The new face of search

That drives huge changes in customer behaviour and decision making; we can have an overwhelming amount of choice, we get recommendations from AI powered personal assistants, we touch websites rather than clicking them, we’re constantly connected; and that means that businesses have to look for new ways to be discovered, new ways to engage with customers and new ways to acquire them.

It’s been a busy year for Epiphany. Alongside internal changes such as adding new roles to our senior leadership team, creating a new film and video team, building our programmatic team, refining our conversion rate optimisation offering, creating a new content marketing proposition and working on new data-centric projects such as Almanac with different specialists within Jaywing, we’ve also brought on board a host of new clients, including Virgin Holidays, Anglian Home Improvements, icelolly.com.

The way in which marketers are engaging with agencies is also changing. Marketers are increasingly asking us for help in stitching together data, marketing technology, platforms, content, creative and advertising opportunities.

There are more brands coming to us for advice on how to acquire customers by drawing on a broader range of channels and approaches. It used to be that you’d hear someone describing their customer acquisition strategy as ‘SEO, PPC, affiliates and email’, for example. Now you’re more likely to have a conversation about joining all of those things up, blending customer facing marketing and communications with back end technology and integrating platforms.

The truth is that there is always another new technology, another social platform, another algorithm, just around the corner, so they can’t be the sole focus of your efforts. Instead, we put the user and the audience at the heart of everything we do and build out the marketing, technology, creative or measurement solution from there.

Earlier this year, Epiphany also created its own innovation team to explore what search marketing will look like tomorrow. You only have to consider the impact that mobile is having on the way people are accessing the web to realise that this is an industry that simply won’t stand still – ever. That can be a daunting prospect for in-house marketing teams but, for an agency like Epiphany, it’s what makes search such an exciting field to work in.

To that end, Epiphany has just released a search marketing supplement in association with The Drum to cover these emerging trends and technologies and how they're impacting the way marketers work.

Epiphany was founded as a search specialist in 2005, expanding its range of services over the years to include SEO, PPC, Display, CRO, Content and Web Development. It is now part of the Jaywing group. Tom Salmon is managing director at Epiphany.