How we work

We have five stages in the process we work through with our clients to help them grow their businesses. You may not need to all of them, but we hope our philosophy gives you a better understanding of how we work.

Stage 1: Formulating a plan for growth

Before moving forward with any marketing, it is important to identifying your key strengths and your target markets, which may not always be the obvious ones when it comes to targeting new business. You may want to grow your company in a new direction or identify and develop your most profitable clients. You also need to think about who your targets are specifically, identifying their job roles and building a picture of them and those who influence their decisions.

Stage 1 is about sitting down with you and your team and working out what you offer and who you want to offer it to. Then we work on developing your core marketing message, the thing that your clients and potential clients will want to engage with and will become central to all your communications.

How we work

We have five stages in the process we work through with our clients to help them grow their businesses. You may not need to all of them, but this is our philosophy and it gives you the context for our proposal to you.

Stage 1: Formulating a plan for growth

Before moving forward with any marketing, it is important to identifying your key strengths and your target markets, which may not always be the obvious ones when it comes to targeting new business. You may want to grow your company in a new direction or identify and develop your most profitable clients. You also need to think about who your targets are specifically, identifying their job roles and building a picture of them and those who influence their decisions.

Stage 1 is about sitting down with you and your team and working out what you offer and who you want to offer it to. Then we work on developing your core marketing message, the thing that your clients and potential clients will want to engage with and will become central to all your communications.

Stage 2: Creating the right impression

In a crowded market place, you need something that will make your company stand out. It doesn’t have to be really showy or bright, but it really needs to be both impressive and of interest to your audience, so they want to know more about how you can help them.

There are many different ways to make your company more appealing to new clients and influencers – logo redesign, brand development, new website update or complete website revamp – but one of the most important ways is to evolve the way you communicate to other companies, you need to get your core marketing message across again and again.

Stage 3: Getting noticed

Firstly, don’t forget about your current or past clients as they can be your best source of new business. There is a crazy statistic that says that something like 70% of business comes from existing clients but only 10% of companies actively sell and communicate to their current client base. The biggest crime is the lack of cross selling where current customers are completely unaware of all the service you offer.

With new clients, the challenge is not getting in front of them, that’s easy. We can work with you to refine your target, purchase GDPR compliant data and send them emails. We can identify the searches they do on Google and position you there when they search, or we can profile targets on LinkedIn by company, size or job roll to showcase how you do what you do, the options are endless……..

Where we really add value is in developing what you put in front of your targets and ensuring you communicate regularly. Trying to do this in-house can be unbelievably hard, as it really isn’t seen as a priority, and that monthly email newsletter to existing clients soon gets forgotten. Using an external agency like Sugar means it will get done consistently every month, with content that sticks to your core message, to position you as the authority in your market.

Our content strategies include creating case studies, industry news, employee profiles, statistics and infographics all designed to engage with a target market, help with higher rankings in Google and raise your profile so that the impression you project is enhanced, not just amongst existing and potential clients abut also among other key stakeholders like competitors, suppliers and employees.

Stage 4: Marketing automation and the power of outsourcing

Why do you need marketing automation?
Getting noticed in today’s world is a growing problem, we are all very busy, looking, engaging and consuming information from every angle. As a company you want to market yourself, you want new business, but it needs to be cost effective so it’s tempting to do it yourself. Many companies assign someone internally to write and send out the newsletter only to see it falter after about three months, or they write case studies that don’t really illustrate why you should do business with them. This is understandable. People are busy, and your company needs to focus on what you do best.

The problem with this stop/starts marketing is that your message gets easily lost and forgotten. You need to develop “Marketing Automation”, consistently putting your company (and its interesting information) in front of a very targeted audience as often as you can, so you get the best ROI.

At Sugar, this is what we do, all day every day. Like you, we know our industry best practices and have the tools to deliver what we do best – marketing communication. We set up, manage and automate the whole marketing communication process for you, ensuring the right message is in front of the right people as often as possible.

Stage 5: Refine and move forward

We analyse the responses to our activities and (if needed) we alter and refine what we do to make the campaign perform better.