| Do it yourself | Recruit a team | Use Marketing Agency | Use Growth Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Estimated Monthly Cost |
Est. Plus opportunity cost |
Est. 2 FTE, plus ENIC, Pension |
Est. Depends on scope |
Est. Depends on scope |
| Definitions | ||||
| Option definition This is quite a broad definition by design but hopefully helps give some context. |
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| Things to consider | ||||
| Time | ||||
| Cost | ||||
| Management | ||||
| Expertise | ||||
| Think | ||||
| Create a Vision Knowing where you want to get to is a fundamental part of your growth journey. The role of the leader is to create a vision that others buy into and want to help achieve. |
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| Board Support High growth companies need insights when it comes to governance issues. |
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| Build a Team You can't achieve the growth on your own, at some point you're going to need a team. Learn how to attract, select, and retain the right talent to help you achieve your vision. |
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| Culture Change As your business grows you are going to have to deal with a changing culture. Understanding your values and purpose can help set the tone for the behaviours you want to see in your business. |
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| Digital Transformation The world is moving increasingly towards digital platforms. How can you make sure that your business isn't left behind in an analogue world? |
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| Plan | ||||
| Strategic Planning Strategy involves gaining a deep understanding of what is going on today in your business (internally and externally), establishing some guiding principles of how you plan to move towards the vision, and then turning it all into an actionable plan. Simple! |
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| HubSpot HubSpot is market leading CRM software that is powerful and easy-to-use. As an approved HubSpot partner, Wellmeadow can help you leverage the power of marketing automation to take your business growth to the next level |
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| Marketing Plan Having creative marketing ideas is all well and good. However, at some point they need to be bought to life. This is where marketing planning comes into its own. |
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| Tech Stack With so many options for utilising technology for your business processes where do you start. From marketing to finance, inventory to sales pipelines, getting the right technology to do the right thing at the right time can be a challenge but also a huge opportunity. |
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| Business Process Automation If you're looking for business growth, chances are you're going to have automate some processes. Sales and Marketing automation can significantly leverage your efforts and deliver more leads for your business. |
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| Do | ||||
| SEO | ||||
| PPC | ||||
| Social Media | ||||
| Podcasts | ||||
| PR/Advertising | ||||
| Blogging | ||||
| Landing Page Development | ||||
| Data Capture (e.g. Forms) | ||||
| Chatbots | ||||
| Marketing workflows | ||||
| Email Marketing | ||||
| Content Creation (e.g. ebooks, videos) | ||||
| Review | ||||
| Identify Key Performance Indicators How do you know what are the right metrics to focus on for growth? How can you put systems in place to measure your progress? You manage what you measure so don't focus on vanity metrics. |
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| Marketing Reporting There are loads of different ways to report on your sales and marketing data. The right format will depend on the audience and the story you're trying to tell. |
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| Data Analysis With software such as HubSpot in place, the amount of data you can collect is enormous. Turning the data into actionable insights is key to being able to maximise your growth potential. |
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| Machine Learning/AI The future is here! Leverage the power of machining learning to analyse your data and get deeper insights in a fraction of the time. Understand what is happening with your prospects and customers using thousands of data points. |
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| Next steps... | ||||
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Considering your options
There's more than one way to approach your growth plans.
There are no simple answers.
Once you've decided that you're serious about growing your business, you need to find an approach. You could do it yourself, after all nobody knows your business as well as you. You could recruit a team and keep it in-house. Alternatively you could look at using a marketing agency or a growth agency like Wellmeadow. The table below highlights some of the areas to consider when making a decision. You might even chose a hybrid option (we've seen this work in a number of places).
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is a growth agency?
A growth agency will start with your growth strategy and then build all activities around your growth goals. Content creation, marketing and sales activities, and business processes are all geared towards driving growth. Often a growth agency will be strongly data-driven so that decisions can be made with regards to which activities to pursue to maximise growth.
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What's the difference between a growth agency and a marketing agency?
A growth agency will start with the strategy relating to the growth goals. The marketing activity then supports these growth goals. Depending on the particular agency, other services may be offered to support the growth goals and scalability (e.g. governance, building a team, process automation). A traditional marketing agency provides specific marketing services (e.g. branding, website, etc.). However, they tend not to be overly involved in developing the growth strategy.
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What sort of ROI should I be looking for?
Based on HubSpot's extensive research in this area, they estimate that a business should expect to see 7 times their marketing spend in terms of revenue growth.
For example, if you spent £60k on marketing you'd expect to see £400k-£450k increase in revenue within 6-12 months. There a numerous variables which influence this figure such as business sector, average transaction value, existing brand presence, etc.
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It sounds expensive to use a growth agency, can I recruit my own team?
Sure, in fact we've helped clients in the past recruit an internal team. However, as the chart above indicates it may not always work out as being that cost effective. It can take a significant amount of time to recruit and train an internal team, plus you've then got to manage the work. You may also find that you don't get the same breadth/depth of experience that you might find within an agency. That being said, having your own team under your roof can have it's benefits in terms of a deeper product/service knowledge, better responsiveness, more focus on your business. It may be that you work with an agency to get things set up and then recruit when you know what you need.
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How have you come up with the figures in the table above?
Do it yourself - assumes a business owner salary of £100k working 10 hours a week (about the amount of time you'd need to make minimal impact). This assumes a 40 hour week but we know most business owners work 60+ hours a week.
Build a team - assumes two FTE employees at circa £25k pa (plus ENIC, pension, etc.). This is just the direct cost i.e. it doesn't include overheads, management time, holidays and the like.
Marketing Agency - how long is a piece of string?! This can be anything from £100 to manage some Facebook ads up to tens of thousands of pounds. We've picked a figure that represents a reputable marketing agency that offers a full service (campaign management, content creation, PPC, SEO, etc.).
Growth Agency - the typical service Wellmeadow provides starts at £5k. Alongside everything you'd get from a marketing agency we offer far more strategic support aimed at growing your business. We've worked with over 100 SMEs at board level so we can provide experience and expertise beyond that a marketing agency can offer.
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Do I need to use HubSpot?
The short answer is no.
However, we've found that in order to accelerate growth having a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is essential. We've reviewed loads of CRM platforms and found that HubSpot offers a superb feature set. It also offers that ability to scale the functionality as your business grows so you don't have to pay for everything out of the box on day one.