Gravytrain Visits #BrightonSEO

Posted in Conferences, Jobs on September 18th, 2012 by Angelina

The Gravytrain team had a great time at the UK’s biggest, best and free digital marketing conference – BrightonSEO on Friday. We didn’t just go for the useful presentations, this time we were exhibiting there with an aim to look for new SEO or web development recruits!

Some of us stayed over on Thursday night whilst the rest of us got there bright and early on Friday. It was great to see yet another huge turnout – it seems to grow bigger and bigger each year!
We were looking for hot new talents to join the Gravytrain team including a:

• Digital Operations Manager
• Search Account Manager
• Front End Designer/Developer
• Business Development Executive and
• Interns

After a hectic day speaking to a range of different people, we enjoyed the evening playing retro arcade games, being human flies, taking part in the cycling time trials, joining in with the karaoke and of course, sampling the beer! You can see some more pictures on Gravytrain’s Facebook page.

Thanks to Kelvin Newman and the team for organising another great event. We’re looking forward to the next BrightonSEO!

If you are interested in any of these roles we are recruiting for, please drop Kevin an email with your CV & covering letter, telling us why you would be perfect for the job to kevin@gravytrain.co.uk.

Brighton SEO

Posted in Conferences on September 4th, 2012 by Stephanie

At this Septembers Brighton SEO, Gravytrain are out in full force! Most of the team will be there for the full day and we are in search of new recruits.

Brighton SEO is being held in the Brighton Dome and will be in the Corn Exchange within the building. As well as us having a stand, a real highlight is the training workshops and this year there is everything from analytics workshops to content marketing. The impressive thing about these workshops is the quality of speakers involved – the very best of the best from what we can see making it worthwhile to those wanting to up their game.

This year we are thrilled to say that we’re exhibiting at Brighton SEO. As a fast growing agency we’re on the lookout for new hires, so we couldn’t think of a better place to reach out to some of the UK’s brightest digital talents. Not only are we out with the team for pure business reasons, we also want a little fun so we are giving away goodies, what better reason to come by for chat?

We’re also hosting an exclusive roundtable on digital marketing for financial services companies, and we‘re looking forward to hearing the challenges faced by in-house and agency staff. Working with a fair few insurance companies, we’re all too familiar with the impact that FSA compliance and the like can have on the digital process, so we’ll be fascinated to see what comes out of the discussion.

Figaro Digital Marketing Conference 2012

Posted in Conferences, News, Speaking Engagements on July 16th, 2012 by Steve

Last Thursday the Gravytrain team were in full force at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference. With hundreds of digital marketers all converging on one place, this was one of the biggest conferences of the year and one not to be missed. We certainly enjoyed the day, whilst the after party drinks were an added bonus!

The conference was packed full with talks from a wide range of the industry’s professionals, both agency side and client side, while the conference also included the fabled Figaro21’s – this is where a series of speakers rattle through 21 slides, each of which last just 21 seconds. It’s an intense struggle against time and it makes for very entertaining, yet informative viewing! Billed as the session to make grown adults weep, we nominated our own Head of Search, Matthew Oxley, to kick off the 21’s.

Matthew’s talk detailed the rise of mobile and tablet and how device segmentation is now key for all paid search campaigns. Matthew outlined that by the end of 2013, it is predicted that mobile web usage will actually overtake desktop web usage. Mobile is seemingly dominating our lives more and more as we have a constant need for information and data.

The mobile phone has become such an integral part of our lives and with the addition of the tablet, searching while on the go has become even easier than ever before. So, it is little surprise that mobile web usage will soon surpass desktop web usage.

Furthermore, there were other notable presentations, such as Jack Lundie, from Save the Children, who acted out a conversation with himself. The slick nature of his delivery and creativity of his presentation made for compelling viewing!

Then there was Peter Wood from Steak who deserves a mention simply for his incredible jacket! It sparked quite a response on Twitter…He did give a fantastic presentation too about the merger of SEO and Social Media, what he called “SEOcial”.

With the digital marketing landscape constantly evolving and more digital marketers becoming savvy to the rise of mobile web usage, the overriding theme of this year’s Figaro Conference truly was device segmentation and the importance of it. “Ignore mobile at your peril” was one particular quote that stood out for me!

Matthew Oxley speaking at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference

Posted in Conferences, News, Speaking Engagements on June 20th, 2012 by Angelina

We are excited to announce that Matthew Oxley, Gravytrain’s Head of Search, will be speaking at the Figaro Digital Marketing Conference on the 12th July 2012. The day-long event will be hosted at the Royal College of Physicians, which is set to bring the latest insights and innovations from the whole digital marketing industry.

You can expect the presentations to cover mobile, email, social media, video, search and display, from some of the UK’s leading agencies, brands and technology companies.

Matthew’s talk is part of the Figaro 21s presentations – a fast and focused format of presentation. He will be talking about how to make the most out of device targeting options in paid search and will be explaining why it is crucial to any business.

Tickets are priced at £345 +VAT but we can offer you tickets at just £195 +VAT. To book a place at the conference please call Figaro Digital on 0207 870 3380 or email conferences@figarodigital.co.uk.

Please visit Figaro Digital for more information.

Let us know if you will be attending the conference! You can follow and tweet Matthew on Twitter @Moxley.

Day Two of Internet World 2012

Posted in Conferences on April 27th, 2012 by Stephanie

This year is the 20th anniversary of Internet World and as Steve said in the last blog post, Gravytrain are attending for all of the 3 days. Day 2 was mine and Alex’s turn to visit Internet World (on the wettest day of the year, but still worth it!).

Alex and I got the venue and while we drip dried we listened to Markus Fehr from e-Spirit. He talked about integrating CMS and online shopping to an already substantial business that is offline. It was interesting to hear how many businesses are still wary about having an online presence as they feel it may discourage shoppers from their local stores. However, as the world is now largely on the internet, the amounts of visits to local shops are declining and those businesses that don’t have an online presence are realising this.

The next was a talk on email testing. Sean Duffy from Email Center showed us that by using a multivariate testing technique we could see a 45% increase from email marketing. Here we learned that an email testing plan was something to avoid as you need to be dynamic and that each test is a trial and therefore not to worry if the results are negative.

The last talk Alex and I attended, I thought, was the best out of the three. It was hosted by Luca Benini from Europe, Buddy Media. Here he spoke about “The elusive ROI of social media: Tracking connections through sales.” Luca spoke about how actually, the ROI is not elusive. He said that by interacting with consumers, many are drawn away from the customer service phone line and are more inclined to tweet or post, which is a lot cheaper to reply to and therefore, is an instant return on investment from social media. This was one of the points Luca said was a way to measure ROI from social media. The others included: Brand equity, shareholder value, “talkability” for a TV show, Web traffic referrals and sales. He gave an interesting statistic about web traffic referrals that showed more traffic was generated from Facebook to YouTube than from Google to YouTube.

This shows the complete shift in the way people access information and highlights the importance of having a presence on social media sites.

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