Specialists in connecting brands with a youth audience
rocket are a marketing and content company that helps brands and organizations better understand and engage audiences of youth, children and families. As specialists in addressing this target group, they now have more than 12 years of experience in this field.
James takes some time to speak to Business Matters.
What is the main problem you solve for your customers?
We use social media, influencer marketing, media partnerships and content to reach brands’ target audiences. We need to deliver results for our customers — sales, measured brand lift, downloads — we focus on how we can measure the success of our operations and what we can do to solve business challenges, not just marketing challenges. The problem we solve is knowing the right mix of content and media to achieve the desired results for our customers.
What motivated you to start your company – did you want to change the status quo or was it a gap in the market that you could fill?
It was an attitude and a pioneering spirit. We were among the first to work with social media advertising in the UK and we knew the use of content to engage children, parents and families had to change — so we changed it. We were among the first to try influencer marketing and change it to work even harder for our customers. Now customers expect us to change the way things are traditionally done so they can work harder to get results.
What are your brand values?
We are agile, we are innovative and we are driven to make a difference — without this I think our customer base would have stopped working with us a long time ago. Because we have the ability to innovate and bespoke, it means we can work on something designed to achieve our clients’ results.
Do your values determine your decision-making process?
To a certain point, yes! We ensure our responses are always innovative, creative and agile. We are also careful to do what we do responsibly: when we address children, we do so in a way that largely follows the guidelines/regulations and focuses on what is effective.
Is team culture an integral part of your company?
Gigantic. I know it’s something of a cliché, but we try to create a family atmosphere. We always try to focus on taking our work very seriously and not taking ourselves too seriously!
We also make sure we respect each other and understand that there is more than one way to complete a task and that it can be different depending on who is driving it.
What are you doing to show your team that you value them?
Some obvious things, some not so obvious things. We have a “yes” leadership style – we always try to say “yes, but…” to new ideas and initiatives, with a caveat about how the new idea might contribute to achieving our broader goals.
We try to finish by 3:30pm on a Friday. We regularly hold quarterly meetings and team evenings. We give people their birthdays off (or the day after) and everyone gets a Christmas shopping day.
What are your views on inflation and interest rates – will you pass this on to your customers or will it take a hit on your margins and reward customer loyalty in these tougher times?
We have been working with some of our clients at brands and organizations for 8 or 9 years, so the relationships have weathered all sorts of storms! At the moment it looks like advertisers are paying a slight premium in the social media advertising market, but we haven’t seen any issues with everyday campaigns yet.
How often do you evaluate the data you collect and address your KPIs and why?
Constant. We have 12 years of campaign data across a range of key industries and target key audiences.
So this means that we know (for example) what children expect from a new book and what parents expect from a new book for their children… Parents tend to focus more on the author, children tend to focus on the Focus on characters or narrative – For example.
We know which social platforms are likely to help drive family ticket sales at one attraction and which social platforms are effective at driving “date nights” at another attraction.
This campaign data helps us ensure we can respond more quickly and achieve better results in our targeting.
Does technology play a much larger role in your everyday life at Rocket?
When planning our creative content and distribution, we have always taken technical data and social media data into account.
What is your attitude towards your competitors?
There are some excellent content and marketing companies/agencies that cater to those looking to target young, children and family audiences. In some ways, it’s important to know where we fit.
It’s very easy to get caught up in what your competitors are doing and not focus on your own work. We also understand that sometimes we are not the right partner for every brand and organization that wants to work with us and vice versa. Developing a perfect relationship and understanding what makes a perfect relationship makes it easier not to become dependent on competition.
Do you have any advice for someone starting out in business?
Think carefully about whether you want this! Running a company, being a shareholder or director of a company is NOT for everyone. Many people may prefer their role in a company that does not involve shaping the company’s strategic growth and direction.
Don’t worry too much about the little things either — details are important, but it wasn’t until I had kids that I realized that not sending out a tweet at exactly the right time on a weekend isn’t the end of the world .
Being the key decision maker in the company can be lonely and stressful. What do you do to relax, recharge, and sharpen your focus?
I relax while playing with my children and am always amazed at how much they make me laugh. Aside from the day-to-day stuff at home, I love the theater, I love a good bottle of red wine and when it comes to rediscovering focus, I’m a big podcast consumer. I listen to some podcasts that really help me in my daily work (and many that feed me as a news and politics junkie).
We also launched our own podcast focused on youth marketing and youth culture. Search Rocket Fuel Youth Marketing to find our previous episodes or click here:
Do you believe in the 12-week working method or do you develop much longer planning strategies?
It totally depends on the task you want to complete in 12 weeks. Some ideas need to take longer. Some ideas can be worked out. I firmly believe that all thoughts get the time they deserve, but not all thoughts deserve as much as the others.
What is Rocket’s eco-strategy?
We have to get better. We have appointed someone as our Head of Wellbeing with a focus on the environment, employee mental health, company culture and the whistleblower role.
We try to prioritize partners with a net zero target, but this is not always easy. I want our company to do everything we can to be better for the planet.
What three things do you hope to implement in the next 12 months?
- Debriefing campaigns that reflect our company values
- A better tech solution for customers of our Family Collective service – an offering of short-form social content featuring real families for marketing and research purposes.
- A senior executive – someone who will inspire and lead part of the team so that our great Strategy Director can be promoted to Managing Director.
