The quick version 🏃
- The Marketing Centre connects UK business owners with experienced Part-Time Marketing Directors to help grow their business
- The company wanted to increase brand awareness, generate a reliable pipeline of new leads and showcase its team’s experience and expertise
- We help them create a regular stream of thought leadership content, including blog posts, social content, newsletters and downloadable reports
- We generated 1,300 new leads in just one year and grew The Marketing Centre’s website traffic to 10,000 per month
The long version 🤓
One of my favourite briefs is: “I want to put the talent and expertise inside our business out there for everyone to see.”
Creating content is way more fun when you have access to talented, knowledgeable people who love what they do. Our client, The Marketing Centre, has this in spades. In fact, they have a nationwide network of thought leaders and experienced practitioners that are some of the most impressive people I’ve been lucky enough to interview.
This is the story of how we took this expertise and used it to help grow their website to almost 10,000 visits a month and generated 1,300 new leads for them in just one year.
We’ve worked with the Winbox team for over seven years now. They really get our business and our customers. And after all those years they still come to the table with fresh ideas for campaigns and content.
Our client
The Marketing Centre helps UK SMEs find and work with experienced, Part-Time Marketing Directors with a proven track record of growing businesses. Over the last 10 years their team of over 90 Marketing Directors have helped hundreds of UK SME business owners to grow faster and improve their marketing ROI.
The challenge
The Marketing Centre’s target audience is UK SME business owners. They have a few core goals for their content marketing. The first two are what you’d expect: to increase brand awareness and generate a reliable pipeline of new leads. The final objective is to showcase the deep experience and expertise of their team.
Their Marketing Directors have decades of experience leading marketing at some of the world’s best-known brands. Think IBM, Hewlett Packard, BMW and EDF Energy. These are whip-smart marketing leaders with really impressive track records. The Marketing Centre want UK business owners to understand and appreciate the quality of the team without having to meet them.
In the last year we’ve managed to double the average number of visits to our content marketing to around 10K per month.
Solution
One of the interesting nuances of creating content for The Marketing Centre is that we’re creating content about marketing for an audience of business owners. This shapes what we talk about and how detailed we get.
Business owners want to grow their business and understand what they’re getting back on their marketing spend. They pay other people to worry about the details. So rather than talk about content creation or getting better email open rates, we talk about things like:
- What are the best UK lead generation tactics right now? [RESEARCH]
- UK SME owners are flummoxed by marketing metrics [RESEARCH]
- LinkedIn Post Ideas: 44 Prompts For Awesome LinkedIn Content
Over the years we’ve sharpened our sense of what our audience likes and dislikes. This has had a big impact on performance. Our traffic per month has doubled from around 5K a month last year to just shy of 10K a month right now.
The other interesting challenge is distribution. The Marketing Centre has over 90 Marketing Directors and Regional Directors overseeing the different regional teams. These people are a great distribution channel, but to get the most from them we had to develop a smooth process for distributing content that can be repurposed and posted.
Our current approach is to invest 20% of our effort in creating content and 80% making sure it gets distributed as widely as possible by the entire team. In terms of deliverables, we keep up a regular drumbeat of new content to keep all their channels busy:
- Bi-weekly blogs
- Monthly newsletter
- Ongoing social content for the brand accounts and their Marketing Directors
- Occasional ‘gated content’ (usually reports)
We’ve built a really smooth content creation, approval and distribution process. This helps make sure we’re keeping up a regular cadence and reaching as many UK SME owners as we can.
Let’s look at a specific campaign
A lot of business owners froze their marketing spend when COVID hit. The Marketing Centre were keen to go to market with a campaign that showed how marketing can help you make the right strategic decisions during good times and bad.
We started off working on a blog post sharing a few exercises that would help business owners understand their position, set new goals and make a plan for growth. We then levelled this idea up to a downloadable workbook that business owners could print off and work through. Then we paired the workbook with a webinar. Then we turned it into a workshop the Marketing Directors could offer to their clients.
The idea went from a single piece of content, to a campaign, to a new service. Pretty cool!
The Marketing Centre’s mantra for the pandemic was to be ‘relentlessly helpful’. Following this approach, we created a wide range of different content to help business owners understand the situation for their business and make the best possible decisions, all driving traffic towards the webinars and the workbook.
The impact of this was that The Marketing Centre and its directors were able to add value and prove their worth at a time when a lot of business owners might have been thinking twice. This campaign helped them land 23 new customers during the lockdown period.
Results
Over the 12 months from October 2020 to October 2021, our content strategy has helped The Marketing Centre generate:
- 86,000 blog visits (we’re currently just shy of 10K visits a month)
- 1,300 new leads
- 115 new customers
We’ve been working with The Marketing Centre for almost seven years now. They’re an awesome client and we’re really lucky to be able to work with them. Thanks to Pete, Robert, Clare, Mia, Lucy and all the team at The Marketing Centre for giving us the opportunity to help them grow their business.
