Unveiling Digital Marketing Strategies and Entrepreneurial Lessons for Success

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show E-Coffee with the Experts. This is your Ranmay here. Today we have Simon, who is the owner and founder of Binary and Co. with us. Hey, Simon, how’s it going?

Yeah, good. How are you?

Good, yeah. I can’t really complain. Great, Simon. Before we start with the questions and pick your brains on it, I would love to start a bit with your background in terms of how were you growing up as a child and how did you land up in the digital marketing space, and also a bit about your agency in terms of what you guys do, what you guys specialize in, and then we take it up from there.

Sure. I grew up in the UK. I’m originally from a seaside town in the UK. I’ve always been quite a fairly outgoing person in that sense, socially. I think always growing up, I was definitely very more interested in. If I look back on my childhood, I was definitely more interested. I could probably recall more adverts than I can the TV shows that I watched. That idea of connecting with people and connecting ideas really grew as I got older. That really fostered that general interest in the internet as it grew up. I grew up as the internet grew up, really. That connection and access to places across the world really was a draw for me. I see marketing as a little bit of an extension of that, essentially. I think really that’s what drew me in to marketing and really drew me into digital marketing in that sense is the ability to really be able to connect and understand those connections and so on and so forth. I think that was really was my early interest then came into more into marketing and then into the digital marketing and advertising world, essentially, basically.

Great. You have been in the space for quite some time now, since the early days of the dot-com bubble and all of that. How did those initial experiences impact the way you approach digital marketing today?

Yeah, I mean, I definitely grew up or came into the industry initially in that first dot-com bubble. And it was interesting days back then. I don’t think anyone really knew what they were doing, or if they said they did, there was a lot of bluster and stuff like that. But essentially, I think one of the things that really stood out for me back then, now, is the need for value, really. There’s a lot of information being, force information, promise being put around about in that first dot com bubble, and it really made me see the realize to drive value. And you can do that with digital marketing, there’s that obviously in digital advertising, there is that obvious connection. Even though we talk about attribution and the word like the acquisition of attribution, there is a great deal of ability to show value and to drive value through digitaladvertising and so on and so forth. Then so that’s really where that early. Com bubble experiences made me feel that as we’re growing up, what we need to do is to be able to drive connections, but also show the values of those connections. That’s really what moved me into the area of digital marketing that we’re now working now, essentially.

Absolutely. What was the point when you decided to start Boundary and Co? What triggered that decision?

I think I’ve always worked towards starting my own agency. There was always that sense that I wanted to do this for myself. There’s certainly an element of independence that I’ve always had that has meant I think that entrepreneurship has always been a draw, essentially. I did spend a number of years in an agency role, and then those roles always tend to progress into developing your own shop and so on and so forth. But I did look around in the industry and feel that there was a need for a slightly more approach to how digital advertising is delivered. I always give this analogy, and people laugh when I say it, but I always said, Digital advertising, we’re not the pizza. We’re the pizza delivery people. The brand and the creative, that’s a lot of what the substance of the company is about or the clients are about. But really, you need to be able to deliver that in a very structured and precise way so that you’re talking to people at the right time with the right message that’s going to drive them through a decision-making process or at least help them. I don’t know what driving them through, which is a little bit more too aggressive, It really it’s to help and give that information at the right time that people need it.

And so they can either search it out, it can be online or whatever it is. You need to be able to understand how people are making those decisions. So that analysis goes through. If you want to deliver your pizza when it’s hot, ready and right to eat, you have to be able to know the who, what, why, when, and where of the people you’re trying to deliver that message to. And that’s really what drove me to set up Binary & Co was that there was a need to be structured and nuanced in terms of how you develop and structure your advertising so that it gets to the right people at the right time, essentially.

Absolutely. It has been some years down the line now. When you look back at the beginning of your agency journey, what do you wish you could have done differently, or probably what you would have wanted to change versus what you did as a younger self of yourself?

Yeah, and I think ultimately, it really hasn’t changed. Building a HCP scratch can be somewhat daunting, and there are challenges that you face early on, but they don’t necessarily It’s changed a great deal. It’s just gets slightly bigger. Right now, the challenge is always to be differentiation in a crowded marketplace. When we differentiate being focused on our craft, being focused on a customer-centric model, so we look at customers. I always say the most important people are not necessarily our customers, but our customers. That’s really where we start from. It’s looking at who are the people that our clients want to reach and what are the messages they want to get through and how is it that we can help them achieve that through the services that we offer? Really, our craft is about understanding that, but then translating that through to a digital advertising structure and being able to really get that dialed in for our clients is super important. I think that’s where we really try and differentiate is it’s not just a case of a cookie cutter approach where we’ve done it a hundred times before and we’re just going to do it again because people are slightly different, different geographies, different client bases, different things.

It’s being able to understand their subtle differences and let them play out in the work you do for your clients, essentially. I think that’s really where we say we differentiate a little bit in that sense. Then, yeah, that’s That’s always been the challenge from the beginning. It’s differentiating and making people who come to Binary & Co who understand that’s where we are slightly different and how we can ultimately help them is by making something for them that’s for them, not necessarily for them, but for their customers. That’s really been the challenge from the beginning, essentially.

Absolutely. When talking about geographies, as a founder of a remote agency, what unique dynamics do experience while managing a distributed team out of multiple locations? And how do you ensure that the team bonding and the productivity is right there up to the mark?

Yeah, it’s interesting because we’ve always been, I say we started in 2019 and we were a remote agency from the get-go, and I would say that it took a pandemic to normalize that. But despite the pandemic, there’s always been a need to manage that. The need has become more obvious now that more people are doing it. But we always looked at what is it that you would need in order to do that? Actually, we’ve written a blog post on our… Which you can find on our website, about the things that we have learned, the five years of remote working, what is it that we’ve learned? We look at it in many different ways. One is you have to give people that central hub. You have to give people that place which they can connect. Usually, it’s in the office. You have that one-to-one connection. But you don’t have the office here, so you have to give the ability to people to immediately connect and talk to one another. Whether that’s like a Slack or we use a Base camp or whether you use some other tool that allows you to instantly get in contact with people and talk to people, and I say face-to-face.

And that’s the other piece. None of the people that work for us, will turn their cameras off. And it’s not that we say, Oh, we got to turn the camera on. If you’re having a bad day, sure, turn the camera off. You don’t want to be on it. It’s fine. But the point being is that you want to have that sense of connection and having a hub which you can then easily contact people and shoot ideas around and have that. It’s is super important. We also probably are pretty heavy on the check-in, both on the client accounts, but also on that personal level. We try and make sure that there is an opportunity for us to check in with the people working for us and see how they’re doing, because there can be a little bit… There can be that feeling of isolation of working in a silo if you don’t have that connection, and that’s really important. Making sure those connections, those check-ins are done is It’s very important. Then, like I said, that place to connect, you want to have that central place to connect, even though it is in the cloud or so on and so forth.

Where do people go so they know they can find out what’s going on or they can check in on things is super important. Then in terms of team bonding, we do make space for downtime. We do have quarterly games, nights, and so on and so forth. This is all just a bit of fun, but it’s that good, obviously, to just have that little bit time to get to know each other in a different level. It is It’s funny. It is hard, but it’s not necessarily getting together for a beer after work. It is. You can see that it’s a little bit awkward to start with because people are like, What is this? This is not on video. But like I said, the pandemic normalizes Zoom get together. In some ways, people have a familiarity. There’s a number of different things that we do. Having something to check, having a hub, checking in, making sure people have places to connect, and also giving that space for downtime, the areas that we look at when we’re Building remote teams, essentially.

Absolutely. And talking about SEO and PPC, which often goes on in digital campaigns, what is your approach at Boundary and Co to integrate these channels to maximize their effectiveness for the clients in terms of their online visibility?

I think that really comes back to putting the customer’s customer first. Increasing visibility in itself has really I wouldn’t say… Increasing visibility in just for the sake of increasing visibility has no value. You have to increase your visibility with the right people. You want to be in front of the right people that are either aligned with your values or align with your… Or are looking or are connecting with your product or are likely to connect with your products and services. When you clearly have a picture of who that person is and what motivations are, it’s easier to bring in, whether you use PPC or SEO, or even if you’re doing cold outreach or whatever it is you’re doing, not that we do cold outreach, but if you’re able to know who that person is, know what it is that’s going to motivate them, then that is really where you need to align yourself in that sense. Then those services fit in very easily along those lines. You’re not throwing them out of the wall for a lot of better way of putting it to understand how to implement an organic search program or a PVC program, so forth.

You really have an idea of who, what, why, when, where of a customer. That’s really your guiding North Star, essentially.

Absolutely. With so many advancements in digital advertising, how do you see the role of AI evolving in paid media strategies, Simon? Are there any tools that you would recommend to your audience today to ensure that they are effective?

Ai There is an interesting one. And weirdly enough, my background, before I got into digital marketing, I did a degree in computing and psychology. I did a degree in human and computer learning, essentially. And what’s interesting about AI is that even when I go back talking about when I did that, what’s interesting about AI is that only now we’re starting to see AI models that are able to do things like pass the Turing test and so on, so forth. Those reasons, typically, that AI falls down comes down to context. The thing about AI is that it doesn’t necessarily understand the worldview. As a issue, I just saw a quote from Ben Affleck who had said that AI is not going to be as creative. It doesn’t understand us. It doesn’t have that… It doesn’t have art, as it were. I think that’s really where as a practitioner, we’ve had AI in digital marketing for a number of years. Machine learning has been within the Google Ads platform for a while now in terms of optimizing ads, creative, or let’s say with meta or so on and so forth. But it’s really understanding what the AI is spitting out and giving context to it.

Really, it’s going to differentiate you and take your marketing to another level. I would always suggest people to use AI, but then always use it in the sense of you are the person guiding it, and you’re less of the technician and more of the architect with AI. You can have the AI do a massive amount of lift for you. We use it here quite extensively. Obviously, we use it ad copywriting, and we use it for content, and we use it for all sorts of different things. But we always look at it from the sense of we are the architect of AI. We’re not letting AI do the heavy lift. In terms of tools, obviously, we’re using the same thing, ChatGPT, Gemini, so on and so forth, bringing those into our processes quite on a regular basis. But always with that view that our job is to guide the AI rather than let the AI completely do the work.

As long as you’re using it as an enabler, that’s fine. It is far from being that final deliverable product. That’s a great catch of imagination.

Especially with marketing, because I always said with marketing, the thing about marketing is understanding people’s wants, needs, and loves. I think AI falls holds over when you come to that point. Does AI really understand what people want, need, and love? Yeah, maybe, but not really in a real-world context. I think that’s where you, as a marketing practitioner, are always going to be needed, and it’s never going to replace your job. No one has adjusted bids in Google Ads for years. The AI does it now. No one does that anymore. When I first started, they did, right? But that doesn’t mean that people don’t need to look in that platform and understand what the AI is telling you and adjust it move it and make sure it’s pointing in the right direction. It hasn’t meant that you’re like, Oh, I can sit back and not do anything. No, absolutely. It’s just giving you a different type of work, and that work is being able to give AI the context, really.

Absolutely. And in so many years, into the agency and the digital marketing space, give us your favorite client story, Simon.

Oh, wow. God, I’ve I’ve been in the industry, so I don’t want to say it, but yeah, I’ve had hundreds of clients’ favorite client story. I think we… We’ve worked for a number of different… I’ve worked for a number of different law firms recently, in my years, but one of my favorite ones was working for one that had a particular focus on a certain niche, not necessarily niche of law, but niche of persona. It was really interesting for us to be able to say, Okay, what is that? What is that persona? Although most of that persona doesn’t need… So they were looking for people who were interested in sighting, basically. But not everyone who cycles needs a lawyer. But it was the idea that having access into that person that would be interested in cycling, but also interested in rights and so on, so forth, is really important. So building a campaign not just around the services that they offered, but the person they were to appeal to was really was interesting. And it allowed us to gain access to a market that I think was very competitive because we really understood the person in that market that we were trying to reach.

And therefore, we were able to find other place to gain visibility with that persona. I think that was interesting. I’m pretty bad at coming up with clients. I think we try and take that approach that all class is different and we give them the same amount of mental work as anyone else, essentially. Yeah, that’s one. But we try and make everyone feel special here, basically. Yeah.

Lovely. Great. Brilliant assignment. This has been a great conversation. But before we let you go, any piece of advice that you’d want to give to our young listeners today who are trying to make a mark in the digital marketing space, or let’s say, who are trying to start on their entrepreneurial journey?

Yeah, I think one of the things in terms of entrepreneurship is really never understand. Never never underestimate the power of process, right? Never really underestimate the what you do as a certain structure and system and understand that system that you’re working in and document it, really. I think that’s super important. It allows you to be able to give yourself structure, allows you to be able to give the people that are going to be that hopefully one day will be working for you structure. I think that’s really important. Never really underestimate the power of process. Yeah, I think that’s probably it. In terms of if you’re starting out in digital marketing, my own thing is just be curious, right? I think that’s really important to how does it work? What does that do? Yeah, I think one of my really I think, oh, boss, way back in the day, I think it was the first time I ever had to manage and delegate work. He said to me, Never delegate work that you don’t understand yourself. Always take that time to try and understand. You don’t have to be able to do it completely. Always take that time to understand it.

Then that way, you’re not necessarily delegating it in a void. I think that’s really important. It’s like you don’t have to be able to do the work, but you have to be able to understand the work that you’re delegating. I think be curious and understand the work around you is really important.

Absolutely. Great assignment. Thank you so much, once again, for doing this with us. Really appreciate it. Cheers, man.

Thank you.