After receiving an enquiry, we’ll arrange to meet face-to-face or online so we can discuss the project and get to know you, your business, and your aims.

Preferably, we like to meet at your place of business, during an evening or weekend, and when there are customers.

After the meeting, we’ll go away and investigate if we can help you. We’ll come back to you with our initial thoughts and suggest we create a Proposal for you.

The Proposal will include what we can do for you, by when, the cost and payment terms.

It’s important both parties agree to the scope of the Proposal. We’ve seen projects overrun on timings, or fizzle out, due to a mismatch in expectations. It’s much easier to make changes during the Proposal stage than later down the line.

If you accept the Proposal, we’ll then:

• Agree on a start date;
• Ask for any resources that we need to make a start, such as access to web and sales stats;
• Agree when the first invoice will be issued.

The Marketing Strategy sets the overall direction for your business to achieve sales growth or become more competitive in your market. The strategy is written in a series of intention brief recommendations.

Unless you already have a clearly defined strategy, this stage is not to be avoided. Don’t rush into tactics. The danger is that you’ll ultimately waste time and money on ideas that may work for another business but not yours.

Instead, this stage is all about gaining genuine customer and market insights, and then considering the particular circumstances of your business before making a series of recommendation that will set the business up for growth.

It can take a while to create a good strategy and we ask clients for patience during this stage.

We’ll typically:

1. Conduct customer research, preferably speaking to your customers (the results of which will be shared back with you);
2. Sampling your product or service, sometimes as a secret shopper, to get a first-hand experience;
3. Research your competitors and the wider market;
4. Review your current and previous marketing;
5. Analyse any stats you can provide, such as sales data, website stats, footfall figures, social media stats, etc.

As part of creating the strategy, there are some things we’ll need from you:

• Access to your customers, to gather customer feedback;
• Existing sales patterns and possibly other figures (e.g. store footfall) for benchmarking how the business is currently performing;
• We’ll go back and forth with you quite a lot, so some of your time is needed;
• Time during evenings or weekends to discuss the Marketing Strategy.

After developing the Marketing Strategy, we’ll then:

Issue an invoice for the remaining amount for the Strategy (usually on 14-day terms) and then move on to creating the Marketing Plan (with your approval), which sets out the actionable series activities, their timings, and costs.

The Marketing Plan takes the recommendations in the Marketing Strategy and develops an actionable series of marketing activities, with costs, timings and suppliers.

And just as every Strategy is customised to each client and their aims, so too is each Plan.

This means that the best course of action for one client may be a new product launch and ecommerce website, whereas for another client it may be a promotional campaign using a range of online and print activities in a local area.

Either way, we’ve got experience working with all kinds of media, such as websites, social media, email marketing, direct mail, brochures, magazines and newspapers, leaflets, flyers, business cards and stationery, radio advertising, TV advertising, marketing data, and so on. We’re flexible.

The sequencing of activities usually leans towards a mix of achieving “quick wins” to help short-term cash flow, and then activities that are designed for the longer-term, such as building a recognisable brand with presence.

What you can expect in the Plan

1. Breakdown of actionable marketing activities and their timings, based on the Marketing Strategy;
2. Breakdown of costs, including media or creative costs from outside suppliers (e.g. graphic designers, website costs, advertising, etc);
3. Suppliers that will be used, such as designers, copywriters, website hosting companies, printers, etc;
4. Presentation of the Marketing Plan.

This is where we action the Marketing Plan and get any everything live. Before we do that, we’ll usually set up the measurement framework beforehand so we can tell whether the Plan is delivering positive results when it goes live.

Almost invariably, the Plan will need to be adjusted and optimised along the way, to drive toward success. So expect some changes along the way.

For some campaigns, we will need to run a “pre-go-live” test, to check whether we’re on the right path before we commit. This is to reduce risk to your marketing spend. This can be anything from a discussion with selected customers to a test advertising campaign using a small budget.

Once the Plan has come to an end, we’ll spend time with you going through how you can maintain your marketing, and we’ll provide our recommended “next best action” as part of achieving long-term growth for your business.

How and why we (occasionally) use suppliers, and what this means for you

When we use outside suppliers it’s usually either to complete a project quicker, or achieve a better end result for the client. Mostly both.

For some things we can’t avoid using suppliers. Such as website hosting, domain registration or ecommerce transactions. Or advertising on Facebook, magazines, or radio stations.

Creative and design work can either be handled by us or outsourced. We’re experienced graphic and web designers. For larger projects, or where the client needs a quick turnaround, we’ll usually bring in a trusted designer (such as Laura Hodgkinson Creative, who we worked with for years, or Pie Creative who recently helped us to create a set of Brand Guidelines for an estate agent).

We pay the designer from our own charges.

In the case of website services, such as domain registration and hosting, you’ll need full ownership and control. The relationship needs to be between you and the hosting company, without us in the middle. But in all cases, we’ll walk you through the process.

Lastly, we don’t accept sales commissions from any suppliers to avoid any conflict of interest.

Handing over to the client

Once the project is complete, we provide a full handover.

For some projects, this is a quick process, but for others, this can be more involved. For instance, if we have been running advertising on a platform like Google which you haven’t used before, we’ll need to run through how to log in, monitor the campaigns, set up a new campaign, etc.

On-going support

Some clients want our support to continue after the project. We’ll be happy to discuss any ongoing or longer-term relationship with you and will create a new Proposal that outlines what we think is the next best step on your path to achieving your business aspirations.