Fractional + advisory.
Marketing,
not "marketing".
A simple philosophy: do what's best for business.
How? Creating tailored best practice marketing programmes that deliver sustainable effectiveness.
It sounds a bit academic and a bit pretentious putting it that way. In plainer speak, I work with you to make a marketing programme designed for you, built on the evidence-based best practices that are relevant and realistic for your business.
£650
day rate
These projects cover the core of marketing and brand management. I can help you with the entire end-to-end process or each individual stage.
Rate starts at £650 per day for fully remote; travel or office attendance will push it up.
Fractional.
This covers longer and broader projects. Like any fractional role they are usually more senior, involve a combination of advisory and executional work, and cover a wider range of responsibilities. They typically involve strategy development, tactical planning, and running marketing teams/departments while they get the delivery underway.
My most common fractional work covers strategy development and converting it into tactical plans, improving sales and marketing alignment, improving operations and processes (such as automation and lead management), and generally improving the perception of marketing in the business.
The typical reasons I am hired for this work are:
-
businesses starting their marketing function
-
businesses who have a limited amount of marketing and need to extend it
-
marketing departments that need to improve what they are already doing
-
marketing teams that need to improve the effectiveness of their outputs
Consultancy (by another name).
Although I do offer consultancy, I prefer to call it advisory. It may seem like an odd choice, but I do have good reason. In recent years within marketing, the term "consultant" has been adopted by a lot of charlatans selling snake oil in the form of overstated (or even fabricated) expertise. Unfortunately the term is losing both its currency and its reliability. It's a shame, but as it is an established term it is necessary to have it somewhere for the purposes of search engine algorithms.
My most common advisory work is converting strategy into tactical plans, brand management, and campaign planning.
The typical reasons I am hired for advisory work are:
-
reducing the dependency on tactically-led performance marketing
-
shifting to strategically-led marketing practice
-
improving overall brand management
-
getting better customer insight to increase customer orientation
What does this include?
Research.
Quantitative research
Customer orientation
Segmentation
Customer profiles
Funnel building
Research creates an objective picture of the market.
It starts with data gathering, combining internal and external data to create insight into the market and customer. It reveals the dynamic between you and them, allowing you to balance the needs of the business with the needs of the customer.
When it is done well it threads customer orientation throughout strategy and tactics, making sure that your marketing is getting the attention of real prospects and customers, and not idealised versions that don't really exist.
Strategy.
Targeting
Positioning
Operations
Objective setting
Brand management
Strategy is choosing what to prioritise.
Research shows you the dynamics and identifies where the problems are; strategy is choosing who you want to target, what position you want to hold, and which issues you can realistically address. Realistically address is important: trying to tackle the biggest problems rather than achievable ones has been the most common reason I’ve seen strategic objectives failed.
Another typical reason for falling short is missing practical things that impact choices, particularly operational influences such as data and systems. Other freelancers might not have dealt with marketing operations, so my experience ensures that I can factor in issues that they may miss.
Tactics.
Product marketing
Pricing
Communications
Campaign management
Tactics are the actions you take.
These are the things the prospects and customers see: the product, the price, where it is available, and the communications you send them. Every part should be approached with neutrality, not predetermined before any research or strategy work has been done: tactics before or without strategy is the business equivalent of firing blindly into the dark and hoping to get a hit.
Each divides up into planning and execution, and my experience in continuous improvement, sales and marketing alignment, lead processing, and campaign management are factored into both.
Campaigns.
Integrated communications
Multichannel campaigns
Content marketing
Account Based Marketing
Campaigns are the tip of the marketing arrow, the part that pulls all the previous work together and gets it in front of your prospects and customers.
The most effective campaigns are multichannel, so I combine the appropriate online and offline activities across these core categories: