Business is simple. Good product, cash in the bank, steady cash flow, growing sales and profit margins. Dr. Ian Birkby and Alex Cairns discuss the simplicity of running a business well. Welcome to another edition of the marketing science podcast the podcast for sales and marketing professionals working within science engineering and health care don't forget to subscribe on Spotify iTunes or wherever he usually listen to podcasts my name is Frank Barker the head of marketing at eight zero network where you can also subscribe and I'm joined by not just one but two guests this week with Dr Ian Birkby, the CEO of AZoNetwork and Alex cans MD of Move Marketing, a full service B2B. marketing agency. Thanks Gents for joining us doing today, so without further ado I'd like to jump straight into the first question and draw your experience of being in the notable position of pre dating the digital era but also having the experience of working right through the digital era to the present day and seeing how do you see the change in marketing strategy for SMEs? Well, despite the fact the indicating that my working career services in the era of horses and carts Frankie I will give you my the best position on that IAN: I think the key thing in terms of how it's changed since ninety five when Netscape came out and the internet era started, is the ability to measure what you achieve with your marketing efforts. So in the digital age it is relatively easy to measure the impact of the various campaigns and from that to calculate the return on your marketing investment - now I’d counter that by saying we are possibly getting to the stage where some people like to measure too many things and starting to get lost a little bit in the numbers but for me it's the ability to quantify the performance of the campaigns. Franky: Okay excellent, Alex so you've you're in a full service B2B. marketing agency having worked with both client and agency side for lots of multi nationals, so you’ve got a real mix of experience Ho have you seen the transition. Alex: I’ll echo a lot what Ian says, data on 2 aspects - because we use a lot of data for market analysis; market research in the planning phase as well so not just the campaign data which is invaluable but also the research phase for the data in terms of putting together marketing plans that give you a one to three to five years focus. The other big change since 2000 is that we now have channels so it's not just a service, supply through digital channels which we can actually pick and choose from a makes amounts according to requirement so there's a lot more to you and almost test as they say something. Franky: Okay and having worked with lots of different clients for your agency what's the biggest challenge, what’s the most common or the greatest challenges that you see that your clients having from a marketing perspective. Alex: I think it is the data interpretation and insight because it is a fantastic thing having all of the data of but it's not a given to know how to use it and spin into an achievable set of objectives and actions so that's when we get involved. That depth of our experience and expertise in how to use and interpret that data across multiple channels but a lot of the science industrial sectors don’t specialise in understanding data and certainly statistics is obviously not the course specialisms Excellent so Ian using data and statistics as marketing challenges would you echo that? Absolutely I think you know from our perspective as a as a business we've invested heavily in building an analytics platform over the last six or seven years and prior to that we would say to our clients we've driven several thousand visitors to your site - they'd say great thanks very much but they couldn't attribute those visitors to specific actions in terms of products sales and market sector activity so yes if you can use that data to genuinely prove R. O. I. it's a massive plus point. Franky: