At Fablr our clients come to us for many different reasons, from websites to branding and marketing, or a combination of those three. What’s important to us, however, is finding the right ways to meet the challenges that their businesses face.
You may want a new website, for example, but the underlying challenge could be a growth target that you’re looking to hit this year. Perhaps your brand needs some love, but what’s really holding you back could be a lack of time and internal resource to deliver on your marketing plan.
In this post I’m going to break down the top 10 ways that Fablr can help grow your business, framed in terms of the most common challenges our clients face.
I’m going to be open and honest to shine the spotlight on some tough business challenges. Also, these points aren’t in any particular order, so let’s get into it.
#1: I want to grow business revenue
Usually the biggest one – your business can’t thrive without healthy revenue. A good marketing plan is designed to maximise your opportunities for revenue generation, and there are many components of these plans which contribute to this.
When it comes to focusing on revenue generation we are often asked to cover two areas: performance advertising and marketing materials to support a sales or business development function, such as slide decks, whitepapers and brochures, and exhibition stands.
These two areas of service delivery help to move the needle quickly over the short term, however a longer term solution often involves looking at your wider digital infrastructure such as your website and social channels and how your brand is being perceived by your audiences.
For examples, take a look at the marketing materials we produced for i-Pharm Consulting and the paid advertising for fidomoney.
Fablr was pleased to work with iPharm and strengthen their brand position
#2: I worry about staying up to date on marketing strategies and technology
This is a tough one, especially when you or your team are not being exposed every day to the latest technology, research and strategies.
The primary concern is losing ground to your competitors. The problem is that it’s a well founded risk, one that can rapidly erode your ability to stay competitive.
At Fablr we’re a team of senior professionals who love doing what we do, which means we’re always tinkering with and exploring new technologies and strategies, and even putting these into practice once we’ve validated that they are, indeed, the latest and greatest.
There’s also a lot of stuff out there that is all bluster, so we’ll make sure you’re avoiding that stuff like the plague (such as agency-owned content management systems, run a mile if you encounter these).
Working with us, our job is to help you get to the state-of-the-art and stay there.
The Impel brand needed to look modern, professional and dynamic.
#3: I have difficulty in standing out in a crowded and competitive market
Let’s face it, competition these days is fierce, and economic uncertainty isn’t helping. Social networks are full of ads, the internet has around a billion sites, and all your competitors are doing their darned best to eat into your market share.
Working across brand, websites and marketing, we’ve helped clients of all shapes and sizes to cut through this noise and to reach their audiences with a tone-of-voice and look-and-feel that is really you.
We’ll start with looking at your brand and messaging and how you size up with your competition.
Our client, Impel Talent, is a brand new recruitment and coaching consultancy and wanted to be able to sit at the top table with their larger, more established competitors. We transformed their brand so that they were immediately able to capitalise on the modern, serious and professional look and feel we developed for them. The result? They grew rapidly in just one year, and won a growth award to boot.
Fablr worked collaboratively with Birmingham Council to develop a project based on deep research of user groups
#4: I want to know my target audience better
If you aren’t focusing on getting your message across to the right people then you’ll struggle to deliver on your business growth objectives. Your messages won’t resonate and your sales materials won’t stick.
Whether audience targeting through a marketing campaign, or making sure your website has the right user experience, we’ve been providing insightful strategic support to our clients since we opened our doors in 2016.
We’re at our best when we can work collaboratively with you to understand your audience as fully as possible and to align your brand, messaging, channels and marketing activities accordingly.
A highlight project to demonstrate this is the Birmingham Adult Education Service language hub website, part of Birmingham City Council’s services in the local community.
It was vital that we thoroughly understood the audiences here in order to make their web platform a UK-leader in accessibility and functionality for connecting learners with suitable language courses. To do this we ran multiple user cohort and internal stakeholder workshops, iterative design and post-launch behavioural analytics.
#5: I don’t have enough in-house resource to deliver the marketing strategy
This is a key issue with many of our clients. We’re a small agency, and we work with clients who typically spend between £10,000-50,000 with us per year, so typically they aren’t in a position to hire and train a large marketing team or work with a large corporate marketing budget.
Working as an extension of our clients’ teams, we provide that additional resource and expertise in a joined up way that means you get the best of a senior strategic and delivery team, without having to hire a team of senior design and development professionals inhouse (which would cost *does some back-of-a-napkin math*…well into the six figures per year).
We’ve run promotional campaigns for Ye Olde Oak for the past three years
#6: I want to reach my audience online
Do you know which digital channel will give you the most return on your investment as part of your marketing plan? Maybe it’s a single channel, like your website, or a social media site like Facebook or LinkedIn.
For some organisations, reaching customers online isn’t of interest to them – and that’s OK – but for those who want to explore every opportunity for revenue generation, it’s worth trying to find out if there’s some traction in the online space. After all, if you’re not exploiting these then your competitors probably will.
For those that rely on digital channels, such as eCommerce businesses, or those which get website leads through organic search, we can help you build a clearer picture of your target audiences and then reach them through the right digital channel with the right message at the right time.
To have a look at some online campaigns we’ve worked on, with precise audience targeting, take a look at one of several campaigns for Ye Olde Oak.
#7: I want to build an inhouse marketing team
Some of our clients work with us in the context of needing that helping hand until they have built their own team to handle their branding, websites and marketing work inhouse.
It can take far longer than you might expect to get an inhouse team up and running, not least with the challenges of recruiting the right people with the right level of skills and experience.
If you don’t plan on working with an agency long-term, then we can fill that temporary resource gap and then not only hand things over when you’re ready but actually support you in building the team in the first place. We’re all industry veterans and have been hiring and managing marketers, designers and developers for many, many years.
We help our clients decide what skills they need to hire, help them review CV’s and prepare their incoming team to hit the ground running. Ultimately, we want to see our clients succeed, with or without us.
#8: I need help with my employer brand
A slightly different point to the one above, but still around building the right team. Many of our clients are hiring across many different roles and departments within their organisation and need help getting the recruitment message out.
One of the main ways we support our clients here is through extensive recruitment campaigns, featuring dedicated employer brand websites (such as the one we did for Parallel Consulting), and promotional campaigns encouraging the best talent to apply.
Getting the right messaging across is vital, and we support our clients with shaping their communications in light of the job roles available and their core company culture. This can include support with messaging development through to sourcing expert creative copywriting for you.
Rhenus Logistics needed to up their content and design game to stay ahead of the competition
#9: I want to become a thought leader in my industry
If your credibility as a business needs you to be able to position yourself as experts in your field, then thought leadership should be part of your marketing plan.
Success means devising a content marketing plan designed around publishing content that is consistently relevant to your brand’s wider value proposition. There’s a huge amount of competition out there and every single one of your competitors is shouting that they’re the leading voice in their space.
So how do you cut through the noise? “With difficulty”, is the short answer. Many of our clients are already doing, or at least planning on doing, their own content marketing – but without the right visuals, tone of voice, audience targeting, distribution and then follow up, your efforts can fall flat.
We’re here to help you make sense of the complexities of content marketing, and some of the ways we’ve helped our clients include:
- We helped i-Pharm to revamp their visuals to come across as more professional and modern
- We supported Ernest Hunter Green with a content marketing plan including the commissioning of copywriting services, a promotional campaign on LinkedIn and PDF artworking of whitepapers
- Case studies to support Rhenus Logistics win new business
#10: I want my marketing results to go from good to great
Many of our clients are already carrying out their own marketing activities and have done so for a while. They come to us because they are struggling to get from ‘good’ to ‘great’.
Most of them have a vision of the destination they need to get to, and our strategic and collaborative approach helps us understand how to make lots of small changes across a range of areas that add up to a sea change in performance.
Some of the dials we’ve nudged include:
- Adjustments to brand typography, colours and imagery to give a more modern appearance, allowing fidomoney to compete with much larger, more established competitors
- Advanced audience targeting for the Num Num Noodles food retail brand to make the most of a limited budget
- Revamping the sales and training materials for i-Pharm Consulting to give them an edge in team performance
In conclusion
A good marketing plan is tough to execute, and we’re just a phone call away from the support you need. Even if it’s just a bit of advice you’re after, we’d be happy to take a look.
Our clients most appreciate our honesty and transparency, so if you’d like a second opinion on any aspects of your marketing plan, from the strategy to the execution, or even how to sell it in to key decision makers and budget holders, we’ll be able to support you.
Here’s to a successful and profitable 2023!