1. Blog

Strategy: Engage a digital marketing agency which builds capability, not dependency

Strategy: We give you our thoughts on you being more independent whilst still benefitting from what we have to offer. It's a win-win and it works.

A strong powerful confident caucasian young blonde woman raises her arm and shows her bicep, suggesting independence and strength. The background is bright yellow.

We’re an agency. We like people to hire us. We like helping organisations get their digital marketing, SEO and content strategies right. We like seeing it work and we like the feeling that clients get when it works.

And then we like to take off ourselves.

It’s part of how we believe this stuff should work and the way we go about things.

And you want your agency to be itching to get away from you. You don’t want dependency. Dependency is expensive and, in the end, no-one is quite sure who it serves. You spend a lot of money, wondering if it is working as well as they say it does, but worried it might all collapse if you get rid of them.

Independence is better.

Even if we say so ourselves, we have something of a dream team. We’ve been on the inside of organisations like yours, so we’ve got the in-house experience. But the fact that we’re not part of your inner team ethic and culture means we have sufficient impartiality to say it how it is and to spot the gaps rather than overstretch to bridge them.

We have our own shared purpose, team ethic and the rest, but our separate experience of working with many similar organisations over the years is a real benefit to your organisation.

Any agency which wheedles its way into your organisation with the intention of staying there, cuckoo-like, is, effectively draining you of cash while failing to empower you to get on with the job.

And that’s not how we work. We want to help you define strategies and targets and then help you develop the tools and the in-house capability to deliver on those. And then we’re off. And we’ll see you for the next challenge.

Now, it’s important to say that this isn’t true for every client. Some simply don’t have the internal resources for the kind of digital marketing that we do, and they need. So we can do it for them - their digital marketing, their content, and so on. But that’s not dependency, that’s just a longer-form version of the same. We’ll help you do things until the point you can do them without us.

Creating digital strategies to help your revenue number rise and rise is a key part of what we do. But the genuinely significant bit is that we help you do that for yourselves.

Come for the marketing strategy, stay for the organisational change.

In creating a marketing strategy, we’ll obviously look at your target markets and audiences and what sort of keywords and content will entice them, and on what platforms.

We’ll spend just as long looking at you - why do you need help with this, and how we can make sure you have the skills and capability to do this for yourselves in future.

It’s a form of organisational development where we look at your team, and the structure, culture and strategy you have and see how we can help connect your capabilities to the market challenges. In doing that, we’ll look at issues such as:

  • Possible changes to the structure, strategy and processes of your organisation
  • Skills, capability and capacity of the people within it
  • Culture and relationships and how they affect your output
  • How to improve the output - greater efficiency, lower cost, yet higher quality
  • How to make the changes sustainable

It’s sometimes a little uncomfortable and we have to play Good Cop/Bad Cop - ‘Why is this not happening?’ aligned with ‘How can we make it happen in future?’

But usually, it’s simply being an external and impartial voice that points out things that you haven’t noticed or have avoided and helping a team grasp the nettle of a new strategy and a new way of delivery.

When it works, and it does, it gives both sales and organisational uplift. You may not depend on us for as long as you could do.

But we prefer it that way.