Interview with Mark Appel: "The only thing left for external agencies is to bridge the gap between brand and demand."

Podcast

Mark Appel, marketing director of Exact has been responsible for the digital transformation of the entire marketing stack of both main business units of Exact. Growing it internationally from 50.000 licenses to 400.000 subscription users, more then 85% of which are new users.

introducing social media marketing, CRM, display and SEA to the company as early as 2012.

Exact is a very metrics and performance focussed company. Brand identity has never been priority but at the same time a large scale partnership with Max Verstappen was developed to build international brand awareness. This posed to question of how to make this partnership relevant to the brand and how to measure the effect of branding on metrics inside the marketing funnel.

These facts are grounds for a lot of scepticism towards creative and branding agency due to the lack of measurable results.

Mark poses that you can only delegate marketing processes to external agencies when you thoroughly comprehend them internally.

That is why Exact has developed its own in-house agency of 70+ FTE which is mostly focused on performance marketing.