Digital marketing: The disruptive journey
Q. How were you able to identify and capitalise on the opportunities before the advent of digital marketing? I started my business back in 1994. I was a vet in those days. I had a veterinary practice in the UK and we used to do newspaper ads and magazine ads and that was it. Then Google came along. I could see that the world was going to change and I remember saying to my business partner,“ You know people are going to buy stuff online,” and he went,“ Nah!” and I went,“ No, really it’ s going to be big.”
So what I did in 2000 was build my first website using a really old program called FrontPage. That was what is was in those days. I built this website and it worked! The three or four people who were online every week, which wasn’ t many, but those who were, they found my veterinary practice and they came to me and they told me they had seen my website and I said to myself,“ Ah! There’ s something here.” So basically it was a case of seeing it and jumping on it. Which I guess is what you do in business.
Q. What are the current challenges facing the field of digital marketing? Sometimes it’ s just the volume of stuff that’ s coming at you. That’ s a bit of a challenge, just keeping up with the demand, but that’ s a nice problem to have. There are still a lot of dinosaur businesses, there are still so many old stuck-in-the-mud businesses who just don’ t understand how digital marketing works and that’ s a bit of a challenge to persuade them to move and do something or they’ ll lose their business.
Q.“ Traded my stethoscope for a mouse …” could you tell us a bit about that journey? It allowed me to stretch my creative muscle and I really enjoyed that. And then I built a few more websites and got a really good hang of SEO( search engine optimisation) and that was a big thing, handling globally successful websites. Then I realised I was actually enjoying this more than my day job. There was so much opportunity and I was
4 AGSM
Interview by Divya Mathai( MBA cohort 2017)
Deb Jeffreys, founder and CEO of Brilliant Blue, traded her career as a Veterinary Surgeon to build her first website in 2000. Her company speacialises in deliverling complete digital marketing solutions to small and medium businesses – an end to end service. When she is not working she spends many happy hours with her partner and 4 daughters. Caring for herself through yoga, and mindfulness is very important.
a parent. Still, a parent never stops. I just realised then that there’ s a career here that I can make that is much more flexible around my family. So I finally decided to sell my veterinary practice and sell my house in the UK and move to Australia. And this was pre-GFC, so we were able to make a little bit on that and be in a position to re-invent ourselves. I’ ve got all this knowledge, I can be a good parent and I can start building the next career. People today don’ t just have one career, that’ s life, you move along. I started freelancing initially and actually there’ s a good story in that, because the first person to give me my first gig is now my business partner. So what happened was we grew his business to such a level through digital marketing and then eventually sold it last year using a website specifically built to sell the business and now he’ s a partner in the business.
Q. What is the secret to a successful online marketing campaign? It is so many things, but I will tell you some of the big errors people make.
First of all, they make it all about them, but it is not all about you, it’ s about what you can do for the person out there. The first thing you’ ve got to be able to do is identify the target market out there – who you are going for, what they actually want, and what is the problem you are fixing for them. And once you are there, you start to articulate the content around these questions and you design the website or social media platform to fit that.
Photo Credit: Provided by author