Four years ago I was preparing one of New Zealand’s few $100m Ecommerce businesses to be part of an IPO.

Having worked my way up through some of New Zealand’s earliest successful digital media sales and marketing companies, I found myself at the helm of one of the country’s largest Ecommerce businesses. It was owned by a Trans-Tasman traditional media heavyweight and had all the talent and resources it could ask for.

This traditional media company often found itself up against the ropes for different reasons, but different reasons that all pointed towards one thing: the world had changed around them and they were not quick enough to adapt.

But it wasn't just traditional media that was facing change. Our ecommerce business relied on email as its main source of traffic and that started to slow down significantly. Customers just weren’t engaging with it in the same way anymore and, as a business that depended on that channel in particular, it was a major challenge.

It was more difficult than ever to reach our audience.

The ‘fix’ I was given came in the form of traditional media – namely print and radio – with the explanation that ‘volume will work’. Guess what … it didn’t.

So I had to think of new ways to do it.

I vowed to myself that I would never use cookie cutter mass market strategies again and instead dedicated our efforts to finding smarter ways to leverage data, segmentation, personalisation and automation tools in order to connect with customers across the right mediums, with the right message, at the right time, every single time, and with as little waste as possible.

This would become my guiding principle.

Alongside a handpicked team of digital experts, who would later become my business partners at Hype & Dexter, we worked tirelessly for more than a year to carve out one of the most significant and complex multi-faceted digital marketing strategies ever seen in New Zealand Ecommerce.

While the journey was tough, the learnings gained through it were immeasurably valuable. I had a true understanding of how to grow businesses through digital transformation. But I was stuck in a front row seat watching a traditional media company struggle to keep relevancy as global digital companies came in and stole their eyeballs and ad revenue.

One thing was obvious to me now. It was that Ecommerce, consumer data, advertising and marketing were destined to collide in the most spectacular way. But realising I didn’t yet have all the answers, I left the company we’d painstakingly built back up to head up one of New Zealand’s foremost data agencies. This role had me working with some of Australasia’s largest corporates. Banks, telcos and energy companies were all lining up to discover how a deeper understanding of data could help them become even more indispensable to customers in order to grow their businesses.

The big shock came when I saw the amounts of money and resource being allocated to the integration of hugely complex marketing automation platforms.

It’s always the big companies who are early adopters of the most expensive and complex tools. And it always seems to be that the investment comes long before the understanding of how to use is realised.

In my experience, enterprise level marketing automation tools are only ever as good as the people who drive them. The “We’ll learn how to use it as we go” approach was, and still is, extremely common. But it results in only a small percentage of the platform’s true capability being used.

Still, the risk factor for these big business is relatively limited. But what really got me thinking was this:

What about businesses who don’t turn over $100 million or more per year?

Who was looking after these businesses – the ones who can't afford to get it wrong?

What I found was concerning.

• There are small agencies and one man bands consulting into these businesses who lack the resource and real world experience to deliver, meaning their clients get a less than optimal result.

• There are really effective consultants who were able to assist at a competent level... but given the demand for their services they can choose to work only with the highest bidder (and some of the rates being charged are extortionate), leaving businesses with no other choice.

This is why we started Hype & Dexter.

We are an agency focusing specifically on delivering marketing automation and customer generation, providing our clients with our ‘best of breed’ digital expertise. We are experts in our field and have been for over a decade.

We are leveraging the experience of our talented team to replace the mystery with mastery when it comes to marketing automation and customer generation to make it accessible to businesses of all sizes.

We see a lot of digital marketing ‘gurus’ pretend they have a secret system or a magic formula that makes them unique. But the trick is … there is no trick. No magic formula. No quick fix.

If you engage with us directly or through our launch campaign, you’ll be able to see exactly what I’m talking about. We are going to lay it all out there, and always will, in order to educate businesses in how to engage the tools and execute the strategies for success in digital transformation.

Put simply? We connect businesses with their ideal customers across the right media, with the right message, at the right time, every single time.

In the age of digital consumers expect you to know them. Customers don't see relevance as a privilege, they see it as a right.

This shift in consumer expectation is real. The businesses that embrace it will prosper, those that neglect it won't.

See what we do and how we do it. We've created a funnel that takes you through the Inbound Marketing experience – and reveals how we're doing it along the way. Want to know our secrets? There are none! See how it's done by starting our crash course in Inbound Marketing today.