Southampton Presentation

Editor's Notes

• #2 Hello Southampton University and welcome to our session on careers in digital marketing.My name’s Neil, and this is Nik (and that’s Dan over there)
• #3 NMWe’ve been invited here today to talk to you about a unique and job rich market (and we think one of the most exciting too).It’s a sector which is driven by technology innovation – where technology is developed and the way that consumers adopt it into their lives creates new marketing opportunities and these marketing opportunities create new jobs. It’s a sector which is constantly moving.It’s also a bit of a weird market - it’s a sector where the number of jobs outweigh number of people, creating demand for people in the market and fast career progression That’s one of the reasons we run this part of our business not-for-profit - we want to show more people why this is such a great market to work in, and we want to know people on their way in tooRunning things not-for-profit is a bit of a weird thing for a recruitment agency but it helps us do some interesting things – including things like thisThe main thing for you guys is that we’re not here to make money out of you, the only thing we care about is helping you find your way into the market, and to show you that we’re good at what we do in the process
• #4 NM – Today we’re going to aim to cover a few key areas – we’re going to take a look at some Southampton graduates who are working in the market and how they’ve progressed and how their perception has changed from where you’re sitting now to where they’re sitting nowWe’ll look at a market built on specialism and take a closer look at a couple of the key areas we work inWe’ll take a look at some of your options coming into the market and the pros and cons of agency and client sideNN - talking through how to find roles, application and how you can stand out, how you can use us to get ahead
• #5 NM:Thought we’d share some fellow Southampton graduates Chris is someone I first met nearly 5 years ago. He’s studied Computer Science here and ended up working in search.He was the second person in the search team at MGOMD and left a team of around 15 people after a couple of yearsHe joined Razorfish (global digital agency) and a team of around 6 and rose through the ranks as the team grew to head a PPC team of 20 peopleHe’s literally just moved from there to Head Performance Marketing at an agency called Unique DigitalWithout being to specific about Chris’ earnings, I can tell you that a Head of Search or Performance would typically earn anywhere between £60 and £80/year, sometimes moreDave’s someone I placed as a graduate nearly 3 years ago – he had quite an odd background, studying Aeronautics here and flirted with the idea of becoming a rocket scientist before doing his Masters in Marketing Management and decided to follow this partHe was very numerate and now he looks at how users interact on websites and so very data and analytics drivenNN: Adam, did internships, got recognised at MEC and then they took him on after his internshipNikoletta, started speaking to when still at S’Hampton. Very focused and diligent, keen and eager.NM: Before we came here we talked to each of them about how their perception has changed and each of them mentioned that the main difference was that they’d received a really good overview of the market through their degrees, but were surprised at how the jobs in the market were so specialised, so we’re going to take a look at that todayThey also mentioned about how data-driven it is, and that it helps if you have a problem-solving, analytical brain for a lot of the roles (although not all of them)INTRO NEXT SLIDE:Search as core areas, long presentation if we went through every one.3 most popular areas are Search…SEO & PPC
• #6 SERPYou’ll all be familiar with the search results page and will have noticed the adverts to the right and often across the top too – you’ll also notice that they take up most of the page and this has increased continuously over the yearsThese adverts are triggered by the search queries when the search volume is sufficient and it’s a fairly unique form of marketing in that it’s a form of pull marketing – where the consumer seeks the advert and not the other way aroundIt’s one of the best marketing channels for ROI and that’s one of the reasons it’s such a massive marketThe listings here are what we call natural results and are the actual results returned by the search engine – the ones the engine deems most relevant and most authoritive (and we’ll take a quick look at how they do they shortly). The method of improving the rankings here is commonly referred to as SEO or Search Engine Optimisation
• #7 So taking a quick look at SEO – the market’s changed a lot especially in the last couple of years. Historically search engines determined authority and relevancy by the density of keywords on a page and the number of inbound linksThis meant that companies or agencies acting on their behalf would often stuff pages full of keywords and buy and build links wherever possible. It was often quite a spammy industry and the role of linkbuilder (now obsolete) wasn’t especially glamourous or engagingA couple of years ago, Google made two significant changes to the way it’s algorythm ranked websites – both updates names after animals, Panda and Penguin respectively. What this meant was that the emphasis came away from the number of links and more about the qualityThis meant that developing quality, sharable content is the way to get sites to rank better and means that roles in SEO are now a lot more varied and interestingIt’s a complex and massive field so in this diagram we’ve tried to show the variety of the roles using the idea of a restaurantIn this example, the restaurant is the websiteThe waitress at the top is for conversion optimisation – this is what Dave does. It’s about making the experience as good as possible for the user so they have the greatest chance of converting. It’s pretty analytical and can be technical but also needs someone with a marketing brain who can design the tests they runThe cleaner is for onsite SEO – this is the technical part of the role and people often come in from web design or programming backgrounds. They’ll make site the site is crawlable – structured and optimised for different browsers, continuously updating the site as new algorhtym updates are releasedThe chef produces content – the more fresh, relevant, unique content you produce the better you’ll rank and they’ll produce content for both on and off site (shown here as restaurant food and takeaway food). A lot of people from English degrees and Journalism end up working in this field, as well as graphic designersThe offsite content will be delivered to market by a content marketing team who’s job it is to build relationships with publishers and bloggers to put the content in the most effective place for maximum results – there are blurred lines here with some of social media and online PR too. The people we place in this field tend to be pretty active on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Twitter etc.
• #8 In this slide, we’re trying to demonstrate why PPC is such a massive sector by showing you a consumer journey which hopefully you’ll relate toSome of you (especially the marketing students) will be familiar with the conversion or marketing funnel and this is our yellow brick marketing funnel – it shows the different steps a consumer goes through before making a purchase decisionIn this example we’re showing some search behaviour throughout the buying funnel when Dorothy is booking her holidayIt starts with an awareness that Dorothy wants to go on holiday, she knows roughly when she can get time off the farm and how long for an that determines her first searchShe searches for ‘Sunny holiday in Europe October’ and at this point she’s unlikely to convert to purchase as she still doesn’t know what she wants – she’s after information and ends up on some travel blogs or perhaps a site like Expedia and do some reading upHaving done this, she likes the look of Croatia and moving into the Interest phase she searches for ‘Best places to stay in Croatia’ and at this point she starts to evaluate her options – this might include more blogs, perhaps some offline information as well, talking to her friends and getting adviceDubrovnik looks good so now she just needs to find somewhere to stay to suit her budget – she searches for ‘3 star hotels in Dubrovnik’ and finds the Hotel Zagreb Dubrovnik and at this point she moves towards the commitment phase, finds the best price for the dates of her stay and makes the purchaseThe point we’re making here is that she’s probably used many different sources to make her decision but given that over two thirds of holidays are booked online, it’s likely that online had a large influence and search was an intrinsic part of this process throughout her journey it’s not just an acquisition marketing form and this is one of the reasons it attracts one of the highest spends of media fullstopThis is another field where data is important and people who enter this market often enjoy problem solving and drawing insight from data – it’s a very addictive field so if you’re hooked on Candy Crush, you’ll probably like PPC.Search is also a form of biddable media, in that the media is bought on an auction basis and this makes is a really good skill to have in terms of developments in the market
• #9 We wanted to give you a look at RTB (Real time bidding) because it’s such a massive growth market and to give you an idea of how quickly a sector can develop. It can be tricky to explain if you don’t know much about digital media so in order to tell you what it is I’m going to start by telling you what it isn’tRTB in basic terms is a way of buying media – we’re talking mainly about banner advertising or basically any advert you see online other than text based ads or searchThese are traditionally bought by a media agency who will take a brief from a client. For example Mazda might have released a new hatch back with a hybrid engine designed for eco-conscious city dwelllers – the planning team will identify websites who have a sufficient proportion of users are in this demographic and buy advertising typically on a CPM or cost per thousand basis. This means they pay a fixed cost for every thousand times that advert is shown and the media agency will use it’s buying power to get a good rate on the media tradeRTB is very different – the main difference again is data. With RTB, the planner will use data to target consumers on a single impression basis which means they can target single users with a targeted advert and the accuracy of this is limited only by the data you have.You could only target people who have bought a car in the last 5 years or only people who live in a certain area or have visited the website more than once over a certain periodIt’s another form of auction buying which means that you get a true price for the media and this means that buying power is out and analytics and strategy are inWe’ll take a closer look at this in the next slide
• #10 There’s a lot of jargon in RTB so we’ve tried to simplify things in this diagram to show you how it works.The flowers here represent data – and remember this could be any data you have. We’ve shown CRM or customer data and campaign data which might be information from your website or marketing campaignsThis data is fed into a DMP (the hive) and using a DMP, the ad trader can segment the data and make marketing decisionsThe ad trader buys media through a number of different channels including ad exchanges which are essentially online market places. By using a DSP or demand side platform, the ad trader can buy inventory or advertising space across a number of different platforms though one single interface (this rickety market stall)It’s not as technical as it sounds, and just needs a smart marketing head.To give you an idea of progression in this sector, we placed a guy called Adam in to RTB two years ago on a graduate salary of around £20k, stayed at same company and now on £45k
• #11 Market is specialist, number of reasons whyBrands outsource to agencies:Expertise, team of people focused on area. BrainpowerTrading element, more buying power – rates betterLocation – London attracts people so if you’re in West Country you won’t attract peopleSeasonality – ups and down in markets means you don’t have to grow & shrink teamsAccountability – if something goes wrong you have someone to blameMost of companies are client side but most of roles are agency.Advantages to each:
• #12 We find that there are 5 main roadblocks that we have in their job hunt.What do I want?People get stuck on what do I want to do? How are you geared up, are you numbers driven, are you creative, are you technically focused.. There are a number of things to consider which will help with your decision as to which specialism would suit you.How do I find it, that’s where hopefully we come in. There are some great agencies that specialise in graduates and we can point you towards them. We’ve had a search engine built that scours the net for graduate jobs. Register for job alerts, speak to your friends and just keep your eyes open. We get a lot of jobs on because we’re not for profit so keep checking in with us.How do I stand out: What am I standing out from, about 300 applicants per role. The good news is, it’s not that difficult to stand out. We’ll talk through specifics in the next slide but we can definitely help with that but we look for people that are academically strong, wants to work in digital marketing and has a tailored approach to their application.How do I get it: it’s about preparation. Read up and know the market and area you are going into. Research & Preparation,Blog,Training sessions,Resource guides,Read and research online,Follow market developments,Follow the key people,Twitter, Linkedin follow people onWe are a resource and a support.When do I start: it’s quite a quick turnaround, some roles take longer however generally a month or two and you should be in a role.
• #19 Overall structure roughly applies to most agencies.Supporting account to start withSEO Exec doing outreach, reporting, putting decks together, supporting presentationPlanner: doing planning work. Putting proposals & campaigns togetherAM: Owning account, e.g. Volvo & Ikea, represent agencies to make sure they are happy, getting right reports and they are getting right info. Ensure team below you are delivering workAD: AM may look after different areas, big account e.g. Apple: one AM may look after retail, one iTunes, one accessories.One AD will be responsible for whole of apple spend, overall accountability and strategy.Head of division – you own discipline in each areaBusiness Director – you may look after Apple across whole business, print, TV, radio…Technical go to head of divisionBusiness Director – commercially drivenPeople move in house after every level
• #20 Overview of salariesBlue line is digital and this is compared to other salaries.Yellow & Green are UK and London average, in here to give you perspective. Put them there so you can see the average.Red line is the average graduate salary for London for first 5 years.You can see digital starts off a little behind but catches up and overtakes very quickly, and grows rapidly.You hit the national average after3 years and London average not too long afterwards.