Digital marketing for business with Jacques Du Bruyn

Image supplied: Jacques de Bruyn, MD at Flume

We spoke to Jacques Du Bruyn, the digital marketing and PR MD at Flume, about digital marketing and transformation in business - and why it is important.

“South African digital agencies are noticing an upswing in the amount of international business knocking at the door for digital marketing services, especially development work. This is exciting and certainly something that South Africans should work collectively to embrace to build our industry together and ultimately create jobs locally”, said Du Bruyn.

On some advice for businesses going through digital transformation, how you can make people aware of your brand effectively, and the challenges digital marketing can assist with, Du Bruyn has some nuggets of wisdom to share…

Tell us a bit more about your work and what your day-to-day looks like

The definition of work has changed for me personally over the years. When Flume was a small agency, work was defined by how many social media posts I put live on any given day. Today as a medium-to-large sized agency work is defined as leadership.

About how I contribute to the growth of my staff, the agency and our clients. Day-to-day is therefore largely spent investing in people, investing time into meeting with clients and selling Flume’s services to potential new clients.

How did you end up on this career path?

My grandfather worked in advertising and I always knew that it was something I wanted to do.

As a young boy, I’d always been fascinated by the ads in a print magazine. I even created my own. I didn’t study digital marketing per se at university, but platforms and technology have always intrigued me and it, therefore, seemed the obvious route to combine my love for marketing with technology.

What is the best method to use when making people aware of your brand?

Frequency. The more people see your brand the more it’ll be top-of-mind. It’s a fairly simple concept yet we as marketers tend to overcomplicate it and overthink it.

Let’s talk a bit about digital marketing - what do you think it has to offer for businesses?

There’s so much that digital marketing can offer businesses. First and foremost it lowers the barriers of entry.

A small business can enjoy success by marketing online, not only big brands and spenders. The other two compelling items are the ability to target quite specifically a specific target market and the ability to gather and understand data in order to make smarter decisions, faster.

What challenges can digital marketing help businesses overcome?

Digital marketing can help businesses overcome the challenge of wastage. Traditional media has a degree of wastage in that we cannot guarantee that only the intended audience will engage with the communication.

Whereas with digital marketing we can quite specifically target the audience that we intend to reach and engage with the message, and not that, we can keep refining the targeting criteria daily.

What do you predict for 2022, in terms of digital marketing and how digital marketers work?

The trend we’ve noticed as an agency is that businesses are far more interested in integrating their digital marketing efforts than trying to focus on single-channel tactics. There was a time when the channel was the hero; brands scuttled to be on social media.

However, there is a growing awareness that integrating all digital channels, platforms and technologies is what ultimately drives success online. This will inevitably change the way marketers work in that they will have to start thinking more laterally about digital technologies.

What advice would you give to anybody who is in the process of digital transformation?

First, take a step back and understand the business readiness. Digital is necessary but businesses aren’t always ready to transform.

Employees need to be ready to handle the new processes and systems that arise from a digital process. For instance; building e-commerce probably makes sense for a B2C business but if the employees aren't trained to handle the new processes that arise from digitising a returns process then it can do more harm than good.