FAQs

Marketing is the activity of creating, distributing, and communicating the value of what you do to the right people, in the right place, at the right time to meet the needs of customers, clients, partners and society at large.

Importantly, the marketing strategy is the work that determines who the right people are, and where they will be most receptive to the message. Whilst most marketing activities can address these first two requirements, there are very few channels and tactics that can address the third requirements of the "right time". That's why it can take up to 20 touchpoints for a person who has never previously heard of your business to become an interested lead. Unless you just happen to put your message in front of the at exactly the right moment, and mostly that's' just luck (or search engine marketing!).

We’re not hiding our ideas from you, but we do value them. Our strategic and creative thinking is an important part of what we sell, and we prefer to do a thorough, well-considered job for our clients. To immerse ourselves in your business, to truly assess your current marketing with a helicopter view, and to form a professional opinion that is relevant, useful, and actionable takes hours of work. Quality matters, and ‘quick looks’ and random thinking just aren’t our style.

We’re also a small business ourselves, and the reason our model works so hard for your budget and our efficiency is that we don’t have people sitting around in offices waiting for a job. We only start work, once we can pay people for their expertise.

The reason we don’t charge a solus strategy fee as an upfront project is because we know from experience that this doesn’t work for you. For a strategy to have value, it has to be useable. Most agencies and consultants will send you a presentation with lots of slides and images, which gets you excited about the possibilities. Reality check – how actionable is that?

We can’t count the number of times we’ve had prospective clients tells us; “we hired a consultant and got a report, but now we don’t know what to do with it”.

What’s missing is cohesion. Ideas are great, we love them too, but a list of random ideas that don’t fit together into a cohesive plan from which a team can implement is useless to you. You are left thousands of dollars down, and you still don’t have a solution. That’s why we do things differently.

Our strategies are not only a plan of the recommended marketing channels and tactics, they include a thoroughly scoped budget and calendar where every detail of how we will execute on the plan is worked through, and where the numbers in the budget actually correlate to the cost of the partners who will action the plan because no one enjoys surprise costs (least of all ourselves, who ultimately pay for any costs that we didn’t think to include!). We also think about the long-term journey for the business and set the marketing function up with scalability in mind.

Without this aspect to your plan, it’s just a bunch of ideas that are never going to go anywhere. We’re building you a marketing function, not a task list of tactics. To build the strategy, we rely on being able to engage the relevant partners into an ongoing retainer for their services. By doing this, we can get audits, competitive reviews, ideas, technical expertise and everything else we need to complete the strategy. Without that commitment, we would only be able to access generic proposal documents and quotes from prospective suppliers who aren’t particularly invested in the outcome.

Bottom line, if you’re not happy with the strategy, we’ll work on it until you are.

Yes! We work in marketing every single day. One of the key skills of a professional, qualified marketer is the ability to intuitively understand buyer behaviour and customer needs in any sector. As marketers, we work with a diverse range of business types, models, customers, products, services, and industries across our careers, and one of the things professional marketers love is being able to onboard themselves very quickly to understanding a new client's business and customer. We thrive on learning about our clients' businesses, and we do not need to be experts in your industry in order to create a strong, strategic plan.

The truth is that every business owner thinks their business is totally unique and different from every other business, and they are often blocked by this limiting belief. They tell themselves, well, we can't have anyone work on our marketing because our business is too hard to understand, or so unique that they won't know about our industry. This is just a way of you holding yourself back from progress. Creating a strong block that limits your ability to engage marketing professionals. If you're at this stage of your thinking, you're probably not ready to work with us.

Fundamentally, the principles and contexts in marketing are very similar across multiple business types and sectors. When you engage us, the first stage of working together is for us to learn about your business. You're going to have plenty of opportunity to teach us what you want us to know, give us access to resources and assets, and see that we have thoroughly researched your industry, competitors and customers when we deliver your strategy back to you.

We truly build a bespoke strategy for every client. We are not going to give you a templated document where we just change the name at the top. We're going to use our thorough and proprietary strategy development system to develop your unique strategy and deliver recommendations that are tailored to the specific needs and behaviors of your prospects, and your budget.

If you're asking that question, then sorry but you're most likely not going to be a good fit to work with us because we're all about strategy and planning!

A plan makes everything:

• More efficient

• Faster to execute

• More consistent

• Cohesive

• Scalable

• Aligned to the business goals

• Less stressful than an ad hoc approach

And that's just the reasons off the top of our head!

If you really want to align your marketing function to your business goals, so that you can grow your business, then you need a marketing strategy. Our research shows that businesses who had a comprehensive marketing strategy found marketing 'easy when they had marketers to help them'; whereas businesses with no strategy found marketing hard, even when they engaged marketers to help them. Why make life difficult for yourself?

No. We do not provide a 'one size fits all' approach to marketing strategies, or to implementation. We build a 'from scratch;' bespoke marketing strategy specifically for your business. Yes, we use a template to present the strategy (although we mostly end up tailoring this anyway!), and yes, we have a set of steps we go through to produce the strategy, but the output is unique to your business.

Our approach is our secret sauce, but broadly, it includes audience profiling, competitive and industry research, consideration of your brand positioning and messaging, channel planning, budgeting, and detailed strategies and tactics to make the most of your business, and your time.

We’re glad you asked, and happy to answer. Your live results dashboard can be viewed at any moment, so if something is not performing as well as we need it to, we work with that implementation partner to make changes and optimise the system for improved results. It’s never too late to change or improve areas of your marketing - one of the benefits of working with an outsourced team who doesn’t wait to be told what to do, they take the initiative to make change as soon as they see they can do better.

Yes. We work very well with clients whose business requires both B2C (business to consumer) and B2B (business to business) marketing. Depending on your available budget, we can develop strategies and tactics to target both aspects of your business, or we can determine which aspect to focus on during the strategy phase.