Search insights with Andre Alpar, speaking at 3XE Search, October 19th, Dublin

By @SimonCocking we caught up with Andre Alpar Business Angel on Parental Leave. Entrepreneurship & Online Marketing since 1999. Andre will be coming to Ireland to speak at the upcoming 3XE event on Thursday, October 19th. See more and get tickets here.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

Nearly fulltime father of two kindergarten children. Ex agency CEO / founder on a very long parental leave and super happy about it. I have been in digital marketing and entrepreneurship “my whole life”. I founded businesses for 20 years and invested as a business angel for nearly 10 years. My aim and wish is to teach and inspire others. Search is the lead channel for pull communication which is a huge paradigm shift in the last years. Those who understand it well and are able stir it with depth of professionalism will be enabled to powerfully change the efficiency and effectivity of their marketing and communication efforts or even build wholly new company on this basis.

How was the last 12 months, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?

Over 7 years I have built together with an amazing team of 170 colleagues one of Europe’s largest independent search and content marketing agencies (previously called AKM3). The agency was sold and successfully integrated into Performics (part of Publicis) – one of the largest international performance marketing agency networks. The last 12 months included my successful transition from being the founder and CEO of the company to leaving it very smoothly. It was a very unique and humbling experience showing yet again what an amazing team I’ve been lucky to have.

What are your plans for the future?

Over years my list of things “I want to do but never get to them” grew significantly. I am working it of successfully bit by bit. One of the items on the list is to speak in as many countries as possible 😉

What will you be talking about at this event? (brief taster)

As a search marketing agency, we wanted to build an ecommerce business “on the side” that would be completely ours. I will explain why we decided and how we became the second biggest German online cigar retailer ( http://www.noblego.de/ ) with only SEO and content marketing.

What inspired you to attend it?

I’ve founded three different German digital marketing conferences myself and have invited the kind people of Wolfgang Digital as speakers in the past. Through this productive contact and exchange with Alan Coleman came the idea of myself speaking at 3XE. I am very thankful for the opportunity and much looking forward to it as it will also be my first time in Ireland ever! :-O

Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?

In general, I get my daily fix of digital marketing news via following amazing individuals on Twitter. For inspiration, some suggestions from my home country: German people you should not miss are Marcus Tandler @mediadonis, Johnnes Beus @sistrix, Marcus Tober @marcustober and Maik Metzen @maikmetzen.

How can people find out more about what you are working on?

At the moment, I am reworking my CV-website. The German version already has a new design and some new content at http://andrealpar.de – an English version will follow soon. Besides that

• Blog http://andre.fm
• Podcast https://www.youtube.com/omreport
• Twitter https://twitter.com/andrealpar

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