Digital Marketing for All: Seek Social, an Interview with CEO Paula Braiden

Today’s digital marketplace is crowded, and if you are a small business trying to find your feet online, it might feel overwhelming at the outset. Furthermore, if you are a business owner who wants to make your business’ presence felt online, digital marketing may well be hard to understand. Digital marketing agencies generally quote high prices and are not affordable for most businesses when they are first starting out. So, what do you do? Seek Social – a digital marketing company based in Bury, Greater Manchester – is here to help.

Seek Social is a small company that delivers big services. It was established by a husband and wife team who dared to make the transition from their corporate lives to help small businesses and traders come online. The company provides premium services that work, and for a cost that is fair.

The company has become one of the leaders in the digital marketing space in a very short span of time, with a particular emphasis on social marketing. Seek Social is already off to a flying start in 2021, being nominated for two awards and, of course, having been featured in our magazine already this year. We interviewed Paula Braiden, CEO of Seek Social, to learn more about what distinguishes her company in this space. Here are the key excerpts from the interview:

Marketing is more than just a method of promoting a brand. Do you help your clients develop a strategic vision about leveraging various marketing opportunities?

Yes, we do. We help all our clients look at the bigger picture when it comes to digital marketing, and align all their marketing channels so that they work in a cohesive manner to help the client achieve digital marketing success.

Q. Explain your services in brief.

This is always a very challenging question to answer because we actually offer a lot more than most digital marketing agencies. Back in 2015, we built Seek Social to deliver the ‘standard’ digital marketing services, which are Graphic Design, Web and App Design, Content Creation, Social Media Management, Search Engine Optimization, and Online Paid Ads. As the company grew, we noticed that our clients would often ask for one or two extra services that did not fall within our core offering. However, we knew that these extra services were something we could provide, and so we added them to our standard range of services. So now, in addition to the original core offering we mentioned above, Seek Social clients can also take advantage of our Professional Database Management, our Advanced Lead Generation, and our range of Data Services too.

Q. Business owners who try to compete in this highly competitive market usually find themselves facing a dilemma with their digital marketing strategy. How do you help them find the right tool that they can use and focus on?

We will sound very cliché by saying this, but there really is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to digital marketing. Even two companies who offer the exact same product may well need different marketing approaches based on their own brand goals and identities.

This is why for our clients and ourselves, everything starts with data. Being able to identify what is actually happening and compare that to what you want to be happening, is the first step to finding the right tools to use or the right goals to target. Depending on what the data tells us, the Seek Social team can then propose different strategies and platforms to ensure our clients get the results they want.

That’s the way we always try to do it, at least - but the pandemic has brought forth its own challenges, and most businesses are reshaping their services to meet the ‘the new normal’ of doing business. Seek Social is no different, but I am pleased to say that I think we adapted really well and we are still getting great results for all our clients.

Q. How do you manage to understand their operational culture and marketing needs before strategizing a marketing plan?

We have a very thorough and well-defined onboarding process for our new clients. We go through a lot with them, making sure that our team understands all aspects of their brand identity and business goals.

Understanding our clients is an on-going process, though. We meet with our clients regularly, we always have open communication channels and we always ask to be informed about any changes to their business, products or services, so that we can adapt what we are doing as and when needed too.

However, for Seek Social, it’s about more than just understanding the client’s business. Our approach calls for that next level of trust and knowledge that allows us to build strong relationships with our clients and really work together as partners.

Q. Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your clients?

This is one of the main challenges faced in the Digital Marketing industry – and it’s a challenge faced by agencies and freelancers alike. For every quality service provider operating today, there’s somebody else out there who (while they may have the best of intentions) doesn’t have the combined skills and knowledge to deliver on their promises. Clients who have had a bad first experience with such providers can have very little faith in digital marketing in general as a result, and it may well be really hard even for a reputable provider to change this opinion, at least at first.

We have dealt with clients who have been stung in the past, and we have changed their views over time because we have been able to deliver what we promised. Getting results is, therefore, part of what helps us build good relationships with clients - but at Seek Social, it is also about transparency, honesty and a genuine desire to do what’s best for their business.

Q. What does the future hold for Seek Social and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

We have a lot of plans for 2021 and beyond. Our goals are to expand our team and create more opportunities for people – particularly young people looking to get into the digital marketing industry. To this end, we are working with further education facilities both locally and abroad to establish how Seek Social can best help provide experience to those who need it. We are also developing new ways of offering our existing services to our clients - ways that we feel might be a better fit for certain business’ needs. We can’t give you all the details on that right now, but it is planned to launch in Q2 of 2021, so watch this space!

“We help all our clients look at the bigger picture when it comes to digital marketing and align all their marketing channels so that they work in a cohesive manner to help the client achieve digital marketing success.”