How This Analytics & Marketing Agency Puts Diversity at the Forefront

Welcome to our Agency Spotlight series! Each article will feature pioneers of the #agencylife and how they run their businesses in the modern world. This week we hear from Apples & Oranges, an analytics and marketing agency that focuses on bringing their clients the right data to help them succeed.

Who are you? What is your background?

Hi, we are Apples & Oranges Analytics and Marketing, or A & O for short. We specialize in data-driven marketing campaigns for organizations that express culture (through social, ethnic, or spiritual values). This means we often work with social entrepreneurs making money with innovative solutions, though we also work with other organizations that express culture through more traditional means, such as food or the arts.

A & O was founded by Michael Despotovic and is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. After studying World Literature and Interactive Art and Design, he earned a Masters of Publishing from Simon Fraser University. His experience in book marketing and arts & culture administration was a springboard for self-starting ideas and projects that eventually led him into the intersection between entrepreneurship and social change. You can learn more about Michael at despotovic.ca.

How would you describe Apples + Oranges Analytics and Marketing?

Given A & Os mandate to serve the cultural expressive, we too are made up of team members of varying faiths, ethnic backgrounds, and lived experiences. Our strength is in our diversity, and we are energized by the value that our clients bring to people across the world.

What does A + O do especially well? What is your speciality?

A & O was named in defiance of the classic idiom or phrase, you can't compare apples and oranges. From our perspective, anyone can evaluate their digital marketing strategies, with the right use of data. This is why we specialize in marketing attribution - i.e. the ability to attribute success, or areas of improvement, using data collected from web, social, email, advertising, etc. If you can name it, we can track it.

Our funnel maps and advertising campaigns are living, breathing documents, thanks to all the data we get from tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, as well as organic and paid posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more. We evaluate our marketing tactics constantly, and since we visualize all our data using Google DataStudio, our clients have the ease and comfort of seeing our work, and their success, in real-time.

What digital tactics have you found worked in your client's industry?

While we always encourage our clients to build a frictionless experience on their website, communicate their brand out across social media, and reach out to potential customers with online advertising, our top emphasis is in email marketing.


Most of the cool things we want to do with data, like personalizing our messaging, automating workflows, and tracking users across their customer journey, can only happen if we trace them to a single identifier, like their email. Also, with the ever-changing algorithms of social media, we can rely on email to be a direct communication between brand and customer.

What is the most rewarding part about the agency life?

Perhaps this is the answer of most agencies, but the ability to work on such a breadth of market opportunities, given our diverse portfolio of clients, is a lot of fun. We will often find a strategy that works really well for one client, in one industry, and will then translate that into a strategy for another client, creating a constant feedback loop of improvement, for everyone we work with.

It means a lot to have the trust of our clients that were out there trying to accomplish the same goal they have for their organization, and we look forward to growing our clientele as often as possible.

What problems are you solving with HeyOrca?

HeyOrca allows us to stay focused and organized when it comes to planning our social calendars and general campaigns. Often, our clients want us to do the heavy-lifting of creating content and tailoring it to the platform, but they still want to be involved in the edits and/or revisions. Thankfully, HeyOrca allows communication between our clients to be rather seamless. Oh, and we really like the ability to post on Google My Business, too.

Want to showcase your agency? Email us at katie@heyorca.com to have your agency feature in our Agency Spotlight series!

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