Founder Stories: Felix Norton On Building Woww
In today’s Founder Story, we feature Felix Norton, Founder/Managing Director of Woww!
Read on for lessons he has learned from launching and marketing his digital marketing agency.
1. Please introduce your business and share your role.
Woww is a digital marketing agency based in Cape Town that helps businesses start, grow, and thrive online.
We partner with our clients throughout their entire digital journey, helping them get online with amazing branding and a stunning website, grow their traffic and sales through SEO & PPC, and provide the ongoing support and guidance they need to succeed online.
We work with over 450 clients worldwide specializing in WordPress-based websites and companies who are looking to scale their online presence without hiring an internal team. At present, we’re specifically targeting UK-based clients looking for alternative outsourced solutions where we can offer them competitive rates for excellent quality, while still being on the correct timezone and language.
2. How did you prepare for, and go about your launch?
Initially, we grew very organically, leveraging word of mouth and strategic networking. Ironically, we found a lot of success with creative multi-colored business cards where each prospect could pick their favorite color combination. While it might have felt gimmicky at the time, people really resonated with the personalization of the business card design, leaving a memorable impression.
3. Since launching, what types of marketing campaigns and designs have worked best to attract and retain customers?
At present, we have a very strong SEO presence, so our website receives many organic leads requiring our website to stand out. We use a lot of colour in our designs which many clients find appealing and mention as a reason for selecting us.
We’re now experimenting with a combination of paid advertising to supplement our organic traffic and an outbound email marketing campaign. We use creative ad designs on Linkedin and Meta to increase our CTR.
4. What have been the most influential brands for your business? Whose branding and marketing do you aspire to and why?
Over the years we’ve incorporated many tactics and ideas from brands we aspired to be like one day. WebFX and Klientboost are two international brands that we are benchmarking ourselves against.
More recently we’ve been introducing a lot of learnings from a book called Scaling Up, focusing on people and our core values. We have then incorporated the narrative and messaging of these values into our web copy and marketing campaigns to clearly communicate our brand and value proposition.
5. What are your favorite marketing platforms/tools?
We’ve built our largest success from organic search via Google and now are integrating paid media campaigns with Google Ads & Linkedin. We leverage a ton of powerful tools to execute our service offerings including Ahrefs, SEMRush, SurferSEO, and more recently AI-powered tools like ChatGPT.
6. Looking ahead, what are you most excited about?
Scaling internationally. Our eyes are set on scaling our team and service offering to focus more on an international audience where we know we’re able to provide incredible value for our services. As we expand we’ll be able to compete in a more mature market, increasing our pricing and providing a better standard of life for our team while simultaneously still undercutting local competitors for the same caliber of service.
7. Who or what inspires and motivates you?
My team and clients’ success. We have a core belief that “We Thrive Together”, so the continued growth and achievement of our team members and the projects they work on provide incredible satisfaction. By creating with purpose and helping our clients succeed online, they return with bigger budgets and more ambitious goals, fueling us to continuously improve and achieve new heights.
8. What are some lessons you’ve learned along the way that you would share with entrepreneurs hoping to launch or who have just launched?
It may sound cliched, but just starting. It’s so annoyingly simple, but it’s the critical step to creating something great. If you’re not slightly embarrassed by what you’re putting out, you’ve probably launched too late. Rather put out something smaller / rougher / sooner than delaying or never getting started.
9. What do you believe are the qualities of a good entrepreneur? And what makes a team successful?
Relentless tenacity combined with level-headed patience. The road to success is not always easy nor fast, this requires one to never give up and constantly pursue one’s goals through challenging times and setbacks, all while maintaining patience for the time and effort it takes to navigate the journey.
Purpose and alignment. If your team is aligned in achieving the same end goal, they will work together to get what needs to be accomplished, resulting in eventual success.
10. Let us know where we can go to learn more!