Tightening up what we do and how we help clients
It’s always an interesting exercise to review the services you provide and what services provide the best outcomes for clients. Over the last 17 years we’ve accomplished a lot. We’ve built an impressive roster of clients, built some fantastic websites and apps, and delivered some pretty amazing marketing campaigns…but…
Well for us, the world is changing. The ‘digital footprint’ is becoming more commoditised and whilst some technologies bring simplicity, there’s an emerging set of more complex technologies to master. And the desire to achieve better results with less is as prevalent in our agency as it is in our clients.
After taking a long look at what we love doing and matching that to our client base, we’re sharpening our focus on the three things that we’re the best at – Drupal, Magento and Marketing.
Drupal
We’ve been working with Drupal 6 / 7 for many years and love its power and flexibility and we’re big fans of Drupal 8. It’s exactly the sort of CMS where we can excel in all aspects of the project life cycle – from planning, creative, UX to front end / back end development and deployment.
Whilst other CMS platforms (WordPress, Typo3 and the like) are perfectly fine, we’re not big fans of shoe-horning requirements into platforms that just don’t make sense. And as we favour open source LAMP stack over proprietary technologies, Drupal makes perfect sense for us.
Magento
As an agency, we‘ve always prided ourselves in developing transactional websites. In the early days, we worked on OS Commerce (a forerunner to Magento) and even developed our own proprietary ecommerce system. But for the last 8 years we’ve specialised on the Magento platform.
True it’s complex to get to grips with, but it’s a powerful and extendable platform that’s allowed us to engineer solutions for some very complex requirements. The team has recently completed training on Magento 2 and we’ve launched our first Magneto 2 projects.
Marketing
Better marketing performance for our clients has always been at the heart of what we do. Over the years we’ve become a proficient marketing agency and have delivered many successful campaigns.
We’ve always taken the approach of understanding client objectives and lining up campaigns and programs to deliver these. Along the way we’ve become experts in Google (and Bing), programmatic display, remarketing, social advertising, affiliate and email marketing. We regularly use a combination of these channels, and we’ve often run campaigns in radio and print when clients are looking for joined up thinking across all channels.
Having decided on Drupal, Magento and marketing as our three specialisms, we’ve tightened our focus and brand positioning to help articulate our value to clients and define the space that we want to own.
Better performance and results
We understand that companies want better performance – from better websites to marketing campaigns that deliver more. Trying to achieve more with less is fairly commonplace now.
This is where open source systems like Drupal and Magento can really help, especially as they tend to have a lower total cost of ownership than many other systems. Using our tried and tested marketing approach delivers better performance for less media budget.
Specialists
Naturally people want to work with specialists and experts in what they do. This is particularly relevant with Drupal and Magento – both are complex systems that require experience and expertise to get the best out of them.
It’s not just the codebase itself that’s complex, it’s the extended digital footprint covering the likes of DevOps, analytics, interfaces and integrations that can influence how good the solution is.
