Do you really do digital?

Wednesday 28 November 2018

If we are all becoming permanently plugged in…then surely we should fully understand how what we see on our devices is affecting our behaviour? Well, no actually.

The discipline of digital marketing has become the topic that communications professionals all love to talk about, but, deep down, many still fear they just don’t quite get it.

This is where Daniel Rowles comes in. He has recently moved his digital marketing firm, Target Internet, to Jersey, because the island’s fibre broadband means he can manage a list of top global clients from a farmhouse in St. Mary.

Express went to meet him, to discover why a top digital marketer had made his home in Jersey’s countryside...

Pictured: Daniel manages his company from a farmhouse in St. Mary.

It’s easy to lose yourself in a jungle of jargon, buzzwords and highly technical narratives when talking about the world of digital marketing. Bringing the topic to life can be tricky and no one is more aware of this than Daniel Rowles, who has spent his career perfecting his craft of making the fast-moving world of digital marketing relatable and understandable.

As an author, speaker, trainer, professor and business owner, Daniel has discovered over the years that the key to running a successful digital training business is rooted in narrative. Only through capturing people’s attention through the art of storytelling, can the necessary knowledge and skills truly be retained.

“Imagine trying to engage people on the topic of multi-channel funnels in Google analytics,” Daniel explains. “Unless you can talk about this with engaging narrative, no one is going to listen or even remember what you said.”

For someone that has had to capture the attention of everyone from students to company CEOs, Daniel has learnt to adopt different tones and storytelling techniques to suit his audience.  

Pictured: Daniel says your narrative needs to be engaging if you want people to remember what you said.

It is through the many roles that Daniel plays out as CEO of Target Internet, that he has found a business model that allows him to remain at the top of his game as a digital marketing trainer. He splits his time lecturing at Imperial College and Cranfield School of Management, speaking at conferences all over the world on digital marketing, as well as writing and producing podcasts on the subject.

“If I was to simply deliver e-learning and sit at home writing on the topic it wouldn't work because you need to be out there in different communities learning and evolving. You will always need practicality to deliver effective training, which is why Target will never just be a training platform as its too theoretical.” 

With so much of his time spent travelling, it was a chance meeting that brought him over to Jersey and spurred the decision to make a permanent move from Brighton to the island, bringing the business over with him. “Luckily Target fits into the type of company Jersey is eager to welcome, small footprint and high growth, able to employ islanders and to help create Jersey’s position as a centre of digital excellence.

"We actually weren’t envisaging doing a lot of business in Jersey as most of our clients are international, but then we realised there is a huge opportunity here, so we have started to work with handful of finance firms and will be focusing more on this in the future.”

Pictured: Daniel decided to move his company, Target Internet, from Brighton to Jersey after a chance meeting.

Daniel has been eager to immerse himself in island life and the Jersey community, partnering with Digital Jersey where he teaches a course on digital marketing and working with them on achieving the aims of Jersey’s digital agenda. He hopes with more of his work taking place online, he will be able to travel less and enjoy the island more.

“It really is a perfect place to have the business, I can be working from a rural cottage out in St Mary’s but still benefit from this amazing fibre connection and fast connectivity. I get to run my business seamlessly, whilst enjoying all the benefits that come from island life.” 

With Tesco, BBC, UBS and Sony amongst Target’s clients, you’d be forgiven for thinking the digital training giant would feel a little out of place in Jersey, like having taken a step back in time, but Daniel is quick to correct me on this misconception.

 “There’s the assumption that businesses in Jersey are way behind that of their UK counterparts in their use of digital platforms, but actually there’s very little difference. Yes, there are a few pockets of people in the UK who are at the top of their game, but most of the people running the businesses don’t understand digital or how best to utilise it.”

Pictured: Daniel says Jersey is the "perfect place to have the business."

Huge fans of taking surveys, Target quizzed a large cross section of the UK population on their digital skills and the results were universally terrible. “The problem is that it is now moving and changing so quickly that people can’t stay up to date. Younger generations may get it, but what you end up with is your most inexperienced staff being in charge of your brand, which is very dangerous.”

It was through these huge gaps in knowledge that Daniel saw opportunity to provide an ongoing training service that would provide business owners confidence and platform users skills. “Many of those in charge of companies want to understand how to engage with their staff and agencies on their digital marketing campaigns, and learn how to better evaluate them. You can’t achieve this without knowing the subject well yourself.”

Rather than being a one-stop-shop for increasing your digital skills, Daniel and his team offer ongoing training in digital marketing and communications, with virtual learning platforms that will teach people and gamify it all. “You can no longer go on a course and expect to have all the skills, it needs to be a lifetime commitment to learning. Which is great for us as we build ongoing relationships and it makes our business much more scalable.”

Daniel describes the service Target provides as ‘strategic training.’ They will come in and assess what a business is doing, see where the gaps lie and then focus on suitable training to plug these. Their aim is not to do the job for you, but they will be a support as you learn how to improve your skills and develop these as your business grows. 

Pictured: Daniel and his team offer ongoing training in digital marketing and communications.

The business model is so successful, it has seen the company grow by 40% year-on-year since they launched seven years ago. “We have evolved massively since we started. We used to have an office space in Brighton, but then realised there was never anyone in it! Now we have a distributor workforce with staff in Leeds, Isle of Wight, India and with a plan to recruit more in Jersey. It’s a unique set up - no office, no sales team, just a virtual platform and everything is done through word of mouth.”

So just how did a small company of seven capture the attention of big household names such as L’Oréal and Warner Bros? “We established some good partnerships early on, as a course director for the Chartered Institute of Marketing they have become our largest source of referrals, plus we are the EMA training partner for Hootsuite. These connections open doors in terms of presenting at conferences and once you catch people’s attention at these, the rest just flows from there. I seem to tick a lot of boxes for talking at conferences; author, Associate Professor, CIM Fellow.”

“There was also an element of acting bigger than we were early on, though. We were clever in that we didn’t display our team members on our website, so as to hide the size of our organisation. We did a survey, once again, to understand the public’s perception of our business and most thought we were a team of between 150-200 people.”

With the company’s sales coming from Daniel’s role as speaker, albeit indirectly, you start to understand why performance is so critical to the growth of the business. “I enjoy feeding off different audiences, it’s what keeps this job interesting. And of course, they inform my work as much as I teach them.” 

Pictured: Daniel compares his role as speaker to that of a stand-up comedian.

Target have built upon this by launching webinars and a digital marketing podcast, which is now listed in the global top 20 on iTunes. “It’s madness when you think the podcast is just me and my marketing director rambling on about digital marketing for half an hour, but it works!!” Daniel compares his role as speaker to that of a stand-up comedian, someone who has learnt how to play with narrative and use it to spark a response from any audience. For someone that had an extreme phobia of public speaking, talking is now one of the most enjoyable parts of Daniel’s role.

For all the advancement we are due to encounter in digital marketing, it is actually looking back to simpler times that is best informing Daniel’s work and the direction of the business. Stripping back objectives to the act of storytelling, which weaves together what you want your business to say and what your customers want to hear, hopefully with practical business outcomes.

Rather than looking forward to the next big social media platform or second guessing the direction the next generation will take digital, Daniel finds himself contemplating much wider questions. What’s the formula to creating narrative? Can you apply it to anything? Should we start using narrative to solve wider problems?

The digital world is changing at an exponential rate, as well as becoming more fragmented. Uncertainty has become the new norm in digital marketing and there is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach to communication. Amidst so much uncertainty, one thing that Daniel is confident on, is that the future of digital marketing can certainly take shape from a small, sunny island off the coast of France. 

This interview first appeared in Connect, which you can read here.