March 2007 – Savoy London. With sweaty palms, we stood in front of the UK’s largest businesses eagerly looking at us to tell them how to do this crazy thing called ‘Digital Marketing’. How ever did two brothers from sunny Stoke on Trent get here? But we need not have worried…
Ian Hammersley – Director smARTebusiness
“June 2000 – I landed my first customer and he wanted to sell more Fender Socks! I wasn’t quite sure what a Fender Sock was but I was pretty sure the Internet was the way to go. So up went my first online shop. It looked good but would it sell anything?
A month later Alan, Mr Fender Socks, rang and said that things were starting to hot up. Not only were the orders flooding in, but he had to become VAT registered because he was turning over so much money.
From this first customer I got an inkling of the power of the Internet and how when combined with what I knew about direct response marketing, it could not only add revenue to the bottom line, but it could change the whole business model.
Our first customer and the interest in how digital technologies, like the Internet, can be used to change a business’s fortunes started to grow.”
As an aside ‘Mr Fender Socks’ has now sold his business and retired to Spain.
Mark Hammersley – Director smARTebusiness
“June 2001 – Squashed in my IBM cubicle, staring at my Thinkpad I was trying to sell £5M worth of software upgrades to customers that hated it. I had no idea which customers were likely to buy and my sales training flipped over anything resembling lead generation. It was an interesting problem especially as I had applied to become a programmer and ended up in sales. It was my first job but already the passion for marketing and technology was born.
A couple of years later I was lying in volcanic stream Kerosene Creek mid New Zealand. Truly away from it all as my Nokia buzzed under a fern on the bank. My mind raced at the possibility of the text. ‘Amazing IM Promo’ is revealed in the inbox window. I see the sender and I know why he messaged me on holiday.
I had met with a good friend for dinner three weeks previously. He worked in the marketing industry at a similar company. After some dim sum and a Peking duck, I suddenly knew what was wrong with everyone and everything at this exhausted guy’s company, and why he was a button’s click away from resignation. On the menu’s blank side I jotted down three digital marketing ideas to try before he quit. I left my puzzled friend and forgot about it as I prepared to go on holiday.
With a parting shot he tried my advice, and was ‘shocked’ at the results. The organisation promoted him and insisted everyone else in the company try to emulate what he was doing.
I shared what I had learned with my brother Ian, who was a branding/marketing agency director. This evidence was enough to corroborate what he already knew and he soon turned his primary focus to the power of digital marketing and what it could do for his clients.
Soon after, I joined the company and we launched smARTebusiness.”