Zoomsphere is company that sells and develops a social media management platform with the same name. I was asked to be interviewed in their podcast for release 19th of February 2020.
Listen to the Podcast on Spotify
Alternative streaming:
Soundcloud: Zoomsphere Podcast Episode 5 on Soundcloud
Apple Podcasts: Zoomsphere Podcast Episode 5 on Apple Podcasts
Summary of the interview:
- Zoomsphere interviews leaders of different companies in Europe working with digital marketing
- RED Performance works primarily with Norwegian companies, mostly within B2C.
- Taking an analytical approach to working with clients is vital. Some stats say we are exposed to around 20 000 messages every day. Being aware of your strong and weak points and understanding your competition is important. Understanding the needs of the ones you are trying to reach is vital.
- KPI’s that we use for measuring content marketing is: Organic search – Visibility, Social Media – Sharing, Paid media and e-mail – CTR. For measuring content / landing pages Scroll time (in preference to Time on site) is used for measuring engagement. Although conversion rate and revenue is used universally, when we can use new customers as a measure that is preferred. Inspired by How brands grow by Byron Sharp.
- There are 30 people working in the company, with another 70 in the RED dentsu X. We use some freelancers, but not that much.
- Speaking of trends, Peter asks if influencer marketing is dying. I do not think so, I welcome it. However the power influencers have can sometimes be very strong and therefore exploited. A development I comment is Google opening up direct shopping in France. This can eliminate the need for a web site shopping solution to sell stuff in Google Shopping. This is happening in China and may well happen in Europe.
Full transcript of the Zoomsphere podcast interview
Somewhat shortened and tidied up. A binary thanks to IBM Watson for the speech to text work.
Peter:
Hello and welcome to the Zoomsphere Podcast. Thank you for joining us for this week’s episode of the Zoomsphere podcast. I am your host Peter Rujgev. In in the next 20 minutes you will be able to listen to our conversation with Magnus Strømnes Bøe. CEO of RED Performance. Working predominantly in the Norwegian market, RED Performance helps big and small brands achieve their goals through online performance channels. They do so by applying analytics, and their extensive experience across markets and verticals. During our conversation Magnus tells us more of the KPIs used when measuring the success of a campaign. Also – what’s it like working with freelancers and some of the latest trends.
Before we begin we’d like to invite you to subscribe to the Zoomsphere podcast on your preferred platform. We are kicking off this interview with a few words from. Magnus about his background.
Magnus:
I started working with search in 2001 and moved on to other marketing diciplines for different agencies in Oslo. I started working at my current job, in RED Performance in 2012 as head of SEO and web analytics. A few years later, in 2017 I became the CEO of the company. A year later I sold my shares together with the three other partners in the mother company (RED) to Dentsu Aegis Network, that’s basically it.
I’m still a very hands on CEO so I still do a lot of strategic and tactical work. Mainly SEO, web analytics og digital strategy.
Peter:
That’s very hands on, I like that! Right, so tell us more about RED Performance and the services you offer. As well as the clients that you work with.
Magnus:
So RED Performance is a performance marketing agency and we work mostly with search, both paid and organic. We also to a lot of social media marketing and also a lot of web analytics – we have to do that in order to be successful. The type of clients we are working with are primarily Norwegian brands, we also do work with some companies in Sweden, but mostly Norwegian brands. Retail, e-tailers, big brands and other type of companies that do a lot of communication and business online. We do a little bit of B2B, but it’s mainly B2C.
Peter:
OK, you mentioned you were predominantly with big client’s, so I’m quite interested to find out what is the process you go through when researching a new client that you will be working with?
Magnus:
When we are to send messages on behalf of our clients we have to make sure that these messages come through. I’ve seen a lot of statistics on this, but in average every user or human, is bombarded with lots of different messages every day. Some statistics say that it’s around 20 000 messages (daily), so to be able to break through that barrier you have to really cherry-pick what you are trying to say. So we do a lot of A/B-testing. We try to analyze and understand and see how the competitive landscape is: our competitors weak points and our strong points so that we are sure that what we are taking out there is valuable and a strong message. When we try to do a lot with little, what are our strategic points, and how can we use that to our advantage.
Peter:
Alright, and what is your strategy for developing a campaign when you don’t have sufficient budget or the budget isn’t as big as you want it to be? What is your approach to that?
Magnus:
If we see that the budget is way too small we generally stop and ask: Is this really necessary to focus on? Is there anything more important to work with? If it’s an uphill battle and we still want to fight it, we really need to use time to analyze and make a good plan on how to do it. If you just implement without a plan… There is such a high risk of not succeeding at all, so plan first and then implement.
Peter:
That sounds like the right approach to me. So once you’ve set up the campaign, how do you measure its success? What are some of the KPIs you follow in order to prove that you have delivered on the promise?
Magnus:
Well, it depends on the type of campaign of course. If you take one popular approach that we work a lot with, content marketing. It is important in search, social, programmatic and e-mail marketing as well.
We have a number of KPIs we like to avoid. We don’t use time on site in Google Analytics. People love to use that for content marketing, but it’s a broken metric. It doesn’t work. If you look in the upper part of the funnel, for the metrics we use. We look at how many times the content have been shared (within social), in search we see how the content performs in terms of visibility in search engine result pages. For e-mail what are the CTR for the specific message.
Further down in the funnel, we look to visits / session – not visitors. To measure content we use a metric called “scrolling time”, which is a more advanced metric that require knowledge of javascript and you probably need a developer to get that metric in use. It is a substitute for measuring time on site that work. The amount of time a user scrolls is something that can be measured exact enough. In the bottom of the funnel, using very concrete KPIs like revenue is of course very good – but even better is measuring actual new customers.
Inspired by the awesome book by Byron Sharp – How brands grow. Getting new clients / customers – that is how you grow your brand. If your setup of your website and CRM is good – then you can measure this. It’s the very best KPI to be using.
Peter:
That’s very insightful, thank you very much. Next I’d like to ask you about your team. How many people do you have in your team and do you tend to work with many freelancers?
Magnus:
We have around 30 people that work in RED Performance, in the whole RED dentsu X environment we are around 100. We also work with some freelancers, not many. We have around 3-4 freelancers that we work with, for different means, that are working from different locations. It works, but I think it’s important in business to actually see the people you are working with. To understand our and our clients goals it isn’t that easy not working integrated. We could probably work more with freelancers.
Peter:
Right, so what kind of work do you normally use freelancers for?
Magnus:
Development work, of course. We’ve been doing some work with the AMP-standard in SEO. We do a little bit of work with outsourcing in paid search, but since there are few Norwegian freelancers. Mostly our freelancer work is web development.
Peter:
Allright, so next like to ask you a little bit more about the business side of it all. I’m pretty sure you enjoy with you but obviously the company being profitable is one of the reasons why you’re doing it do you have a certain margin did you have set in place for all clients if you work with. For example is there a certain margin that you would never go under when considering a new client?
Magnus:
Yes, we are pretty really aware of that. But there are times that when we’re doing projects that are cutting edge, and and we try to find out how to do stuff in new ways. We are not happy to lose money on a project, but sometimes we do that full knowingly. We do have some thresholds yes – but I don’t want to disclose those thresholds for obvious reasons. We have some levels that we absolutely can’t work beneath.
Peter:
Sure. definitely – that makes sense. To get back on the topic of other clients you work with, have you noticed any trends in certain things you clients want in recent months?
Magnus:
I think the demand of level of quality in content marketing have changed to a higher level. I think the intensity in social media and the frequency of campaigns have changed dramatically. Also I think that there is a strong in-housing trend in Norway, and I think that is a trend for the rest of Europe as well. The competency on the buying side, from advertisers – our clients have increased a lot.. So their demands are more complex.
Dealing with web analytics for instance, coping with GDPR and understanding how to still be doing after GDPR is a big thing. And also I think using data, like product feed and inventory data – that could scale up our efforts a lot.
Peter:
Alright, and do you tend to work with many data scientist then?
Magnus:
We have one guy that work with that in our company, and we have had lets say 5-6 projects in that area. It is still very hard. The quality of data input is not good enough. Also understanding how to work with data, it is better – but the level of understanding is not on the level that it should be. But understanding will increase, also when data float more freely. There are data silos existing in business systems like CRM, ERP and so on. But it gets better and in a couple of years it will be a lot better in Norway.
Peter:
Alright – and that touches on my next question. Which is, what do you expect to see in the industry in the next month?A few people that we have spoken to on this podcast say that they are looking forward to getting rid of influencer marketing in the next couple of months. Do you think that as well?
Magnus:
No, I don’t think that, I think influencer marketing is great. I think the market need to understand the potential power an influencer can have. There are so many different influencers, we’ve recently done influencer marketing with a B2B-company working within the chemical industry. It’s so impressive to see how an influencer used in this category is really effective – but this is a totally different type of influencer than your average. Influencer marketing is being abused by some, just using famous people that doesn’t know anything about anything – but I think the audience understands this.
What I really am anticipating is what Google will do with their shopping service going forward. I know they opened their shopping service in France, selling directly – without the user not needing to stop by the advertisers website. What happens if Google rolls this out all over the world? I don’t know if I want this but it may happen in Europe. If you look to China there are quite a lot of online shops that do not have a web site – they just bypass the need for this and use different shopping solutions on different social media platforms.
Peter:
That’s great Magnus, thank you very much! just a final question – how can people get in touch with RED Performance?
Magnus:
The norwegian site is at https://redperformance.no – there is a one-pager in English on our site – https://redperformance.no/about/.
RED Performance is a part of the global dentsu X network – go to their site to get in touch with the international team. https://dxglobal.com/
