“Social media has really forced brands to focus on content marketing and telling a unique story.”

Co-Founded in 2009 by Joshua Otten as a strategic mobile, social and interactive marketing firm, Screenpush specializes in helping brands connect with their audiences in the digital space and beyond. They work with agency partners, Fortune 500 brands, and small-to-medium sized businesses in creating original marketing and technology solutions.

Their immensely talented team of marketers, designers, strategists, creatives, social media experts, and techies has more than 50 years combined experience in advertising, marketing, design, technology, editorial, sales, business development, and CRM.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you expand on how your background in film and TV as a creative producer provides you with a unique perspective on brands, social marketing and technology?

Joshua: Producing with Academy Award winners and Academy Award nominated film directors, Dan Lindsay, TJ Martin and Morgan Spurlock taught me the value of trusting your creative team to find the best way to tell a story. Producing a feature film or TV series is such a group exercise that in order for one to have any hope of creating quality content everyone has to be on the same page. Social media has really forced brands to focus on content marketing and telling a unique story. Social marketing has the same team-focused, technical know-how environment, in which content creation and audience and channel syndication strategy all need to happen in harmony in order to have a successful social marketing campaign.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you talk about the importance of how creating the right content strategy can make the difference between conversions, actions and sales?

Joshua: Creating a successful content strategy means that we develop and produce content that is on-brand and geared towards the target audience and produced for the channel it will be shared and syndicated across. This means strategically developing content to engage with the right audience while also ensuring it is optimized for the channels and networks it will be distributed on. Without that strategy in place, we have seen conversions and actions drop aggressively as the content isn’t positioned correctly to syndicate successfully on the various channels and as a result, engagement drops.

Using analytics platforms to track and monitor engagement with content will help ensure that your branded content is having a positive effect on your traffic and audience. Google Analytics has recently updated their platform to focus on “Sessions” while allowing for people to track “Events” that lead to conversions. What we are finding is that content is the number one driver for conversions, actions and sales and we prove this by tracking what users are interacting with on a website and what Events and Actions lead to conversions and sales.

BusinessInterviews.com: What advice would you give to a new business that is starting to establish their company culture? What are some important aspects that they should keep in mind for long-term success?

Joshua: Screenpush has really been blessed with having a very high retention rate with the employees we’ve brought on. I am proud to say we have only lost one employee in the last three and a half years and I attribute that completely to our focus on maintaining a healthy corporate culture. Above all, having an open line of communication really goes a long way in keeping everyone happy. People thrive in an environment that allows them to share their opinions and points of view without running the risk of backlash. It is also important that your employees know you have their back. Due to the nature of the agency business, if there are any problems, we are at fault – right or wrong – 99% of the time, so making sure that you don’t use any of your employees as a scape goat is also integral in keeping moral high.

It sounds like a cliché when people say that money isn’t the main driver for employee retention, but money only really becomes the primary focus when the job and work environment is not fun and enjoyable. Focus on fostering a healthy office culture and you will keep employees happy.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you share why The EngagementHub is an important tool in helping maintain your focus on providing best possible ROI for your clients?

Joshua: Brands and businesses are being bombarded with hundreds of software platforms that promise to monitor their content, listen for their audience, generate leads, track engagement and even distribute content. The cost of licensing, learning and utilizing any one of these tools can easily cost upwards of six figures annually. In addition, all of these platform-driven companies practice price discrimination; with some of the higher-end social analytics and marketing platforms they don’t even list pricing on their sites.

We created The EngagementHub in order to allow our clients to tap into the best of these services and solutions without having to provide long-term commitments and hire additional people to utilize them. We also have partnered with hundreds of powerful influencers across all social networks that allow brands to tap into a built-in owned media audience of millions. We recently partnered with several influencers on Vine, Twitter and Instagram for campaigns with Kia and Universal that lead to tens of millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands of engagements all at engagement rates that were much higher than industry standard.

BusinessInterviews.com: Once a company starts to engage with their customer base, how can they keep the momentum going and hopefully increase it?

Joshua: This is the toughest part of growth and scale for any business, growing your customer base sustainably without losing focus on ROI. We genuinely believe that engaging with agency partners can really help start-ups and growth-stage companies. Many CEOs look at an agency retainer budget and think that it is cheaper to hire internally. However, when you hire an agency like Screenpush you plug into an organization with over 25+ full-time employees each with diverse yet complementary skill-sets that allow you to focus on business development and sales. Hiring a full-time qualified social marketing manager, marketing analytics expert, paid media specialist and content marketing strategist would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and benefits, whereas working with an agency allows business and brands to tap into all of those skills and more at a fraction of the cost and commitment.

BusinessInterviews.com: Why is Brand Monitoring becoming such an essential function for businesses and individuals alike?

Joshua: Brand Monitoring is crucial for all growing businesses because it allows you to communicate and interact with existing customers to increase retention, while identifying new potential customers based on their digital conversations and the competitive brands they are following and interacting with.

Many brands and businesses can’t be bothered with replying to PMs/DMs and comments, as they may see negative feedback as unique and coming from one-off disgruntled customers. Brand monitoring allows businesses to ensure that the one loud customer isn’t actually a trend that could scale into a PR disaster.

BusinessInterviews.com: What advice would you give to a business or individual who sees the value and importance of Brand Monitoring but can’t afford to sign up with a firm?

Joshua: You would be surprised that many agencies are open to compartmentalizing services to ensure they are affordable for brands and businesses of any size. It isn’t just the small-to-medium sized businesses that have tight budgets; many Fortune 500 companies are looking for more cost effective solutions, as they are having to operate in more and more channels and networks while still spending money on traditional advertising.

Partnering with an agency who can offer a brand and business a specific solution can often times be more cost effective then licensing a brand monitoring tool direct as an agency is able to offset and amortize the cost of the platform across multiple clients.