Challenges:

• Most people online aren’t searching for their service to support them (and if they are, probably have another, similar, local charity in mind).
• Because of the number of small events the charity ran each year – any audience could quickly become overwhelmed with marketing requests and engagement across the board was low.

Strengths:

• Through the charity’s good work, the company passively generated a lot of positive content and heartwarming stories.

Approach:

I worked with charity staff and fundraising teams to;

• Switch focus to owned channels (Email, Facebook, Twitter)
• Increase time spent gathering impact stories
• Sacrifice focus on appearing in search
• Sacrifice website “shareability” tactics
• Sacrifice support for many fundraising initiatives, to build up audience engagement and make actual CTAs more powerful

Impact:

• Revenue
  • 2.5X email revenue
  • 1.7X PPC revenue
  • 2.5X revenue per customer.
• Audience and awareness
  • Tripled social media audience with engagement 2.4x of nearest peer
  • Based on local awareness – charity approached by building contractor to be included in a new development which would mean a huge improvement in facilities.

An international phone top-up company wanted to scale up their marketing activity. They asked me to help them plan their strategy for success.

Challenges:

• Incredibly thin margins on purchases
• Very low brand awareness
• Little-to-no experience in organic search or social marketing in-house.

Approach:

• I analysed the business and found that;
  • Reviews and support requests showed that, even at the point of purchase, customers weren’t paying much attention to the brand they were buying from
  • Outside of building up their own brand, the most valuable areas to compete in were highly contested.
• Using the competitor landscape and the client’s internal data, I showed that, best case organic investment was likely to cost over $400K, and would be loss-making for at least 3 years.

• I convinced key stakeholders that organic investment wasn’t a good fit and recommended that the investment be redirected to
  • Paid media for short-term acquisition
  • Skills and technology to better retain customers
  • Geographic and (in-particular) service-based expansion.

Impact: 

• Client saved over £300K over the course of the next three years, and used those funds to work on projects with a much larger positive benefit.

A unicorn SAAS company wanted to expand their reach in APAC, starting from a base in Singapore. They had resources and smart people, but a huge number of territories and languages to cover.

Challenges:

• Powerful and well-funded brands already operating in many of the target territories
• Language and cultural differences meant that there were up-front costs to any marketing expansion
• Very different population densities and wealth made it hard to understand the value of different regions.

Strengths:

• Strong existing brand in EU, US, and parts of Asia
• Smart, capable team
• Healthy resources.

Approach:

I worked with local teams to;

• Understand the experts we had in each region
• Combine LTV for customers in each region, with survey and search data that allowed us to estimate audience value in different regions
• Used regional branded search data to compare the client with competitors and spot the regions of biggest gaps
• Identified the strongest and fastest growing competitors in each region, and the strategies they were employing for growth
• Worked with APAC head office to plan the most appropriate activity for the territory (i.e. events/ advertising/ blog posts) depending on value and customer density
• Incorporated defensive messaging targeting the strongest competitors in each territory.

Impact:

Brand awareness

• Across the three key territories selected – brand awareness increased by 3 percentage points