. That’s part of business. But yes, that’s probably the only thing I have. But I love my job. Lovely. But I love my job.

So lovely. We all do great. Are you a celebrity crush?

Oh, gosh, the misses might kill me. I always had a bit of a thing for Melissa Joan HaNickelodeonld, and Sabrina. That was always my thing, but my girlfriend probably killed me now for saying that. So cheers for that.

All right. We got you there. We’re not going to stretch this any further. Perfect. Thank you so much once again for doing this. Really appreciate it, man. It was a lovely conversation.

Thank you. Thank you very much.