In Conversation With: Lorna Tiffany, Marketing Director

To gain a deeper understanding into how we work here at Dream Big Digital, I will be interviewing each member of the team, asking them a series of questions to explore their creative process and get a behind-the-scenes look at their approach when working with clients. To kick things off, I sat down with Marketing Director, Lorna Tiffany, who shared her experiences, insights and tips. We discussed topics such as moving from client side to agency side, the value of Shopify for an ecommerce brand and her strategy when approaching a marketing campaign.

What’s your current role and what does a typical day look like for you?

Hi, I’m Lorna and I’m co-owner and Marketing Director at Dream Big Digital!

A typical work day for me varies from day to day, sometimes I work from home and sometimes I work from our office in Leeds City Centre. If it’s an office day, work starts with coffee (always from Kapow Coffee on The Calls) and then checking my emails, and planning my day.

I always start by reviewing the day's tasks, meetings, and what needs to be done that day. I’m very methodical and like to work through a list, ticking things off as I go. I often plan my diary with the projects I need to do that week, though these do move around depending on whether I’m feeling more creative or need a more monotonous job!

What drew you to agency work specifically?

This is a really weird answer, but I never wanted to work at an agency, let alone run one! It was just not in the plan. And then 2020 happened, and as for many people, Lockdown changed everything. My husband Daniel started Dream Big Digital in 2019, and then in the thick of Covid, he found his clients wanted marketing support, and it just seemed like a no-brainer to make the leap.

In all honesty, I was frustrated working client-side, especially with how long it took to make changes and move things forward, and the move just seemed like an opportunity to develop myself and learn a load more skills. And the truth? I loved it from day one. I never thought I’d want to work from home, and now a day at home alone is my favourite way of working. It’s not just about being your own boss (which is amazing), but working with multiple clients keeps the work varied, exciting and fast paced, which suits me.

How has your role evolved since you started?

It’s changed a lot since I started! At first, we had clients who were interested in all areas of marketing, but as we were essentially starting from scratch in many ways in terms of our offering, I wanted to focus on areas of marketing that I enjoyed and was passionate about. A lot of my time was spent researching what we wanted to offer our clients and how we wanted to do it. In previous roles I worked closely with advertising agencies and I understood how these things worked along with the reporting side of things, but setting up campaigns was all new for me. It made sense for that to be my main area of focus, working on marketing that supported driving sales to the websites we'd already built or improved.

I was going to say that from Day One, that's what I was doing, but in fact on Day One, we went to the pub! Day Two is when the work began and I really started to throw myself in at the deep end. I did my Google certifications to make sure I was accredited, and I did loads of learning, lots of research. A lot of my time in lockdown was spent cramming in as much knowledge as possible to offer our clients the best possible service.

The first kind of clients that I worked with were clients that Daniel had already acquired; he'd done their website design and development work, and now they needed help with their marketing. It was really good because Daniel had already done a lot of the hard work in terms of getting to know the client. He could pass all that knowledge on to me and then I started to support them in their marketing. I remember my first project really well because it was in lockdown and I had to go to the client's office and that was like a really exciting day trip out. It was to teach the team some best practices for organic social media, which I have been involved in since pretty much the beginning of my career in marketing.

Since then things have really taken off for me in terms of our marketing clients, and I support with email marketing, strategy, online advertising, social media (and so much more!) and I've now on-boarded some clients who only work with us for marketing.

Then I took nine months off when I had my little boy. That was brilliant timing in my personal life, but maybe not so great professionally because things had just started building up, but with kids there's never the 'perfect time'. When I came back to work, Daniel and the team had all been working hard to nurture client relationships, and many of them were ready for some marketing work. Almost straightaway, one of the big things I took on, which we didn't offer before, was email marketing, as some clients had expressed a lot of interest in this. We partnered up with Klaviyo: I did my Klaviyo accreditations and spent a lot of time on their partner portal learning their ways of doing things, especially when it comes to flows, as we instantly saw the value in this for our clients.

We then moved into more organic social media content, including content creation within our team, which has been a big step for us. We can offer TikTok content, which a lot of our clients are asking for now. In the last couple of months, we've taken on Evie! Evie's working as Marketing and Merchandising Assistant, so we can do a lot more in terms of Shopify collabs, working with gifting, and working more with social media, as well as ensuring our client's sites are fully merchandised. I'd say the aim for the next six months, in terms of my role, is for me to focus more on the marketing strategy. Me being me, though, I love to get stuck in, so I'll still be heavily involved in everything, but it means that I can focus more on that overarching strategy rather than doing all the day-to-day work. I don't think I'll ever take a step back from Google ads and Meta ads because I love doing that and creating all the reporting. But, yeah, my role has changed a lot; I’ve grown as the role has grown!

What would be your biggest piece of advice for anyone using Shopify?

Get to grips with Shopify and embrace it because it’s just amazing; I love Shopify. I can't express enough how brilliant a tool it is. I've worked in places where if you wanted to set up a new collection of 30 products, it would take two weeks, and you'd have to write a brief and then pass it to a department for them to look at, and then you'd get it, and it wouldn't be right. The freedom you have with Shopify to be able to go in yourself and easily create a collection that can be live in 30 seconds is extraordinary. I think it's such a good tool to use, and then you can use that collection specifically for an email or social media campaigns or anything that you need. I’d say learn how to use it and make the most of it.

Obviously, for the more advanced things you do need Dev support but in terms of the day-to-day management and merchandising, like reordering products so it's easier for your customers to find the products you're talking about on email or in a homepage hero is just so easy. I think that for the basic day-to-day changes, teach yourself, get comfortable using it and then take advantage of how easy it is; it’s a godsend!

How does working for an agency differ from in-house marketing?

I think that on the agency side you get all the variety, which is brilliant. I love to be busy and to be working on different things every day. Whereas, in-house you're often working with the same brands day in and day out, which can be really good as you get close to their brand and you kind of become a brand ambassador as you know it inside out. But it’s really nice to be agency-side and see loads of different clients and kind of work on a different level. Things can change really quickly, which I do like. One of the things that I do find sometimes is I have to remind myself that I am the agency and not the client, in terms of when you want to go above and beyond, sometimes there’s a line, and you have to leave it with the client. At first, I did find this quite difficult because I'm a perfectionist. But obviously the client knows the brand like no one else and you can learn loads from them. Having regular conversations with clients is key, and then you can take your agency knowledge and knowledge from other brands, and apply that to multiple clients.

I never thought that agency life would be for me; I think I was put off by the thought that it was super stressful and really long hours, but actually in reality, it's not like that at Dream Big Digital; that's not the kind of culture we're trying to grow. It’s a very nice environment here with a good work-life balance. We’re more of a chilled agency. As long as you get the work done, we have that flexible work-life balance, because Daniel and I truly believe it's important to ensure your team are happy in their work too.

What marketing channels tend to work the best for your Shopify clients?

A lot of our clients see success with Google advertising. In terms of their campaigns we do, we work across Search & Performance Max campaigns and then in some cases we also work with Bidnamic, which is a machine learning tool for feed optimisations. We’ll work with them in collaboration for those clients who have really big catalogues, with thousands of skews as we find that this way of working usually is most successful. I think in terms of all varieties of clients, Google advertising is a massive channel that cannot be ignored. I have a really good relationship with some of our clients' Google Account Managers who I’ll speak to every couple of weeks. They can help us get on various different Betas and help us when we need any assistance.

With one of our clients we’re also testing branching into Microsoft Bing advertising. I think for the right demographic, this could be really interesting. I'm really excited to see where that's going to take us. We're working with Diginius on that one, who are a Microsoft Partner and I'm excited to see how our test goes. Like I said, it's the right kind of demographic; it feels like there could be some real good synergies. At the end of the day, it's mostly about whether their Return on Advertising spend is positive or negative and then how this compares to Google ads.

How do you help Shopify brands grow through marketing on emails/social media?

For each client we take a unique approach and sit down with them to go through the basics of what they're after and what channels they want us to manage for them. When it comes to emails, for some clients we'll just set up the automated flows for them. In Klaviyo, we’ll set up the welcome flow, abandoned basket flow, things like that, and they run in the background all the time, and we'll make sure that these are set up to our best practices based on our learnings and Klaviyo's recommedations. They can tick away in the background, generating revenue for the client and be updated seasonally if necessary. For some of our clients, we run their full email strategy. We'll plan a strategy to align with their seasonal plan, and then we’ll brief, design, build and send the emails, and then we also do monthly reporting. We can offer different services for clients, depending on their budget and their internal teams. It's kind of similar with the social media side too. For some of our clients, we take what they do on organic social media and apply this to ads, or tailor it to ads, or work together to come up with content ideas. For some of our clients, again, we own the whole organic social media space for them. We come up with the monthly strategy, create the content, and work with influencers and customers as well to gather user generated content.

We’re very big on reporting too; I think it's so important. Not just reporting on the emails and social media themselves, but reporting on the whole marketing mix in terms of making sure the client knows where the orders are coming from, where the website traffic's coming from, who's influenced the orders, things like that. I'm a big fan of looking at reports. We set these up bespoke for a lot of our clients, reporting on the exact things that they want to see in one document, so they don't have to go to multiple places and sift through multiple platforms to get the information they need.

What is your process for planning a marketing campaign with your clients?

The starting point is taking a brief from the client; either sitting down with them or having a Zoom call and finding out exactly what they want, understanding their KPIs and what success looks like for them. Then we'll go away as a team and think of some different options, do some brainstorming and then make a proposal back to them, which hopefully they'll be happy with, or make some small amendments, and then we take it from there.

For some of our clients, we offer them a whole marketing solution. So we’ll still do that process, then we'll come to the client further down the project to seek their feedback, because they're happy for us to take care of everything, which is great. So ultimately, there are a few different ways of doing it, but normally it would always start with the brief from the client and really trying to understand what they want and what they want to achieve.

Any advice for businesses out there, wanting to make their marketing dreams a reality?

Well, I think I'm going to have to give a cheesy answer of “get in touch with us, we would love to work together!”

On a serious note, I think in this day and age, in many ways it's never been easier to start and grow a business; more and more people are doing it. I think that people should be inspired by that, and in a lot of ways, it's good to just go for it. A lot of the brands that we've seen have successes launch quickly, fail even quicker, get back up, make some changes, learn from this, then really go for it. Especially if it’s a product brand, you can spend years trying to get the perfect product, and during that time, you're missing out on all these learning opportunities. A lot of the tools people use these days, whether it's selling on TikTok or doing Meta advertising, are more accessible than they've ever been. Google Ads, especially Performance Max campaigns put a lot more control in the brand owner's hands for them to make a really good start, get out there and have a try at advertising themselves, without having to spend weeks setting up campaigns.

When start-ups and new businesses see success and they take learnings from that, and the business starts to grow, that's the right time to get in touch with someone like us to help take the business to the next level. We love getting involved, and we love hearing about new businesses. I love working with all of our clients to help them achieve success - success for a client is also a success for us. There's no better time than Black Friday when we're watching the charts go up and up and up for our clients, knowing that we've worked together to help them achieve that. So overall, my advice is make a start. If these are your dreams, if this is what you want to do, then go for it and learn from there.

And finally, what’s the best thing about working in Leeds?

100% going out for lunch! My favourite place, hands down is Things in Bread. You just can't beat it. I love where we are in Leeds and being able to walk straight into the city centre. From our offices we’re also by the river so it’s a really nice spot - especially in the summer.