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Microsoft Advertising Celebrated Partner spotlight

Microsoft Advertising Partner Celebration, recognizing our Partner Tier.

Celebrating our partners is just one of the ways the Partner Program likes to highlight the hard work our partners have accomplished throughout the year. We have interviewed our Celebrated Partners from April 2021 to get an inside look at who these companies are, their history, objectives, and ongoing partnership with Microsoft Advertising. You could be a Celebrated Partner too — nominations for the Partner Celebration are now open until 20 October 2021!

Microsoft Advertising Celebrated Partner, Australia — Pathfinder Marketing

Mitchell Kelly, Director & Co-Founder, Pathfinder Marketing

Mitchell Kelly of Pathfinder Marketing.

Mitchell Kelly.

Tell us about your company — it’s history, current size, audience, and business objectives.

I founded Pathfinder Marketing in 2016 along with my business partner David Toby.

We started as more of a side hustle than anything else; a way to earn a little extra income running SEO and digital marketing campaigns for friends and acquaintances’ small businesses. As we started to gain a reputation for generating results for clients, referrals started flowing in, to the point where we needed to scale up operations. We’re now a team of 5.

At our core, we’re a performance marketing agency. We don’t sell clients cookie cutter packages for SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads etc. We focus first and foremost on what will generate our clients the best outcome possible and then design a tailored digital marketing solution around this.

David Toby of Pathfinder Marketing.

David Toby, co-founder of Pathfinder Marketing.

What is your company’s vision/mission/specialisation?

We believe that you don’t win at digital marketing by following the crowd and doing what everyone else is doing. You win by being bold, ahead of the curve and standing out from the crowd.

We help our clients discover what makes them unique and leverage this when we design their digital marketing strategy so we can elevate them above their competition.

What product features offered by Microsoft Advertising do you rely on the most to achieve your vision?

The Google Ads sync feature has been a major time saver. We no longer have to worry about updating ad copy and settings across multiple platforms and can simply rely on changes to be synced across all our paid search efforts.

Smart shopping has also been a game-changer for our ecommerce clients. Since it’s roll out, we’ve seen major performance improvements across the board, not to mention reduced workload in terms of optimisation.

How has Microsoft advertising been able to help you reach new customers and grow your business?

Microsoft advertising has allowed us to present a major point of difference when we pitch for new clients.

For most agencies, search marketing starts and ends with Google. The fact that we set new clients up with both platforms as standard has been an important factor in differentiating ourselves and winning new work.

What impact to your business have you been able to drive with Microsoft Advertising?

Microsoft Advertising allows us to expand the reach and performance of our paid search advertising for clients at a lower cost. This has ultimately meant significant improvements in terms of the return on investment we can generate for our clients and as a result — greater client satisfaction.

How does your company embody inclusivity and giving?

At the start of the COVID crisis, we had a number of clients severely impacted. Many were no longer able to pay for our services and some were on the verge of shutting down. Rather than parting ways, we continued to work pro bono with them throughout lockdown so that they could get back on their feet.

Caring for our employees’ mental health has always been a core value of ours. We offer flexible sick leave for employees to take mental health days as well as the freedom to work from home when employees choose.

How have you adapted to recent changes in consumer trends brought about by COVID-19?

It’s no secret that ecommerce has exploded since the start of the pandemic. In the past, we’ve had a lot of clients that have been resistant to converting their businesses to ecommerce. Whether that be because of concerns that their buying process is too complicated to be done online, or a fear surrounding the complexity of the logistics around selling online.

With the overwhelming opportunity now available from converting to ecommerce, we’ve been working with these clients to make the shift to selling online wherever possible and overcome any of the obstacles in their way in doing this.

Has your digital marketing strategy changed since the pandemic? How so?

If working in digital marketing has taught me anything it’s that change is constant and that you can never stand still. This has kept us in good stead throughout the pandemic.

One thing we quickly realised was how drastically the keywords people searched for changed as a result of the pandemic. We set up a reporting script for all of our search clients to identify “trending search terms,” (i.e., search terms that had risen in search volume in a client’s account over the past 30 days).

A perfect example of its usefulness was when it helped us identify a sharp rise in search for keywords like “quarantine care package,” “isolation care packages” etc. for a hamper delivery client of ours. As a response, we helped the client develop an appropriate product to cater for these types of queries, built a landing page to promote them and started running traffic to it.

This one strategy yielded tens of thousands of dollars in revenue when Sydney’s recent lockdown hit.

A huge thank you to Mitchell Kelly for giving us a glimpse into how Pathfinder Marketing has adapted and flourished during the pandemic. Don’t miss out on our other spotlighted partners as well as upcoming events for partners on every tier.

If you haven’t enrolled in the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program yet, make sure that you apply at microsoftadvertisingpartners.com so you’re eligible for the next round.

If you’re an enrolled partner, stay connected with us and up to speed on all things partner-related by joining the Microsoft Advertising Partner Community on LinkedIn.