This week we feature Alex Addae-Brobbey, Founder of By Creative. At BY Creative they  create beautifully animated websites, that encourage their visitors, to find out more about their products and services. They are a small combust team of multi disciplined animators, designers and developers with a huge passion for interactive web media.

In this interview, you can read more about his work, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location: We are located in Brixton, South London, England.

Your favorite gadget: Apple Watch (just for testing purposes), Wacom Intous Pad 3,  Micky’s portable power conversion pack (which is great for charging a whole range of devices in the office)

You start your day with: Reflection to myself at 5 am, 15 mins run 15 random exercises. Visualising tasks of the day.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Always asking or finding out when something is required and then building a layer of time around that ‘thing’ so that you are always in control of delivering it . Also one key thing that we all do at the studio, is put things in writing. Whether that be on Trello, Freedcamp, Slack or Freedcamp.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Campaign Live, The Hubspot Blog https://blog.hubspot.com/, Emergency Awesome Vlog (did I mention that we are comic book fans)?

A picture of your workstation or the view outside your window if that inspires you:

Describe an average day at BY Creative?

The ideas whiteboard. That’s where the day lives. This is a sacred place in our studio. Occupied with a lot and creative ideas (from animation to illustration to an idea for a new UI build) You name it, it’s likely to be sitting here.

As a Founder what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

Me personally? I am obsessed with Trello and Trello Boards for all round tasks in and out of the office. Whether that be projects/campaigns in progress, future campaigns. I find this tool really helps with eliminating bottlenecks on projects that may be running over schedule. 

I am also a huge fan of Slack, however these days we tend to use that as a communication and task completion tool with some of our Tier 1 clients.If our Web Development team ever want me to oversee or test something I will converse with them over a bunch of tickets on Freedcamp, which is a very agile and effective tool.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing/inbound, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3-5 tools you use?

Our first tool has to be Hootsuite. That is our central hub for all things social media and analytical engagement. We also use Hootsuite to monitor streams of activity on campaigns running on Instagram through to customer competitions. 

Hubspot is also a team favourite for us because it allows us to integrate our sales and marketing funnels at the same time.

This way, we can provide existing and prospective customers a personal service on boarding experience quickly and efficiently.

Lastly I would say Capsule is a great CRM tool because it keeps our sales and marketing team on the pulse in terms of email marketing feedback/responses.

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

We really like to engage with each and every one of our customers online. We are always trying to find out what they like the most about the creative services that we provide them, followed by what they would like more of from us.

Feedback is key to our business growth and development, as a creative marketing agency and that is why we closely monitor our feedback loops, ensuring that we respond to queries and requests within 24 hours.

The same methodology is also applied to our social media engagement. Infact its even quicker than 24 hours….more like 5-10 minutes with regards to comment responses and social media post engagements. We act as our own Brand Ambassadors and everyone at the agency is involved in that (regardless of job role/title).

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

This year in 2018 we have been focusing more on building bespoke data capture forms and split testing them. It is a process still in its infancy at BY Creative and one that we are looking to develop further this year.

Obviously with the arrival of GDPR we are now focused on building simpler more efficient opt in processes and this is another why we have been working closely with Hubspot Inbound Marketing team to get the best out of this process.

Is there any advice you'd like to give to budding marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

I would say perhaps setting 5 weekly tasks/marketing objectives that are broken down into 5 bite sized chunks so that they can be achieved successfully. Stack and log those taaks/objectives into a planning tool such as Trello, and monitor how they are going at the end of each day. If things aren't going to plan or other projects have arisen, simply reorder the task stack in order of priority or preference, so that you know you will remain on the ball or on schedule for each task.

How do teams at BY Creative have fun at work/ make work fun?

We read loads of comic books and watch a lot of movies. We also play a variety of Video Games. The latter helps us a lot when it comes to visual communications and idea generation. In our downtime we also watch animated tv series (DC Animated universe currently in session at the studio). We’ve also just started to catch up on Marvel’s Luke Cage tv series.

A big thanks to Alex for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out By Creative.

‍

Managing marketing projects shouldn’t be chaotic —Try Brightpod for free and start focusing on what matters.