Parallax Spotlight: Marketing Executive Alex Peters

We’ve been giving an insight to the goings-on of a Leeds digital agency on our blog over the past three months. This week the Parallax spotlight turns to our Marketing Executive Alex Peters.

Hi Alex, start us off with an introduction about your role and what you get up to at Parallax.

I’ve been working at Parallax for around 18 months now. My role has changed as we’ve adapted to the way digital marketing has progressed over the past year or two. SEO has become online PR. Our marketing campaigns are now much more heavily ROI focused and based around content curation, rather than purely looking at keyword rankings.

A typical day will involve liaising with clients, generating content ideas, talking with journalists and bloggers and checking in on rankings and performance. In the content team we spend a lot of time keeping our ears to the ground for developments or changes in the industry. The guys at Econsultancy are really handy for keeping up to speed with digital marketing news and insights.

What sort of things have you been working on recently?

I’ve been working on the outreach for the battle of the sexes infographic as well as working on our own marketing efforts – we recently found ourselves in Creative Review for example. I’m also working on the ongoing content marketing campaigns for several other clients.

A lot of the marketing work seems to be focused around content, how does that work?

The phrase ‘content marketing’ has been thrown around loosely over the past couple of years in the digital marketing world, but we’re really starting to see the importance of content being interactive and consumer focused; the definition is beginning to be nailed down a bit. We have to think: what do people want? And react with our clients to how we can engage with their audience through digital media.

There is so much noise on the web, and you need to really find an interesting angle with your content to break through it all to be heard. The Bonkers for Conkers campaign is a great example of this. Much of the content that is created is to help build the profile of our clients and to get them some exposure. However, it is also created to gain backlinks pointing back to our client’s website which is a huge SEO factor in terms of building domain authority and achieving a healthy ranking and organic search presence.

What stand out tools or pieces of digital marketing software would you recommend to those new to digital marketing?

I’d say that Google Analytics and Moz Analytics are your bread and butter in this industry. Tools such as Crazy Egg for A/B testing and design revisions as well as HootSuite for social media marketing are pretty key too. I’m also a big fan of Raven Tools’ reporting software and MySEO Tool. You’ve then got tools such as Adroll which now includes Facebook Exchange and then Google Adwords which are all useful to know your way around. There are plenty more though!

Where do you see digital marketing trends going in the next 12 months?

We’re starting to see smarter and more insightful data capture emerge which is giving brands a much better understanding of their customers. Not just on the web but in our daily lives with products such as Estimote starting to emerge. This overlap is going to be fascinating, and we’re already seeing it with Sainsburys’s Nectar Card and Tesco Club Cards etc. Having said this, users are beginning to become more and more conscious that their data is being collected and used to market to them.

Online, learning how consumers navigate through a website to the conversion point and where they fall off is an interesting one, but it is the changes that we see on the UI of Google Analytics that often hints where things are going. Google Analytics is starting to offer up a much greater insight – all of which is focused around Adwords traffic. The measurability of online marketing has made budgets much more transparent.

I think we’ll continue to see more marketing spends shift to a paid strategy and new insights from Google throughout 2014. This will give clients a better insight and perspective on their users and of their marketing budget.

I’d recommend having a look at my article Keeping Ahead of the Curve – Agency Tips which gives an insight to this, as well as design and development insights on what we can expect from the digital world over the next 12 months.

Last but not least, what would you be doing if you didn’t work in the digital sector?

Similar to Andy, it would be professional sport, but obviously I’d be chasing an egg shaped ball around the field for Bath Rugby rather than a round one for Leeds United.

Thanks Alex!

If you’ve got a question for Alex about digital marketing, SEO or content curation let us know in the comments section below or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.