STEPHEN Gorman is CEO at Pilot Fish Media, an award-winning digital marketing agency with a focus on social media, founded three years ago.
He submitted this on Friday, June 17 2016.
What exactly is it you do?
Pilot Fish Media is an Edinburgh-based digital marketing agency with a specialist focus on social media.
We help clients launch or expand into new and emerging markets by using the power of social media (in particular Facebook advertising) to better understand their target market and ensure they are reaching the right people with the right message.
With a wide network of global contacts, and working closely with people on the ground in the countries we work in, we offer clients an unique combination of global expertise with local knowledge and insight to ensure they are engaging with their consumers with relevant and appropriate brand messaging.
What did your working day yesterday comprise?
Yesterday, we had a weekly status call with our client in South Africa and liaised with the client’s PR agency in Cape Town. We’re working on a big event for one of our brands – a luxury Scottish whisky – and brainstorming ideas to ensure we are amplifying the event as much as possible on the Facebook page.
We also had a catch-up with our client in Bulgaria to discuss organising a photo shoot so that we can build up a library of images that are appropriate for the Bulgarian market.
Other things on the to-do list included updating our own website with news of our recent Marketing Society Star Awards win, putting a proposal together for a potential new client and starting to plan next week’s work.
Finally, we had multiple press calls regarding our recent success at the Marketing Society Awards where we won gold for our social media campaign for the Famous Grouse in Africa.
We also had a heated debate about the England versus Wales match during the Euros!
How different or similar is your average working day to when you started?
Things haven’t changed too drastically, but the workload has definitely increased – which, of course, is a good thing!
The focus of our work has also shifted, somewhat. With the rapid development of Facebook advertising and consumer profiling, a paid media service is now very much a big part of what we offer our clients.
When we first started out, it was still possible to reach a fairly decent percentage of your audience without paying to boost your posts.
Of course, this has all changed now. So, we do spend a lot of time in Facebook’s ad manager, reviewing and tweaking to make sure we are reaching the right people as well as creating content that is going to get as much organic reach as possible.
Our team has grown since the early days, as well, so there’s a lot more internal management and liaising to make sure we are all working as happily and efficiently as possible!
How do you see your job evolving?
We believe that we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the opportunities that social media will offer brands in the future, especially when you look at how rapidly the industry has developed even in the last 12 months.
Mark Zuckerburg and his team have been way ahead of the curve since day one and we are only now starting to really understand his vision and how he sees Facebook changing the face of advertising and marketing as we know it.
Traditional print media has been dying for a long time, TV is nowhere near to gasping its last breath but when you compare the costs versus potential audience reach of TV versus social media advertising, they’re not even on the same playing field.
We predict that brands are going to start earmarking a much greater chunk of their budgets for social media spend and the brands that start laying the foundations for success now – by growing their audiences and engaging with them in meaningful ways – will be the ones that will reap the benefits.
What gives you the most job satisfaction?
We all really love working on big campaign ideas and the longer terms strategies that help our clients grow their businesses. We have a very strong creative team and we love it when a big idea can support the client with their business objectives.
And, of course, winning awards feels pretty good, too!
