Meet Andre Alpar, Investor & Digital Marketer Strategist

We’re really excited to have Andre Alpar, representing Germany at SearchStars this year. He has a solid background in digital marketing, runs a highly appreciated podcast and besides that, he invests in businesses to help them thrive. Get to know him a bit better in this interview!

My first question to you is, could you tell me a bit more about what you do at work? What is the highlight of your working day and what kind of projects excites you the most?

Mostly I ”work” as a ”dad” these days. Regarding digital marketing, I do several things. I have a weekly AMA / Q&A podcast on www.omr.com called AskOMR. OMR is the largest digital marketing conference, tradeshow and news portal in Germany. The podcast has around 30.000 weekly listeners. Asides from that I am active as a keynote speaker and author on different performance marketing topics – see more at www.andrealpar.de if you speak German. Also, I am active as a business angel for a dozen years.

When and why did you decide to start working in digital marketing?

To be honest: It wasn’t a conscious decision in the beginning. I accidentally stumbled into it early on in 1998 and was lucky enough to always be able to keep up. I think I was fortunate to have the right talents and background education for the field. These days I love the speed of change in our field. It makes us always question what we do and forces us mildly to never stop improving and experimenting.

What do you think is the most important thing for new businesses to start off with when it comes to digital marketing?

I think there are two things. On the one hand, you have to have an infrastructure (e.g. web analytics, conversion optimization, …) that is able to understand which customer acquisitions efforts work how well. On the other hand, you have to be able to pick the right ”battle to join” that fits the relation of the product or service that you are offering to the market. One of the biggest questions here is whether you are fulfilling a demand that already exists better than your competitors or if you are so innovative that you have to create the demand. The choice of digital marketing channels for new customer acquisition will strongly depend on this.

How do you keep up to speed on everything that is happening in digital?

Nothing too impressive here. Following ”the right accounts” on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/andrealpar/following ) and Facebook.

At October 9 we will see you speaking at SearchStars, what can the audience expect from your speech?

I hope to deliver strategically helpful frameworks that will help participants to advance in their knowledge but also very practical ideas that can help them make their SEO and content marketing efforts better starting the day after the conference.

Well, we’re certainly looking forward to listening to Andre’s at SearchStars October 9 – hope to see you all there!