Kate Hamer is a Marketeer who has specialised in Digital for over a decade. She has 20 years experience working for global household brand names such as Orange, Unilever, Tesco, Disney and L’Oréal. Her passion for communications and her entrepreneurial spirit have led her to be involved in a variety of projects outside of her main roles. This desire to work on a variety of brands and projects convinced her to leave the corporate world and set up her own consultancy in 2015. Her mission to spread the digital word and upskill workforces who may have trained in their specialism in the days pre-internet, has led her to develop her own training offering and she is also an Expert Tutor for the Google Squared Programme.
In 2018 she partnered with Louis Saha to develop AxisStars, a private platform for Stars from the worlds of Sport & Entertainment to connect with trusted brands and service providers.
Making Digital Plain Sailing
We have a sailing boat for our logo because they were used to discover the original ‘New World’. Nothing fancy, just wood, material for the sail the sea and the wind. For lots of marketeers and business owners, digital is today’s version of the new world, not yet fully explored and rather daunting. The great thing about digital channels is that they give you a platform from which to make the most of your natural advantage – our aim is to help you catch that tailwind in your sails and navigate the sometimes choppy seas of social and search with ease and speed.
Kate’s Philosophy
Digital is an area that has grown fast and that has unfortunately allowed room for poor quality service and what can only be described as blagging. It’s true that most of us senior digital experts are self-taught (we didn’t even really use the internet when I was at university). However there’s a big difference between reading and quoting lots of articles about digital and sitting up for 15 hours straight working in the backend of a wordpress site (Googling every forum known to man) to find a solution to a problem you’ve discovered. I am from the latter school of Digital expertise – I believe that you can only really learn if you roll your sleeves up and get stuck in.
Digital is just communication, marketing, life itself!Kate HamerMy mission is to stop ‘Digital’ being talked about as though it is its own separate discipline – as complicated as rocket science, and the solution to all the ills of the business world. The fact is that Digital is just communication, marketing, life itself! As consumers we don’t distinguish between the offline and online parts of our life so why should the marketeers trying to promote their products to us, work in that way?
I don’t deny that there is still an importance in up-skilling marketeers and businesses in digital but it really doesn’t need to be as complicated as some people make it. We can help you find your sea legs and equip you with everything you need to stay afloat.
I was amazed, even as I was developing my own website, that there are so many people positioning themselves as web designers whose own sites are neither responsive to different sized screens e.g. mobile phones nor optimised for search in Google. These are really important factors for businesses to consider but it seems that a lot of the suppliers trusted as experts in this field, are not offering the full package.
Digital is moving at such a pace that it’s impossible to know everything, but if I don’t know, I will have a pretty good idea how to find out or who to ask in my extensive network. I have a ‘collective’ approach to projects. I’ve met many brilliant experts throughout my career, in different disciplines from Analytics to Usability. I will bring the relevant team together for each project. And most importantly, at the start of every job, I agree objectives and measures so that we can clearly see how successful it is at the end. Can’t say fairer than that, let’s get started!