Finance Magnates recently had the opportunity to interview Itay Paz, CEO of Morning Dough, about the importance of content and digital marketing tools in the global business. While digital marketing is important for all sectors, it becomes even more crucial for financial organizations.
With more than 25 years of experience in the marketing sector, Paz has established several entrepreneurial ventures throughout his career. In the recent discussion with Finance Magnates, the CEO of Morning Dough highlighted key developments in a constantly evolving digital marketing ecosystem.
- First of all, we are really glad to have you here Mr Paz, before we proceed further, can you please tell our readers about your profile and give us a short introduction to Morning Dough?
I am a veteran entrepreneur, started my way as an affiliate marketer over 25+ years ago, and over the years, I’ve been involved as an entrepreneur, consultant or mentor in hundreds of international businesses as well as big companies in a wide range of verticals and industries. I have also founded DMIEXPO, a leading digital and affiliate marketing international conference and expo held in Israel every year.
In June 2020, just a few months after the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic began, I decided to pivot the business and launched a new venture, the Morning Dough.
Morning Dough is a quality community of affiliate marketers, digital marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs.
We’re building this community by creating an authority hub that provides our community with the best and most important content through a website and a daily newsletter, allowing them to save time and be at the front of the pack with their online marketing.
- In your opinion, how has digital marketing evolved over the last few years?
While digital marketing is evolving constantly, in the past few years new trends have arisen driven from:
- As more people carry smart devices with them at any time, the number of internet users has evolved, and the number of opportunities for digital marketers has grown significantly, gaining access to hundreds of millions of users, worldwide, using different marketing channels.
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, people stayed at home, connected more to the internet and used e-commerce stores instead of going to physical stores.
Globalization has accelerated the growth of e-commerce, live stream shopping, shoppable TV and many other new opportunities.
With all the new trends, there are many marketing opportunities, such as banner advertising and email marketing, that are still alive and kicking, improving over time and utilizing the new technologies developed worldwide.
- How important is digital marketing and specifically email marketing for the global financial sector?
As mentioned, email marketing is still one of the best ways marketers can reach out to users. People are still reading emails, and all the people who said email marketing is dead, 10 years ago, were wrong.
As email marketing is still one of the cheapest and most efficient ways to acquire new customers and retain current customers, the global financial sector should be investing in digital marketing, sending marketing and sales emails, creating financial information emails including newsletters to add value and increase revenues.
- In today’s competitive environment, what are the key benefits Morning Dough offers to readers and subscribers?
The amount of online marketing information and content published online, on a daily basis, is bigger than anyone can singly handle. Big companies have brought different solutions to curate information, but as they are all based on AI technology they are not optimal and, at times, provide too much information that makes users spend valuable time in sorting out what is really important.
As someone that has ADD, I know firsthand, the issue of handling mountains of information, every day together with other daily tasks I have.
Therefore, I have decided to bring to the market a solution that handles one of the biggest problems there is today: too much information and the time wasted while searching for the right and best online marketing information.
- In your opinion, what is the definition of ‘engaging content’?
Engaging content is any piece of information that adds value to its readers. While maybe people think that to create added value, you need to give a lot of content and information.
When it comes to engaging content, there is no one size fits all, meaning, the value is not determined by the amount of content.
Think about sitting down for 1 hour with a financial investment consultant that ads you value or 10 minutes with Warren Buffett. I can guarantee that the 10 minutes with Mr Buffet, has a significantly higher value, even though it is just 1/6 of the time.
- How does Morning Dough ensure that the news is accurate and timely?
At Morning Dough, we have created a unique process that allows us to bring our community members the best and most important online marketing information in a way that can be consumed in 2 minutes or less allowing them to decide what topics they wish to dive in to deeper.
After trying different formats, we were able to perfect the process and format, and it gets raving reviews from our community on the quality of the content we provide for them every day.
The Morning Dough is curating the news published online. The way we increase the accuracy of the news we send to our members, is based on our extensive digital marketing experience and hundreds of online sources, allowing us to sort out the best daily news available.
- What is your advice to companies which are still stuck with all the changes that have happened in the last couple of years?
Change is good, even when you’ve found success, change drives you into thinking differently and getting better results. When it comes to big changes, my best advice for companies is to:
- Embrace it, don’t let it take you down and take big actions.
- Talk to smart people.
- Focus on the big change and put all your resources into it. Making a big change is similar to steering a huge ship in a different direction: you need to act smart, fast and put in all resources to make sure you succeed.