Business Plus interview with Martin Casey

Recently Martin sat down with Business Plus and chatted about all things Arekibo including digital transformation and client work. Have a read of the interview below. Founded in 2002, Arekibo is one of Ireland’s largest independent agencies. Specialities include digital consultancy, content creation, digital marketing and user experience design.

ACTIVITY

Our objective is to become our clients’ digital partner and we are committed and passionate about this. We have longstanding relationships with existing clients, where we are continuing to support the deployment and execution of their digital strategy. This includes the rollout of their digital strategy, new product development, technology enhancements, and data and analytics projects. New client business has similar ingredients, with a significant digital and operational strategy focus.

RESEARCH

Talking to your customers before you commence developing a new product seems like the obvious place to start, however, this isn’t always the case. Our product strategy and research services help our clients to engage with their customers to understand what they think of their new product idea or proposition well in advance of commencing design and build. The consultation between a business and their customer is vital and quickly puts the product strategy and its feature set into perspective. Your customer has a valuable point a view – neglecting this will prove to be very expensive and will also negatively impact your business. Our emphasis on customer research before and during product development is to ensure that a product is designed and built for your customers. Competition is only one search away, and you can bet they are talking to their customers and forensically analysing the data to make their products and user experience better.

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

If you don’t have boardroom buy-in, you are not undertaking a transformation programme. If you’re not sure where to begin, consider what your customer needs from digital – what do you need to transform for them? Transformation must be sustainable and therefore needs to be adequately resourced, funded and continually supported by your executive team.

CLIENT WORK

We are fortunate to be working with clients who are passionate and committed to digital to deliver better services and experiences to their customers and staff. Our team are invested in ensuring that from a technology perspective we can streamline and enhance your capabilities in a scalable and secure manner. Without these technology solutions, our clients won’t be able to build the next phase of their business strategy. We deliver technology solutions that need to enable our clients to quickly adapt to their market and customer need. As a result, projects are technically complex and need to be carefully planned to ensure that the integrations between existing and new technology is perfect. The team enjoy these challenges and are very good at what they do. This makes delivering successful projects very satisfying for the team and most importantly our clients and their teams.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media can become a bottomless pit that eats time and money and, for many, delivers very few results. Social definitely has its place in your digital strategy but you need to be very clear on what you want to get out of the various channels. Look at your competition and cross-industry peers to see what they do, and take inspiration from it. Be honest about your ability to create content. Manage and resource your social channels, and then start small and sustain and measure your progress.