Any business that has successfully grown its headcount and built a team that is as strong in skills and character as it is in numbers will recognise the story in these photos. But what’s the even stronger story behind the smiles – and why is it good news for businesses in this region?
Since our relaunch in October 2020 (when the first group photo of four people was taken) and this month (when the second group photo, on the opposite page, was taken), we have grown much more than just head count.
We’ve also doubled our turnover and increased our business process efficiency by 20% – which basically means we’ve got a lot better both at bringing new clients on board and delivering more for them for the budget available.
But why would you care? What’s so good about what we do for your business anyway, and how do we do it differently to other agencies?
Find your audience, know their mind
We focus on doing marketing properly, and that hinges on three critical factors: segmenting your target audience to find suspects and prospects, knowing their mind and what’s on it, and creating a dialogue that engages, drawing the target down through the sales funnel to a buying decision.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And we see no reason to complicate it – indeed, we pride ourselves on simplifying the complicated (which is why our strategic marketing plans are only ever one page long).
But behind the simplicity, we’ve invested in some pretty heavyweight marketing muscle. Our relaunch wasn’t just about a new logo and a new website. It was about putting in place extensive ‘martech’ (marketing technology) to analyse data from our clients’ universe and turn this rapidly and efficiently into accurate segmentation and effective targeting – minus the expense to our clients of doing it manually.
It was also about moving our strategy to a completely original, and more scientific, model: cognitive marketing. We are the only UK B2B marketing agency we’re aware of taking this approach.
This approach stops you burning through marketing budget, attempting to connect with audiences that could never have any intention of buying from you or even considering you as a potential supplier. Cognitive marketing totally reverses this wastefulness, gathering and analysing strategic intelligence about your segmented targets, their interests, and their likely intentions, and tailoring the conversations you have with them – in email campaigns, advertising, website content, on social media, in sales collateral, and through customer service channels – to respond to those characteristics and ‘push the
buying buttons’.
Science requires scientists, so we brought on board Associate Professor Benedetto de Martino, Neuroscientist at University College London, to help us develop – and articulate to our own clients – strategies to understand decision-making tendencies in different marketing audiences, and shape our communications to steer and influence them.
And then came the pandemic – and we couldn’t have been better placed to confront it. With face-to-face customer meetings and physical marketing events obliterated almost overnight, digital marketing communication became not only the new normal, but the only viable way for our clients to build sales-friendly trust with customers and prospects.
In short, SMEs needed us at a time of uncertainty, when all they could do to drive business was to communicate better. It was a stark reminder that share of voice equals share of market, particularly in a crisis or economic downturn.
And with our precision segmentation and cognitive insight, we were already geared up to deliver what was needed then – and we continue to be so in a radically changed post-pandemic business world.
Clients and outcomes: the vital statistics
We’re getting consistently strong results for our clients, helping to build and grow their businesses, which in turn is growing ours.
Clients are seeing growing pipelines and real conversions – a great example is a design engineering client where almost 50% of the revenue generated in our first six months working in partnership was attributable to a target sector that our marketing strategy had specifically targeted for the first time.
So, what are our plans for the future? We’ll be focusing on working with more clients in construction, building materials and manufacturing – as well as other complex industries into which we’ve diversified in the last year – and we’ll continue to add value by acting as their outsourced marketing department or supporting their
marketing teams.
What a year! Bring on the next one.
Find out more at www.bcmagency.co.uk or email hello@bcmagency.co.uk
or call 01727 226202 or 07788 537567
CEO
