Other Media’s Margaux moves to new role as Digital Strategist

As a Project Manager with Other Media for the past 3 years, Margaux has overseen a variety of award winning projects, spanning strategic consultation on digital transformation, customer experience design, website and app development through to ongoing optimisation for a variety of clients.

Taking the knowledge and skills honed partly in this role and through running her own website, Margaux is now moving into a new role with us as Digital Strategist. We caught up with her to find out a bit more about this role and how clients will start to see the impact of this crucial work.

CB: Firstly, congratulations on the new role.

MM: Thanks!

CB: So how did this move come about?

MM: I’ve always been one for numbers. The power of understanding data and implementing changes based on sound analysis is truly rewarding. From work on my own website and becoming more involved in optimisation work we have been doing here with clients, it was clear to me that it was the direction I wanted to move my career in and it’s a great fit for the business.

CB: When you’re not helping people to get the most out of their websites, you are busy keeping your own website in peak condition. Can you tell us a bit about that?

MM: In my spare time I run thelonetravellers.com which I created after backpacking solo around South-East Asia. I had to spend so much time researching my destinations that I knew there must have been a way to bring together all the relevant travel information in one easy-to-use website. It is written by travellers, for travellers.

The site officially launched in October 2017 and is already performing well but I’ve always been acutely aware that when you launch a website, that’s when the work starts. When you deploy a website to live, it’s called live for a reason – it’s like a living being that needs nurturing, looking after. I’ve spent so much time delving deep into so much data, data that I knew existed and data that I didn’t, and have been amazed by just what insights you can uncover when you look – and I mean really look.

CB: You mean “really look”?

MM: There is a lot you can learn when you know where to look, what to look at, can interpret it and apply what you have learnt. It’s fascinating and exciting to see the incredible business impacts. Knowledge really is power!

CB: So this was a natural step then, to take what you have learnt from your website and apply it to our clients. Can you summarise what the work you are doing with clients will do for them?

MM: There is a lot of effort that goes into the strategic planning of a website (with much of it is underpinned by data), the work doesn’t stop once your website is built and launched. Any online strategy should be focused on the continual evolution of the products and services that you have. It’s all about the extra 1% – the sometimes small, often additive changes that can produce incredible results. If you are an elite athlete, you will certainly have a team behind you analysing everything about you, what you wear, how you train, where you train, what your competitors do and so on, and understanding all of those areas enables improvements to constantly be made. It is the same with a website or app. You must continually assess how you are doing and look for where you can gain extra performance. You can be sure that the competition you want to beat are already doing this.

CB: So where do you start?

MM: You have to ask some key questions – the first being “how are you going to get the most out of your online tool, such as your website?”

CB: And how do you answer that?

MM: It starts with being specific about the function your website or app fulfills. For ecommerce it could be “how do we sell more?”; for sport it could be “how do I attract and engage more visitors?”

It’s about making the experience as good as it can be and there are so many facets to a project like that.

CB: Can you give us a little taster of what some of those elements might be?

MM: Sure. The work you can expect to partner with me on encompasses 3 main areas: digital discovery and analysis; conversion rate optimisation and search engine optimisation. I think many people are aware of the need for the last 2 areas, but forget how important it is to first understand what your current situation is and look for the areas of improvement specific to you and your audience. By using an effective toolkit, you can understand your users and what they need from you. Then we can begin to make recommendations for improvements.

SEO has long been understood as important but the successful implementation of an SEO strategy relies on a very active approach and understanding how to get your web pages found by the right people. I invest time in monitoring changes, for example to algorithms that affect rankings, to ensure an SEO strategy is always up-to-date.

Finally, conversion rate optimisation is really interesting to me as once you have an audience visiting your website, you then need results.. You want a user to do a particular thing – such as purchase an item or sign up to a service. If these results are poor, there are always things you can do to change that by improving the journey and removing barriers. Even if you think you’re doing pretty well, would you say no to even better results?

CB: Absolutely not! Thanks Margaux. We’re all really looking forward to seeing even more of our clients reaping the rewards of this insightful work and it’s great to have all of your skills under our roof.