From Passion to PPC Success: Navigating Challenges and Triumphs in Digital Marketing

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Steven, who is the Founder and MD at Starlight Digital with us. Hey Steven, how’s it going?

Hi, yeah, good, thanks. it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Lovely. Steve, before we move any forward, let’s go to the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey? How were you growing up as a child? How did you land up in the digital marketing PPC space? Also a bit about your agency. What do you guys specialize in? We take it from there.

Cool. Okay. Yeah, where to start? I guess I’ll start with the business just quickly. It relates to… It all feeds in together. I started the business three and a half years ago after working for a major digital marketing agency in London. They’re a global brand. They have offices everywhere. I worked there for about eight, nine years. Had a great time, brilliant place to work, but I always wanted to do my own thing. I always wanted to have my own business, be my own boss. The reason for that was because as a kid, I grew up around other people that were doing that, particularly my dad. He was self-employed, so he didn’t have his own agency or anything like that. But he was self-employed. He was his own boss. He dictated his own hours. He very much fitted it around us, around his kids. That was always something that really resonated with me. I wanted to try to emulate that and to do something similar because as a five, six, seven, eight-year-old, I loved having him around. I loved having him there. He’d take us to school, he’d pick us up, spend loads of time with us.

He would often be working in the evenings, which is fine, but It’s because he had spent time with us throughout the day doing various dad duties. That was almost my model growing up, which is why I then had it in me that I wanted to do something myself one day and have I’ve been at this previous agency for eight, nine years, I felt like I was in a really good position to go out and start my own business, start my own PPC agency because it’s what I knew, it’s what I was doing at the previous place. Everything I was taught was PPC. I’d got to a really high level where I was heading up a big account spending a lot of money in the UK. It was almost the next natural step for me on my own journey.

Lovely. Quite a journey, I must say. You started your own agency after working for a good 9, 10 years at a large scale agent. Starting it out, obviously, initially, you have your own challenges, right? Getting those first clients getting the support functions, the HR finance set up, hiring the team. I know that it had its own challenges. There are a lot of challenges which you would not have really foreseen, and you just come to the office and boom, they go out of your face. How was it? Those What are you sure it is and how did you overcome those challenges?

In the early days, in the very start, I pulled on all my connections. Over the years, you can probably imagine, I had built up a lot of relationships. I’d worked with a lot of different clients, a lot of different people, clients that had come and gone from the agency I was previously at. A lot of what I did to try and win business in those early days was just reaching out to people that I knew, people that I had good relationships with. I was fortunate enough to start landing some pretty good contracts quite quickly with paid bills. That was great. I also used freelancer-based networks and freelancer-based websites to try to find business as well, which was actually quite fruitful. In those early days, I landed quite some decent clients off the back of that. I was just doing all manner of things that I could possibly to try and get some clients. In terms of the running of the business, the admin side, the HR, the finance, all that stuff, I was very much learning as I went. I was doing it myself. It was a case of I was where… Even today, I wear many hats on a daily basis.

I have many different roles.I’m sure. But back then, it was literally everything. It wasn’t that long ago, so it still feels quite fresh. It was March 2021. We started towards the tail end of COVID.

It was still not really the greatest of times to start your own business. But yeah, being an entrepreneur, so much of it you learn on the go when actually things come to the table. You really could not anticipate it. There is so much of learning there. Today, you might look back and feel that it’s quite a fun. But in those days, it must have been quite a time to sail through, right?

Yes.

You have been recognized as top one person agency by Google. Congratulations on that to you and your team. What do you feel? What are the strategies and tactics that contributed to this success in such a short span of time?

Just doing our absolute best. That’s a really simple way to put it. But yeah, it really is just making sure that we are absolutely fully dedicated to each and every one of our clients. When clients work with us, they really feel like they feel They feel the care, they feel the attention, which perhaps they haven’t got from other agencies in the past. That’s the feedback we get. We’re very good at communicating with our clients. We’re speaking to them many times throughout the week via email, some clients we have calls with. Basically, this is all geared around trying to help those clients grow. That’s how we’ve got to where we’ve got to as an agency, because we see success in our clients. If we If we can take a client on and help them grow over a period of months and years, then happy days. That reflects really well on us. It means we’re doing a great job. If their sales are growing, if their leads are growing, if their revenue is growing, they can afford to spend more on their media spend, on their Google Ads spend, which Google loves, but that’s what Google wants.

Google wants agencies that clearly show that growth from taking a client, from where they are today to a much higher place over a period of months, that’s how Google measures success for its agencies. We’ve been able to do that for 95% of our clients, which has been great. We’ve also been able to… That’s then led to clients referring us to other people they know, other businesses they might have come across, which then helps with that natural growth over time. That’s strategy, really. Just do really good work.

That is a little simple it is, but there’s a lot more than it today.

There’s a lot to it. There is a lot to it. It’s not easy. There is a hell of a lot that goes into it. We’re lucky to have such a great team who drives that growth and drive the strategy behind those clients that are growing.

Absolutely. You describe, Steve, Starlight Digital as offering the attentive service of a small agency without compromising on expertise. Can you please elaborate more on that and what are the best practices that you follow in your agency?

We’re fortunate in that. Firstly, we are a small agency, but that is a strength. I see that very much as a strength because we’re so agile. We’re able to, like I said earlier, we communicate with our clients on a very regular basis. We’re able to pick up any tasks super quickly. There’s no long wait, there’s no red tape. If something needs to be done, we just get on and do it. I see that’s very much a strength. But we also have… Everyone within the team has large agency expertise. I came from one of the global leaders in the industry. The other members within our team have done similar. They’ve been at big names. For many years, I think there’s something like a combined… Within our team, I think we’ve got a combined experience of 40 plus years amongst us. So We combine the fact that we are a small boutique agency that can be agile with that global expertise, that big agency thinking, that big agency skill set, I guess. It’s not like we’re a group of amateurs just starting out and learning as we go on clients’ accounts. We’ve done all that. We know how to make an account perform.

The idea is now just to keep scaling as a business and keep winning clients and keep working with really good brands.

Good. You have it in the industry for quite some time. First with multiple agencies, now you own your own agency. Looking back at your early days in digital marketing, Steve, What would you tell your younger self about the industry and the skills that you need to succeed in this space?

Don’t stop learning. Don’t stop reading. Just make sure you keep your knowledge fresh, keep Keep reading Google blogs, keep up to date with all of that. If there’s Google events, go to them. Just soak up as much information as you possibly can, because the more and more information you can soak up, the more it’s going to stand you in good stead for the future. Yeah, that’s probably what I would say to my younger self. There were probably times when I was younger and wherever I was working at the time, they wanted to send me to a conference or to a networking event, and I probably didn’t want to Whereas now…

It happened at the other first age when we were young.

Yeah, exactly. Whereas now I really see the value in that, especially the networking side as well. I remember actually as early ’20s, fresh out of Uni, where I was working at the time, wanted to send me to networking events after work. I remember thinking, Oh, my God, that’s not something I want to do. I don’t want to do that. But actually, now I do a heck a lot of networking because I have to. A, I enjoy it, but B, you always learn something. You always meet someone interesting. There’s always good conversation. Again, if I was to talk to my younger self, I would say, make sure you do that networking because you will learn skills that are going to pay you back in the future.

Absolutely, 100%. Agreed here, Steve. Coming to clients, and I know they can be difficult, but there are clients who, obviously, in your experience, would have come to you with an underperforming campaign because of whatever X, Y, Z reason. What is your typical process of diagnosing the issue and how do you approach that particular use case?

We would always carry out an audit, so a full audit. We call it our 45-point audit check. We’ve broken it down into 45 separate things within a Google Ads account that we will check and that we go through. We produce a report for the client, highlighting all the good things in the account, all the stuff that needs improvement, and all the areas of the account that perhaps are completely missing. Once we’ve produced that report, we’ve produced the 45-point audit doc, we’ll give that to the client so they can see our thinking, they can really get comfortable with the fact that we really do know what we’re talking about. It helps to build confidence, I think, with prospects and with new clients. Off the back of that, we then produce a roadmap. We will give a client, again, a roadmap of, Okay, these are the steps we’re going to take for the next three months, six months, nine months, and this is what you can expect from us. Then we work through that. Again, I think it helps build confidence. It helps the client understand that we are experts, we know what we’re doing, and that they then feel much more comfortable I think going back to one of the something I said earlier, I think it all helps them feel valued, essentially.

Great. I’m talking about AI, Steve, and I’ll show you what are some of the emerging trends in AI-powered BBC advertising space that you are excited about?

Ai is a funny one. Ai is the AI in its essence has been around for a lot longer than ChatGBD and all. So AI has become this big buzzword, but actually, we’ve been using it for years, particularly in Google Ads. That’s what excites me. How much further will Google go with the strength of things like bid strategies? That’s really what I’m interested in because in the early days, AI-powered bid strategies or automated bid strategies that use machine learning, they weren’t great. In the very early days, they weren’t that good. Actually, I remember when they first were introduced and Google were trying to push everybody to start using them as they naturally would, and we did start using them. But yeah, the early results weren’t that impressive. But over time, they’ve got better and better and better to the point now where an automated bid strategy is far and away better than a manual bid strategy. That doesn’t mean we have less work to do, just to clarify. If anything means we have more work to do because we’re keeping on top of the data is very important.

But yeah, I think that how Google further develops its models is what I’m really interested in.

On top of that, anything that can help from an admin perspective, any AI-based tools that can help with admin or any of that. Running a team, running a business, managing people. I would be keen to see how that evolves.

Absolutely, Steve. Steve, this has been a brilliant conversation. But before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re given it.

Yeah, sure. Let’s go for…

All right, let’s do this. Your last Google search.

How scared are you? You could be on this part here. Last Google search was a rental cars in Portugal.

Are you traveling?

Yes, we’re going. We’re going to go. We’ve booked a holiday to Portugal for next summer. It’s our first holiday as a family. Our first holiday. We got a five-year-old and a two-year-old, so it’s our first holiday as a But for me and my wife, it’s our first of all day in about eight years. Really looking forward to that.

Lovely, Steve. Moving forward, what did you do with your first paycheck? First paycheck of your life, paid rent.

At the time, the rent was more than my paycheck.

That was in it so much. Okay. Your celebrity crush?

Celebrity crush? I’m a sucker. This is a controversial one, but I’m a sucker for Amber Heard.

Okay. All right. I’ll not ask you for a favorite football club because now I know that. That’s not the best question to ask these days as well. But yeah. Okay. Where do you find Steve on Friday evenings after office or after work?

Probably half asleep on the sofa by 8:00 PM. Because with young children, you be working all day, then you’d help out with dinner, clearing up after dinner, doing the whole bedside routine. By the time it gets to 8:00 PM, I’m half asleep on the sofa.

Can relate to that. All right, Steve, you have been a real spot. Thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Actually, if you go on the website, so starlight-digital. com, there are contact forms on the website or there’s an email address and a phone number. Everything’s on the website. If anyone wants to reach out, please do just go to our website. Everything’s on there.

All right, lovely. Thank you so much, Steve. Cheers, man.

Thank you. Cheers, Ranmay. Thanks for your time.