Building up the basics – Shuttle Digital's results-focused approach to marketing

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Keeping
up with changes in best marketing practice could be notoriously challenging for
businesses – and this problem is only confounded when there's a mismatch
between the services that marketing agencies are asked to provide, and what a
business actually needs. Agencies are regularly tasked with running campaigns
and providing marketing services when businesses become aware of the need
to do this – when management determines the significance of improving their
search engine rankings, for example – but these necessary strategic manoeuvres
can often be wasted when basic foundational and preparatory steps have not
been taken in advance to aid those moves. In keeping pace with the forces
of change, companies are often skipping more traditional initiatives which are
still very important, impairing their brand messaging in the process.

It was
when Fabio Dos Reis began to recognise that so much marketing work had been
performed in ways that weren't necessarily translating to winning customers
that he decided to build a marketing agency centered on the true needs of
businesses. While his boutique marketing firm Shuttle Digital has a broad
capacity for delivering an entire range of campaign styles and strategies, he's
not shy to point out when a client still must go through some fundamentals
– for example working with sales and client services teams to map out what the
actual customer journey is, for instance, or what touchpoints marketing efforts
should have.

“There's
a lot of opportunity lost from not doing the groundwork,” says Dos Reis,
“because sometimes marketing isn’t just about lead gen or social media presence;
sometimes it's actually enhancing the power of the sales team, or even the
client services team, to nurture rapport to either cross-sell clients
different services or nurture prospects into close versus driving the pipeline.
I believe there are a lot of agencies who do SEO for six months, and ultimately
there's no way of tracking the end result. In terms of KPIs you'll get this much
traffic and you will rank for that keyword, but does that really translate to
clients? If marketing hasn't caused the business to set that foundation
level, they can't really attribute that effort into sales or conversions.”

Shuttle
offers a complimentary digital marketing health look for enquiring
businesses in order to establish a baseline for a firm when launching a
campaign. The check serves as a discovery phase that can lead to a clearer
picture of what specific approach will deliver the desired results. This
straight-talking stance is intended to provide transparency in the services
that Shuttle provides, but it also hands control back to the company owner to
set the priorities – favouring clarity and practicality within the more obscured
policies marketing agencies sometimes use to lock their services in.

“A lot
of the time, it’s not SEO you need to do first,” explains Dos Reis.
“Sometimes I'll say, I understand you want SEO – you need a search engine optimization campaign as of
yesterday – however i think you really need to push back and concentrate on doing these
key things first, because maybe you've got three business partners who don't
have the same views on who you're targeting. It is a good exercise to put
that into a document, so you know what you've decided on as the main client
persona. Only then we can formulate what's the the easy way reach those people.”

Shuttle
Digital has a strong operation providing solid marketing services which come
with the territory – running Google and Facebook ads, setting up websites and
so on. Its core strength, however, is establishing the right foundation to make
certain campaigns are set up to convert. Rather than designing brochure
websites, Shuttle's work is set up ready to track users, collecting the best
data from the beginning – data that may then be used as a platform for
remarketing as well as converting.

“A lot of the things we do comes in from the ground up and makes sure that everything is set in place and tracking right,” says Dos Reis, “so that whenever you do start to advertise, or when you start running social media campaigns, everything links back to data so that you can get one clear view on how things are actually working.” Shuttle Digital works closely with businesses to help them set up a strong marketing foundation – the firm has published e-books on its web site to explain some of the core concepts – and welcomes enquiries for its free marketing health checks to assist businesses ensure their data gathering and marketing outreach work offers the desired return on investment.