A Day in the Life of… Commercial Director of Digital Ethos

Luke Tobin is the Commercial Director here at Digital Ethos, a full-service SEO, website design and digital marketing agency. We provide best-in-class solutions, backed by extensive experience in creating digital marketing and web design.

We caught up with him to find out how he became a part of Digital Ethos, what a typical day looks like for him and his secret for securing business growth.

Luke’s Typical Day at Digital Ethos

Please describe your job. What do you do?

Well, where to start! At the forefront as a Commercial Director, I look at the business growth and opportunity for Digital Ethos. Over the last 2-3 years, we’ve seen a +300% year-on-year growth it’s my job to keep steering that and ensure that the team at Digital Ethos, including myself, are delivering these results time and time again.

I also recognise new opportunities for both new and existing clients, deal with sales pitches, enhance current marketing efforts that my team are delivering and work with them to deliver those projects.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

Since I started off 12 years ago as a consultant, I’ve had various roles, including managing campaigns, sales and commercial aspects. These have given me a wealth of knowledge, skills and experience that I apply to Digital Ethos every day.

I have also realised that digital marketing should be done differently with a transparent approach. This is what gets me out of bed every morning.

Tell us about a typical day for you…

Every morning, I religiously write down goals for the day in bitesize pieces. This could be anything, such as which clients I want to contact to discuss a campaign’s performance, reviews with the team or if there are any commercial strategies I want to look into. I then itemise different aspects of the day into stages, such as catching up with calls and emails first thing in the morning and plan in any meetings.

Anyone who works in an agency will know that things change drastically and there’s always things that come in last minute, which is all part of the fun. I try and keep structure to my day whilst allowing time for things to change.

What do you love about your job? What sucks?

My favourite part of my job is helping all different types of clients, sized businesses and industries. The results speak for themselves and we’re constantly improving them. I make the time to enhance the team, whether it’s through training, brainstorming or simply running weekly impact meetings, which also gives me a lot of pleasure.

I live by a quote by Mark Twain, which is true for me: “Find a job you enjoy doing and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

What do I hate? The fact that we can’t help everybody.

Marketing Goals and Tools

What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

We use lots of different tools to measure the success and performance of a campaign.

An obvious one for SEO is keyword rankings and traffic improvements. We work closely with the clients to find out where traffic is sourced from, if it’s generating conversions and if we’re making them any money, which is what it comes down to. It’s all about pound spend versus pound return.

We’re constantly looking at more ways and new ideas on how to understand our clients and their business’ mindset. We need to understand what their business goals and KPIs are for us to deliver results.

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

There are a lot of tools that I use on a daily basis. SEMrush is great for technical SEO, keyword position tracking, backlinks auditing and idea generation for gaining more organic traffic. We also use Hootsuite for social media and Google Adwords and Keyword Planner for PPC.

How did you get into marketing?

I actually fell into marketing! I had an e-commerce website and realised that I wanted to understand how to get it to market and how to make it function well, so I booked myself onto lots of training and courses. I was then approached by an agency for a job, which I took and fell in love with and worked in it ever since.

Luke’s Ambitions

Where do you see Digital Ethos in 5 years time?

Digital Ethos in 5 years time will be the number 1 place to go to for digital marketing for small to medium-sized businesses. We’re on a path to be the best in what we do and deliver services and results for our clients.

If money was no object, what marketing campaign would you like to work on next and why?

Wow, a really good question. I would love to work on something to do with renewable energy and how to lower greenhouse emissions and carbon footprint. It’s something that I’m passionate about so would love to work on a government project and how to make it more mainstream for the public.

Do you have any advice for marketers in 2019?

The digital marketing space is evolving all the time and there are more sophisticated ways to run campaigns and exciting changes to Google algorithms. It’s also all about user intent and the way they engage with the web, which is now more important than ever.

It’s all exciting, but vital to understand customers and how you can support them in delivering traffic and on-page results.