Get to know James Blackman, Managing Director, Cocoonfxmedia

James Blackman – Managing Director Cocoonfxmedia Ltd
I have been involved in marketing since 2001 starting off in traditional marketing. I have always been interested in computing and started to look at building websites in 1998. I even started looking at programming even before then using a green screen Amstrad. I decided in 2010 after making my hobby building websites into a business in 2010 which I created Cocoonfxmedia Ltd a web design and digital marketing company. Cocoonfxmedia specialises in SEO and has almost grown up with SEO since in conception.

Massively for the worse and has made it so complex and hard for small businesses to compete. Google from day 1 has always said it was interested in serving up results based on a keyword phrase. What has happened is marketers and some chancers have taken this to an extreme which has meant the SEO world must create complex algorithms to stop the chancers and marketers manipulating the search results. Mobile I think is the biggest change the fact the Google forces an industry wide standard (for the good) but actually lied about what they can and can’t do about mobile indexing. It’s taken 2 years for Google to actually catch up themselves.

I got into Digital Marketing about 14 years ago when the company I was working for was starting to get used to marketing. I started to come up with ways to improve presentations using Macromedia Flash & Director to create interactive presentations which could be sent via CD-ROM to clients. I also started looking into email marketing however it was harder to get the template right due to the technology. I started to get into SEO around 2007/2008 when I was playing with my websites. It actually came about when a work friends husbands was creating website (as I mentioned above about chancers) and how he was creating reciprocal links to get up the listings on Google. I started to research more where I learnt about what would have been described as Black hat tactics. The more involved with SEO I got I realised that a lot of the processes you did back then would start to bit you in the butt as for example. I remember people in my office complaining when they searched for something they never got the results they wanted.

As we’re talking SEO we offer a whole range of solutions which will give long standing results based on the budgets provided. We do manual audits on site both technically as well as off site getting the link profile etc… We also look at the design of the sites as well as now the user experience is more key than ever. In fact user experience and design is key for a website to succeed with SEO. To compliment our SEO services we offer a full ground up web design and development service which looks at getting the site technically right for SEO from day 1 and also make it easy for our clients to increase click throughs and to encourage sharing and return visitors.

I think content marketing will be still the biggest element but more better researched content, that can be more visual such as infographics or video with content to support the video. I think also more traditional marketing elements will be needed to help support the SEO efforts and also think a shift from Facebook to Instragram and Snapchat will increase.

If I were to say anything about starting in Digital Marketing is that you need to get to grips with how users want to buy products. That’s getting to grips with basic coding i.e HTML so you understand how sites work. Understand how data works i.e how to measure campaign effectively. i.e don’t just do twitter and look at the traffic in Google Analytics but understand what the data means, understand how to crunch the data.