The Marketing Optimist has been around for a fair while now, and worked with a wide range of B2B and B2C clients all with varying marketing challenges.

Regardless of your needs, there are certain things we need to do to ensure that we provide you with marketing strategies that help your business grow with a clear ROI. Which means that we may not tell you to use the marketing tactic you had in mind when you first got in touch.

Why we don’t start with channels like SEO or social media

Many agencies start with a service. We start with an outcome.

You may well come to us and say that you want us to run an SEO or social media campaign. However, our job is to find out if the marketing strategies you have in mind will be the most effective use of your time and budget to meet the strategic aims of your business.

Rather than taking that at face value, we’ll hold discovery meetings with you and your team and get to the bottom of what revenue growth you want to achieve in the short, medium and long term for your business.

If you’re unsure whether your current marketing is the right investment, we can help you figure that out.

Strategic marketing starts with understanding your business

Once we know the direction you want to go in, we can start asking probing questions about your business. We want the best for your business, and that means we need to have candid discussions about lots of things.

• Who are your ideal customers? – What levels of understanding of your products/searches/industry do each have?
• What’s important to them – What are their pain points that your business solves?
• Why should they come to you and not your competition?
• What’s happening in your business?
• Why do you feel you need marketing support?
• How will you know when the marketing is working?
• What data do you already have about your business?
• What’s your internal structure to support marketing activity?
• Are there any internal problems we need to be aware of?
• Is the whole business bought in, including the MD and the FD?

Once we know the answers to these questions, and a whole lot more, we can recommend a marketing strategy for you, which may well involve using the tactics you came to us asking for, but may not and may involve other ideas and marketing strategies too.

We really want the marketing we do for your business to work, we’re optimists after all, and knowing as much as we can will really help it be a success, which is good for you and the business.

Building a marketing strategy that actually works

Armed with all this information and a few more emails and calls to clarify some points, we’ll put together a clear marketing proposal that sets out the problem, the relevant background information and then clearly sets out the marketing strategies and tactics we propose to use to help you reach your goals.

We frame all our proposals as a long-term partnership with your business. We do this because marketing is never a silver bullet and there are no fast tracks. Marketing success comes from long-term strategies that build and compound over time, building reputation and long-term value for companies and their customers.

To reflect this, our marketing proposals cover a minimum of 6-months, which gives us and you time to settle into a strategy and ensure that there is time for things to begin to work. The vast majority of our clients keep working with us after this initial period, and some have been with us for over 7 years, enabling The Marketing Optimist to develop and grow with their business.

What working with a strategic marketing partner looks like

In the early stages, there will be more meetings and discussions to get to the nitty-gritty of running marketing strategies and campaigns.

That includes:

• Challenging you (constructively)
• Bringing you ideas without being asked
• Taking ownership
• Getting to know your team and who is responsible for each area, sign-off or specific campaigns
• Accessing all your resources – images, videos, style guides
• Gaining logins to platforms and tools we will need
• Setting up a reporting structure – which really helps better decision-making
• Creating a meeting structure – more meetings in the early days, moving to a monthly regular meeting

Our business structure is very simple and flat with as few layers of management as possible.

Regardless of the marketing strategies we are handling for your business, you will have one main contact who you can speak to directly, reducing confusion, mixed messaging and delays.

Planning, execution and continuous improvement

Once we’re all technically set-up, we’ll create a marketing plan for the year. This is your checklist to be able to follow the activity, see where gaps are, add in events and adapt to changes that happen across a long period of time.

We then break this year-long plan down into a shorter term 3 month more detailed plan, which is constantly moving forward.

Then, each month you get a highly detailed monthly plan which will contain content for you to approve before it’s published.

Marketing reporting for future success

Within the first 7 working days of the month, you’ll receive a report on how the previous month’s marketing has performed, with notes on what worked and what didn’t, with recommendations and areas we’ll be working on in the coming months.

We supply the data and information that’s useful in our marketing reports. They’re not a data bump containing every possible statistic we can find. We keep them concise and jargon-free to help you understand the results and make a clear business decision based on them.

If there’s something you need more detail on or clarification, we’re of course happy to give you that.

Why do we work this way?

Our clear and open approach means our clients know exactly what to expect from us. It shows that we apply creativity, insight and experience to everything we do. That’s how we build trust and work with our clients for a very long time.

If you’re looking for a marketing strategy that actually supports your business goals, let’s have a conversation.