Timothy Armoo, is the 25-year-old CEO and co-founder of Fanbytes, a marketing agency that uses social media to help brands connect with new audiences. He launched the UK’s first TikTok influencer house and was named by the Evening Standard as one of the most influential people in marketing and advertising. Here he answers our questions about the future of advertising in the latest of our Marketing Maestro series.This article was produced in association with Lead Monitor, New Statesman media group’s digital marketing solution.
What media channels do you see as most important and best value when it comes to marketing spend and activity?
It completely depends on your objective and the metrics you’re looking to boost. For example, if you’re trying to drive UDC (user-distributed-content) then TikTok is great, if you’re talking about trying to drive brand engagement and awareness then Snapchat is a good vehicle. Then you have platforms like LinkedIn which are really useful for engaging with a b2b audience.
Personally, I invested time in developing a strong LinkedIn profile to improve my professional network and it’s made a real, tangible impact on our business – one of the more recent outcomes was being featured on LinkedIn’s 2020 list of Top Voices. When I first started taking LinkedIn seriously, the goal was to dispel many of the myths that marketers have been told about reaching Gen Z. Fast forward, it’s become an avenue to let people know about leadership, marketing and even topics like racism.
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How important to your brand is the news media (both B2B and B2C)?
We recognise the value of having a presence in both B2B and B2C media. It’s very important because obviously, the bottom line is if people don’t hear about your business, they can’t transact with your business.
Positive coverage in the news media is a brilliant way to spread the word about your brand to new audiences and we at Fanbytes are always looking to maximise our presence in the press through proactive PR – for us, this means monitoring the news cycle for relevant comment opportunities and regularly approaching journalists to let them know about any interesting or innovative projects that we have in the pipeline.
What for you is the key to any successful marketing campaign – what actually makes a ‘good lead’?
For a marketing campaign to be classified as successful we need to be targeting the right audience in the right location at the right time.
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We want to see a real-world impact and the campaigns I’m proudest of are the ones we’ve done with music artists who are just on the cusp of becoming a household name, and our campaigns then end up supercharging their growth.
For us, a good lead is someone who we can build a long-term relationship with and grow with. We are always looking to work with clients where we can make a real tangible impact on their brand. Rather than just focusing on a one time hit, the goal is to create a sustained long-term impression.
How important is technology in modern marketing?
Technology plays a crucial role in modern marketing and for Fanbytes it’s a role that cannot be understated – it’s at the heart of everything we do.
From building algorithms to help us identify rising social media stars, to harnessing social media platforms as a means to get eyes on something – we are always looking to take advantage of new technology. Our efforts were recently recognised when we took home the Social Media Rising Star at the Drum Awards 2020!
We have grown with the times and have prospered by embracing new technology. We pivoted our service offering to take advantage of the TikTok boom and in April, we launched Bytehouse – a content creative TikTok house in which leading British influencers cohabited and showed off their talents under the gaze of a watching online audience.
It was the first of its kind in the UK and the resulting content generated has now attracted over 100m views and reached over 17m fans.
What’s been your proudest achievement in your current role?
Building the company to a size of over 50 people in just three years is a great source of pride, but for us, our proudest achievement is the impact we as a company are making. After BLM we decided to launch the Fanbytes Fund which is funding and delivering marketing campaigns for black-owned businesses to help kickstart the next generation of black business leaders.
2020 was an insane year for the Fanbytes team, launching new business models, product collaborations and becoming THE go-to Gen Z media group for the world’s largest brands.
[Sign up here to receive Press Gazette’s Marketing Matters email every other week]What are the biggest pain points in a marketing campaign?
Getting brands to understand that the conventional way of marketing isn’t the only way of doing things.
Sometimes we need to help brands ‘unlearn’ behaviour as we find that some marketers are hesitant to deviate from a uniform approach to social media. Brands incorrectly assume that if one style of marketing campaign seems to be making an impact on one social media platform, then the same content should be replicated across all platforms.
Each platform has its own style and format. The brand message should be tailored to the platform – not the other way round.
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