Bant Breen:
Steffan is the co-founder and CEO of symphonic digital, which is a leader for small to medium-sized businesses in the digital programmatic media buying and planning space. Tell me a little bit more about Symphonic Digital and what you guys are doing there, what are you working on?
Steffan Horst:
We started off just focusing on where we came from paid search, paid social workers. Have started with small, medium sized businesses. Over time, people came along and said, “Look, I work at a smaller agency now.” We have a client who came in and he needs search and programmatic social support, but we don’t have anyone to help us with that. We, over time, kind of built a second part where we provided white label services to bigger smaller entities and medium-sized agencies because it’s quite hard when you just have one client to build a department. One person doesn’t make a team, even two people are challenging. One person goes, both go, and then you have nothing left. We kind of built the company in two directions. One side was focused on brands and direct business, and the other on agency business. We looked in particular at what other companies out there, what white label companies already do. What I identified is that a lot of them use software systems as relates to communication. You have a platform where you fill in your brief, and you need to change some of your fill-in information, but no one talks to you. A lot of them are also used in the US operation team button, India, or let’s say off-shore execution team far away outside of your timezone. That created a lot of problems for the companies that we are agencies that we talk to because you need to change. You got to wait because, in India or the Philippines, it’s the middle of the night when there’s day here. That was problematic. So we kind of shaped our service offering to work with that to have people here to set up a company that is different than back then and in 2013. Everyone here since 2013, works remotely.
Bant Breen:
What have you seen? And what have been some of the interesting insights that you’ve seen this year for clients and what you’ve learned as a digital agency owner?
Steffan Horst:
I think every agency struggled through Q2 and Q3 last year. I think we all were quite worried about where’s that going. We had a great start to 2020. It was great, we were going to hit our sales goals, and then come to two declines and we all of a sudden started to disappear. I think it took those two, or three quarters for companies to realize we cannot just stop, right? Life must go on and it’s different, but we need to find a way to engage with people that are now quarantined in their homes. What I’ve seen is a lot of businesses that previously didn’t spend thoughts online, even smaller companies, all of a sudden being pushed into this online world. They had to find a solution to become visible because they couldn’t get people in the store. There was a huge need for companies to help them do that. Then there was also a huge need for helping those companies advertise for the smaller companies, probably more on a local level. For the midsize companies that weren’t focused so much on digital, they had to figure out things and had to discover this journey. How do we all of the sudden get visibility? How do we get people in? How do we stay alive? How do we generate revenue? For us as a company, what that led to is much more consultation. You and I know that the big agency world has talked for a number of years, about how are we fending off the likes of big consultancy groups. As they’re going into digital marketing, they’re coming more from a consultant approach, not from an only media buying approach. I think for us as the more small midsize agency or agency that focuses on these kinds of clients, adding the consulting approach to what we do, has added value to our customers. One thing that I talk a lot about these days is I hear so many people talk about lead generation. It’s great, but let’s be realistic, lead is just an intermediate goal, right? You could have 100 leads that convert 1%, and you get one sale out of it. If you have 50 leads that convert at 4%, you get two sales, right. I would rather be 50 and have a higher CPL than anything else. Where the consultation comes into the picture here is the sales part, which a lot of companies don’t have figured out their sales part. They have the marketing funnel done. The sales funnel is not optimized. Our optimization part of the approach goes into the sales part and says, “Look, let’s have a look at how are you set up? Are you properly identifying marketing, qualified sales, qualified opportunities, etc?” Then are you measuring between all those points? And if not, where can we start helping you optimize things?
Bant Breen:
Steffan, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back.
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