Tim Burrowes

It dawned on us quite quickly that rather than spending a day a week working on production for a PDF, there seemed to be an appetite for the bit that amalgamated all of the content in one place. We hadn’t put the focus into Mumbrella itself, which, in all honesty, had been an afterthought. I got a mate to help me out with the logo, so what we have now is a combination of Google Image Search and the font I made in Microsoft Word. We still have this crude thing, and we never did go to a design agency and do it.

The name Mumbrella was cooked up in the pub. I was saying to a friend in an ad agency that it would be where all of the stuff under the media and marketing umbrella would go together, so it was just a shortening of Media and Marketing Umbrella. He said, “Yeah, ‘mum’ is a really warm word semantically, you should definitely go with Mumbrella!” It was remarkably unplanned, the whole thing, really.

How much has Mumbrella‘s reach grown in that time from beyond the group of your family and friends?

Back then, we were excited that we had more than a hundred people coming on the site at once. Now we’re getting about 750,000 to 800,000 page impressions a month. And they’re coming from 350,000 visits a month and just under 200,000 unique visitors a month to the site, and then we’ve got about 30,000 subscribers to the email now.

We have a team of 13 people including Mumbrella and Encore Magazine, which we bought a couple of years back now.

Do you think there’s been increased interest in the marketing world in that time?

I’m not sure that’s the case, because we’re talking about the same world that’s always been there. But I think one of the things that drove the site for us in the early days was the people who are now our rivals are very much focused on having a daily email that comes out at four o’clock every day. So they really don’t put much content on their site, until that time of day when everything will go up at once.

Whereas our strategy has been and is, when news starts breaking, put it straight up. So that gave us a difference. The other thing is we have ended up with a very lively comment thread, which gives people in the industry a place they can have a conversation about whatever we have broken that day – that didn’t really naturally exist anywhere before.

It’s quite interesting because you’re writing about marketing but then you’re also a business that markets yourself as well. Mumbrella is very active on social media. How has that played a role?

It’s played a big role. Actually, I suspect that if we’d launched five years earlier we wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful as we have been, because a lot of those tools weren’t available.

Things like the cheap and easy availability of being able to send mass emails, for instance, has made a big difference. Twitter has made a huge difference. Very early on we were very active with that and still are. In the early days, sometimes that was accounting for 40% or 50% of our traffic. Particularly when you’re new and don’t have an archive of stuff that Google is sending to you. Twitter’s really good for sending people to fresh content.

Facebook is probably where we’re most serious in terms of socially marketing and we’re trying to get to grips with Google+. Every now and then, Reddit has been good for us.

One of the big issues for us is that most of our advertisers want to speak to our core audience – people who are already working in marketing. So, actually, you have to be a bit careful in taking the trouble to think about what each individual social media platform is going to give you in terms of marketing. Twitter followers are generally relevant, but people just coming in through search may just be members of the public and of not much use to advertisers.