How we get from the first hello to actually working together
This is where we begin with most of our larger clients.
There are exceptions. If you know you need us to run your PPC, sort out your SEO or provide another specific marketing service, we don't need to put you through a lengthy strategic process for the sake of it.
But quite often, the businesses coming to us know they need marketing help without necessarily knowing what that help should look like.
They may already have a marketing team. They may have several agencies doing different things. They may need senior marketing leadership, a new strategy, more resource or a complete rethink of how marketing works within the business.
That's when we use this five-stage process.
And importantly, we do most of it before you spend a penny with us.
First, we say hello
We start with a short introductory call.
This is the hello. We want to hear a little about the business, why you've approached us and what you think you might need. We'll tell you about Marketing 101 and how we tend to work.
We're not going to diagnose your entire marketing operation in half an hour.
We're really deciding whether we like the sound of each other and think there's enough there to carry on talking.
The next conversation is longer, normally around an hour, and we ask a lot more questions.
We want to understand how the business actually works. Where does the money come from? Who buys from you and why? What are you already doing in marketing? What's working? What's annoying you? Where are you trying to get to?
We'll talk about your market and your competitors, but also the things that are peculiar to your industry or your business. Those details matter.
We'll also want to know what you're trying to achieve. That could be significant growth, a new market, better profitability, a stronger marketing department or something completely different.
By the end of it, we should understand more than the marketing brief you initially came to us with. We should have a decent understanding of the business behind it.
The A to Z of what marketing could do for your business
We then go away and create your Opportunity Compendium. This is deliberately big.
We use everything you've told us, the collective experience of our senior team and AI to help us research, interrogate and push the thinking further.
Then we write down every sensible marketing opportunity we can find. And we mean all of them.
At this point, we don't care whether you currently have somebody doing it, whether it's how you've historically marketed the business or whether we think you have the budget for it.
If we looked at this business with a completely open mind, what could great marketing look like?
The Compendium starts with our understanding of your business so you can tell us straight away if we've misunderstood something important.
Then come the opportunities. They might involve your brand, website, CRM, trade shows, PR, advertising, customer communications, sales process or the structure of the marketing department itself. Every business produces a different list.
And occasionally we'll spot something useful that isn't really marketing at all. We'll put that in too.
At this point, we're still not selling you anything. We're working out what we think you could do.
This is where you're allowed to tell us we're wrong
You'll get the Opportunity Compendium to read properly.
Some of it you'll love. Some of it you might already be doing. There may be ideas you've tried before that failed miserably for reasons we couldn't possibly have known. Another agency may already have something covered.
And you might simply think one of our ideas is rubbish. That's absolutely fine.
We'll talk it through. We can defend an idea if we think it's worth defending, and you can challenge us with the knowledge you have from actually running the business.
Then we dissect and delete.
The things we agree aren't needed come out.
What we're left with becomes the marketing plan: the things that you and Marketing 101 agree would genuinely improve the marketing of the business.
Your budget determines the speed, not the ambition
Only now do we need to have a proper conversation about budget.
We deliberately haven't allowed budget to constrain the Opportunity Compendium because we wanted to work out what you should do before worrying about how quickly you can afford to do it.
In most cases, we can deliver the same plan on very different budgets. The difference is time.
A bigger budget gives us more hours and more resource, so we can move through the plan faster. A smaller budget means we take longer.
It's actually pretty simple. You're buying access to our expertise, resources and time. Your budget tells us how much of that we can deploy and therefore how quickly we can get through the work.
So don't be embarrassed about the budget and don't assume it's prohibitive. We need the real number because that's how we build a realistic plan.
Now we work out how to do it
At this point we know what we think needs doing, you agree with it and we know what you want to spend. Now we can give you a useful proposal.
We'll put the marketing plan into a sensible order. Some things will need doing before others. Some can happen at the same time. There will probably be things we can get moving quickly and others that need more work behind the scenes.
We'll tell you how long we think the plan will take at the budget you've given us, what we'd tackle first and what initial contract period makes sense.
And you'll be able to see exactly what you're paying us to achieve.
There shouldn't be a mysterious agency retainer followed by a vague promise to "do some marketing". We already have the plan. The proposal simply tells you how we're going to work through it.
That depends on what you already have and what you need.
We can do the work ourselves. Your existing marketing team can deliver parts of it. Your current agencies might be perfectly good and simply need clearer direction. We can bring in other specialists where they're needed.
Quite often it's a mixture.
We can also stay involved as your Fractional CMO, providing the senior marketing leadership that keeps the plan moving, supports your internal team and makes sure different agencies aren't all disappearing off in their own directions.
We're not trying to replace good people for the sake of giving Marketing 101 more work.
If you've already got the right person or supplier for something, great. We'll work with them.
If there's a gap, we'll work out the best way to fill it.
Because we don't think it makes much sense to prescribe the answer before we've diagnosed the problem.
You might come to us convinced you need SEO. You might be right.
But once we understand the business, we may discover that SEO is fine and your CRM is the bigger opportunity. Or that the website isn't converting. Or that you've got five good marketing suppliers but nobody senior making sure they're all working towards the same goal.
Perhaps the marketing team itself needs changing before you spend any more money generating traffic.
We'd rather find that out before we start charging you to fix the wrong thing.
That's really what this whole process is about.
This approach tends to suit businesses where the marketing question has become bigger than "can you run this channel for us?"
Perhaps the business has grown and marketing hasn't quite grown up with it. Perhaps you've got plenty happening but aren't convinced it's all connected. Or you know there is considerably more potential there and want somebody experienced to work out what that looks like.
We don't need you to arrive with the answer.
Finding the answer is part of our job.
Let's start with hello.
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