Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. This week, we’re talking with Ian Fong, Matthew Forzan and Michael Laps, co-founders at Yoghurt Digital.
In 128 words or less, explain your business idea
Yoghurt Digital is a digital marketing agency that specialises in search and user experience. Being a performance agency, we’re not just interested in driving website traffic but also turning that visibility into measurable revenue growth.
Data doesn’t lie. When you look at digital marketing campaigns through a data lens, it’s black and white. What sets our agency apart is that we use data and not opinions to drive strategies. By using data as our compass, we don’t just accept things are working at face value. We work tirelessly to understand the whys and hows so that we can amplify results for our clients.
What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?
Our agency’s growth has come primarily off the back of word-of-mouth and referrals. The digital community in Australia is close-knit, so once you start doing good work, word travels.
As an agency, one of our core values is staying ahead of the curve. This value has enabled us to be recognised as thought leaders in the Australian digital space. We’ve had articles published in all of the major Australian marketing websites, spoken at major conferences around Australia and won various prestigious awards.
How do you differentiate your business from your competitors?
We have an obsession with understanding consumer behaviour. Because our role as an agency is to drive growth for our clients, we have a deep need to understand who our client’s customers are and what makes them tick.
We want to know everything about them. How do they shop? What fuels their decisions? What are their pain points? What other brands resonate with them? What channels do they use? How do they feel about the website? What language do they use? Everything.
The more we understand these behaviours and habits, the more comprehensive and effective our strategies become. This hunger for data and our ability to synthesise it into a targeted strategy is what separates our agency from many of our competitors.
What’s the biggest challenge facing your business?
Finding good talent. Honestly, it’s a huge issue in Australia. There’s a lack of experienced, knowledgeable and affordable talent in Australia’s digital industry. At Yoghurt Digital, it becomes even more complicated for us as we prize culture fit just as high as we value skill set.
For us, it’s not enough to just have the skill set to execute the work. Synergy is a big part of who we are and we look for candidates who are able to work as part of a broader team, build strong relationships and add to the agency’s lively culture (no pun intended).
What one phone, tablet or PC application could you not live without?
Google Maps. With the amount of travel we do and the amount of cities we visit, it’s
hard to imagine surviving without it!
What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?
When we first started the business and needed to take a few risks, somebody reminded us of the old quote, “A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what a ship was built for”.
It was a brilliant reminder that when you’re running a business, you need to be prepared to take risks and make bold moves in order to drive growth. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint hearted and you need to be prepared to take risks.
Hearing that quote was a massive wake up call and lit a fire underneath us to really extend ourselves far beyond our comfort zones in order to get to where we want to be.
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