There is a meeting that happens in a lot of businesses, and it goes something like this.
HOMEPAGE
You sit down with your marketing person for a review. They open a report. Reach is up. Followers are up. The best performing post got forty thousand impressions. Engagement is above the industry average.
And you nod, but something is not sitting right, cause revenue is flat. Enquiries have not moved. Your sales people are not getting better leads. And you cannot point to a single customer who walked in because of any of it.
But the report looks good and you do not have the language to argue with it. So the meeting ends the way it started, nothing really changes, and three months later you are back in the same room having the same conversation.
It is usually not the person
Your marketer might be very good. A lot of them are. What normally happens is that somebody was hired to fix a problem nobody had properly defined, and now they are doing their best inside that, which is how you end up with activity instead of results.
Because here is the question that almost never gets asked before the hiring, the posting, the promos and the influencers. Are people not hearing about you, or are they hearing about you and not buying?
Those are two completely different problems. They need two completely different plans, two different kinds of people, and two different ways of measuring whether it worked.
What we do about it
We work with businesses on marketing, branding and communications, and we always start in the same place, which is why. Why does this matter to the business right now, what exactly is supposed to change, and how will we know.
Once that is settled, the rest gets a lot simpler.Sometimes the answer is that your positioning is wrong and no amount of content will fix it. Sometimes your brand is saying one thing while the experience says another. Sometimes the strategy is fine and the problem is that nobody has set up a way of measuring anything beyond posts published. And sometimes you have the right person in the wrong structure, doing six jobs, reporting to nobody in particular.
We do the thinking and we do the work. Positioning and brand strategy, the messaging that comes out of it, campaigns, and the communications that sit around all of it. We will also tell you plainly when what you need is not us.
How it starts
With a call. A conversation where you tell us what is frustrating you and we ask you questions, some of which you will not have been asked before.
If there is something here for us to do, we will come back to you with what we think the actual problem is and what we would do about it. If there is not, we will say that too, and you will still leave the call knowing more than you did.
What it looks like when it is working
You can answer the question. Somebody asks whether the marketing is working and you have a number, not a feeling.
Your team knows what they are doing and why, which means you stop being the person who has to decide every small thing.
The brand says the same thing everywhere, so people stop forming their own version of what you do.
And you get your attention back for the parts of the business only you can run.
