Marketing support
in the way that works for you.
A bit about me.
I'm a UK based generalist senior marketer with fifteen years of applied practice and post-graduate training across the end-to-end marketing process, for both general marketing and brand management.
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During my twelve years working in-house I worked from junior to senior roles, and as an independent contractor I have done a variety of senior positions either as the sole marketer in the business, or slotting into an existing team. I've worked for small community businesses, growing mid-size businesses, and large global businesses, working on various elements of strategy development, tactical planning, campaign management, and continuous impovement.
Avoid the mistakes that damage
marketing effectiveness.
When clients have issues with underperforming marketing, it's usually because they are trying to treat the symptoms rather than address the causes. This happens because most fractionals, consultants and agencies don't know what the causes are, they just have an off-the-shelf collection of prefabricated solutions that can temporarily mask the symptoms.
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The depth and breadth of my expertise means that I know the causes and how to address them. Unlike a lot of other marketers I can:
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be advisory and executional
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bridge strategy into tactical planning and delivery
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make solutions that are designed specifically for you
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apply the evidence-based proven principles of marketing effectiveness
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select critically assessed best practices for delivering commercial results
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My philosophy is simple: do what's best for business.
It's not about impressing other marketers or firing an infleuncer's latest magic bullet; it's doing the relevant and appropriate things for your business that contribute to its success. It may not get applause on LinkedIn, but it will get money in the bank.
Marketing, not "marketing"
How do I help you avoid the mistakes that damage marketing effectiveness? I make sure you're not doing "marketing". "Marketing" looks and sounds like marketing, but underneath it is a mess of misunderstandings, misapplications, and misinterpretations that creates a broken practice full of overcomplication, inefficiency, and wasted resources.
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It's a consequence of marketers and marketing leaders with backgrounds in specialisms rather than experience and training across the whole discipline. They don't know how to develop long-term holistic performance, so they use a series of short-term fixes to spike vanity metrics. They don't have the foundational knowledge to critically assess the efficacy of practices, approaches, and tools to select the appropriate ones, so every trend, fad, and bandwagon that comes along gets pushed in hoping that a few will work well enough.
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The fact that I can identify and address "marketing" means I'm a safer pair of hands than most other fractionals, consultants, and freelancers who can only tackle the surface issues. Even if you decide not to hire me, I don't want you to hire one of them: I'm happy to give you some advice on the warning signs to look for during your hiring process.​
Let's get rid of the
colouring-in department.
Marketing is there to help your business make revenue and profit. It convinces the customer that you are the best option so you're chosen when they are ready to buy.
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It's not sugary fluff like "building loving relationships" or "capturing hearts and minds", it's not helping customers "realise dreams" or "inspiring and delighting" them. I've never understood why marketing talks like this and then complains it doesn't get taken seriously.
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I'm trained in marketing as a business function, and I've been delivering marketing from that starting point for fifteen years. Marketing's job is to contribute to business success by affecting its commercial performance, and I'm trained and experienced across the research, strategy development, tactical planning, operations, and execution to do it.​
I don't see the
word "growth" anywhere...
Don't panic!​ I focus on marketing effectiveness because that determines the contribution marketing makes to the things a business needs to grow. When marketing is done properly, it is built to affect the sources of growth: revenue and profit.
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Marketers who think that growth is a specialist skill or a specific objective are demonstrating that they don't understand the discipline at a fundamental level, and they don't actually understand marketing's applied relationship to growth. That's why they only use it in vague, general statements or pithy taglines: it's a buzzword for them.
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As a properly trained and experienced marketer I know it is a core competency and a natural outcome of my line of work, and I can work with you to create a sustainable and robust solution that affects the mechanics that influence it.
More effectiveness talk
I know it's tiresome, but it's overused by a lot of fractionals and consultants that confuse effectiveness with other specialisms.
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Effectiveness isn't just revenue and it isn't just channel performance, it's not obsessing over vanity and stepping-stone metrics at the bottom of the funnel. That's "Performance Marketing".
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Effectiveness isn't spiking revenue and ROI with a plug-and-play 'scalable' plan of gimmicky communications, forcing higher spend on producing more to mask their ever diminishing impact. That's "Growth Marketing".
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Effectiveness isn't being left-field, unpredictable, or unconventional; and it isn't doing them even if the more logical or boring option would get better results. That's "Creative Strategy".
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Effectiveness isn't using these approaches to get numbers upfront, and then seeing the cost of doing them overtake the returns they bring after a few months.
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Effectiveness is making a positive impact on business performance through a cumulative commercial return across revenue and profit. That should be marketing's aim. Everything else is a means to that end, not an end in itself.
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​I'll let you in on a trade secret
Most fractionals, consultants and agencies are not creating solutions for you. They have a stock programme that they copy-and-paste from client to client. Why? It's great!
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For them. At a surface level they can use it to bypass any diagnostic work and skip straight to action, which makes them look efficient and proactive. The deeper issue is that these solutions are engineered to bloat invoices. They will include known issues and pretend they were unforeseeable to charge you for "unexpected" fixes. They will be full of unnecessary things that don't add any value. They can appear to be doing work from scratch when they are really just editing. It all artificially inflates the amount of work that "has" and "needs" to be done. It makes them maximum money for minimal work.
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After all that, you won't get great results either. The solutions are not designed to address your specific issues in your specific situation, they are generic solutions to problems that are not the ones you actually have. They will use quick fixes for surface level issues that will stop working if you stop working with them, so you're locked in and paying them more over time. It's all what's best for their business, not yours.
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I start from a blank screen, working with you through each stage or element you need. I aim to leave you with programmes and solutions that deliver consistent and sustainable holistic results that you can continue to run without me.
Recruiter? I can help your clients as a...