Gisele Navarro http://neomam.com 4m 1,063 #companyspotlight
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
Featured Company: Neomam
Who started NeoMam Studios?
NeoMam Studios was founded by Danny Ashton in 2011.
Why did you start Neomam Studios?
We talked about it on our About Us page so I’ll paraphrase from there:
Danny worked at a big media agency for a few years before deciding to quit his job and go travelling for 6 months. When he returned, he realised he didn’t want to go back into the workforce for yet another stressful office job and that’s when the idea of NeoMam started growing inside of his head.
Many of us come from the marketing agency work so we’ve been working with clients for many years. The idea that Danny presented is that of a different kind of agency with the main goal of offering a clear service with clear, measurable results. That’s why we are specialised and the main reason why we offer a guarantee to our clients that they will get the results we said we would achieve with their campaigns – otherwise, we’ll do another campaign until we hit the guarantee.
What types of companies use Neomam and why?
We work with companies based in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, and the one element that ties all of our clients together is that they all rely heavily on search traffic to do business. They all have an in-house SEO team that works on the technical side of search engine optimisation, and NeoMam is their digital PR/link building arm.
It’s quite difficult to generate organic links with content, particularly if you’re also focusing on technical elements of a website and other digital marketing practices. Our agency is here to cover that one element of the online marketing puzzle, so that our clients can focus on what they do best.
What is the company culture like at NeoMam Studios?
We went through many ups and downs at NeoMam in terms of company culture. We’ve actually written a post on our blog about how we failed and what we did to fix the mess we were left with: http://neomam.com/blog/how-we-failed-at-company-culture-and-how-we-fixed-it/
Nowadays our culture is heavily defined by two things: our vision and our core values. We make use of our core values to hire, train and fire team members; and our vision is there to help us establish clear goals for everyone.
The most important elements of who we are as individuals and as a team are:
- We just say it
Whatever is in our minds, we put it on the table. Whether we are unhappy, worried or we just simply have an idea, we open our mouths and say it. This is very important to help us avoid making up stories in our heads: we don’t let issues fester. - We help each other
We’re a small team and everyone has a key role to fill in, which will impact on the next person’s role. Helping each other is part of the deal, and so is asking for help.
- There’s always a solution
We don’t stop when things get hard. We are happy with making mistakes because we all know that giving something a go (even if it’s hard) is better than doing nothing about it.
- Decision = disagreement + commitment
Everyone gets a chance to have their say to help make sure we do the best work we can. When a decision is made everyone gets behind it 100%, even if it isn’t what you would choose to do. This is a very important element of who we are and we couldn’t do it without the three values above.
What types of infographics do you design?
We’ve identified 9 types of infographics that get the best results for our clients: http://neomam.com/blog/types-of-infographics/ and for a long time we used to think of infographics through that lens.
Nowadays, the infographic format is just one type of content we work with so we’re always breaking our own rules in terms of how we work with them.
The one thing all of our infographics have in common is that they offer practical value for the reader. Our main goal is to offer not only data/stats but also practical advice so that once you’ve finished reading the entire thing, you could probably go back to what you were doing and start applying your learnings right away.
How do you charge for your infographics?
We don’t offer infographic design only services anymore. It was a decision we made at the beginning of this year and our founder has written about it here: http://neomam.com/blog/infographic-design/
An infographic without a goal is just a pretty image. The way we work and price our services is based on the tangible results we will get for our client with the content we produce and promote – that is the media and blog features.
Our pricing is based on a guarantee system. We have different options but they are all based on the minimum number of media coverage pieces we will work towards achieving with the content.
Is Neomam profitable?
Yes, but it didn’t used to be! Here are some of the mistakes we made that ended up in bad financial decisions: http://neomam.com/blog/8-mistakes-that-we-learned-from-in-2015/
As most small businesses, we expanded too quickly too soon. Within a period of a 18 months we moved offices, we hired lots of people and we increased our costs massively because the business was doing well. But we weren’t forecasting our sales and we weren’t budgeting accordingly so we hit rock bottom 3 years ago and we had to go through layoffs and everything that comes with it.
Two books saved our business: The Great Game of Business and Traction.
What advice do you have for infographic creators?
Pick one goal for your infographic and stick to it.
If you’re trying to produce content that will get shared on social media, drive traffic to a site, convert leads, increase brand awareness and also get links – you’ll end up with a Frankenstein that achieves none of those objectives.
One goal, one desired outcome.
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