Well I guess the first thing we need to address is where our name came from. In the interests of brevity I’m going to cut a long story short for you…
The bulk of the team here at 8 Million Stories joined after working for large, network agencies where the focus had become increasingly on mass, generic solutions to online marketing strategies. One of the key things we wanted to get back to was creating very tailored solutions for our clients through hands-on account management. In short we believed every client has its own unique story to tell.
Armed with this belief we searched in vain for available URLs and a name that we felt represented our basic ethos. Eventually, we arrived at 8 Million Stories after watching the Film Noir classic “Naked City” where the narrator announces at the end that “There are 8 Million Stories in the Naked City – this was one of them”. We liked the ring of this and decided to run with it… but feel free to call us 8MS for short. After all short stories can sometimes be the most powerful.
So what do we do as an agency? Well our main story is certainly still SEO, PPC and Social Media but we have a great deal of experience in Affiliate Marketing, Display Advertising and Analytics too. What really interests us is finding the right balance of channels for each client, in order to achieve their goals. It’s about telling the right story for your brand.
The online landscape has changed massively in the last 2-3 years. Social Media is the glue that binds everything together and SEO has evolved way past just working out what the search engines want – it’s about working out what your users want. For a customer to be interested in your brand we believe that authentic story telling needs to be built into everything brands do – from your website to social channels and even paid media.
There is a fine balance between pure marketing and good story telling. Creating content that is essentially just selling your products in an attempt to get SEO benefit is dull and not going to get customers to engage with your brand. At 8MS good content creation and marketing is at the heart of everything we do – building exciting, informative and fun content that will ensure customers interact with our clients while helping to tell their story.
We want to be accountable for everything we do. Too often clients spend money on campaigns and have no idea what they have in return. Our analyst team will ensure all our clients have clear success measurements at the start of any project and our performance based management fees will ensure we are accountable for hitting them.
We are all looking forward to the challenge of working for a boutique agency. Stripping things back to basics is important for all of us – good client work, happy workforce and lots of awards!