Problems we solve

If you’re a medium sized business, statistically this is likely to have been your experience of marketing:

• You will have worked with a number of marketing agencies.
• You will have seen some nice creative and left meetings feeling optimistic about the future of your business
• You will have spent money on marketing initiatives with promise of more leads than you know what to do with
• After some moderate successes along the way, you count the money you have spent and realise you haven’t got much, if any, value from
• your investment
• So you decide to do it all yourself
• And when that doesn’t work you come to the reasonable conclusion that marketing is a waste of money


Sadly, we know from the history of our own clients before they worked with us that this is the typical experience of a medium sized business. You may recognise part or all of it yourself. Perhaps that is why you are reading this page.

The reason for your suspicion of marketing is well founded: it is likely that the marketing you have been doing is, in fact, dead!

“Dead?”
Yes, dead.

Traditional marketing is finished and over the last 19 years we have been at the forefront of developing its successor. If you are a medium sized business, this is how marketing can work for you:

• Begin with a story you want to tell about your business
• On the basis of that story, develop an integrated plan, including all elements of the marketing mix
• Automate as much as you can
• Don’t spend any money without a projected return
• Evaluate whether you are, in fact, getting that return
• Proceed only on the basis of evidence and change direction when necessary


Above all, don’t let your past experiences of marketing cloud your judgement about the future. By all means proceed with caution but in the knowledge that, in the past, you have in all probability been investing in a corpse!

The bad news is: there isn’t an easy way out of this trap.

The good news is: there is a way out and this is what it looks like:

• The first thing you do is pause and think: What am I trying to achieve? What is the best way to move forward? Who can help me?
• When you have done this and framed a plan about how to take your business forward, you choose a marketing agency that knows your type of business and how to manage the problems you face
• Then you audit your market and the performance of your key competitors against agreed benchmarks
• You agree with your agency how to make marketing and sales work together with shared goals and not, as if often the case, with barely concealed hostility. The best way to start is to get ALL parties to agree on the definition of a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Lead
• On the basis of an integrated sales and marketing plan, you begin an inbound-centred strategy to generate leads
• You review the tactics you are using on the basis of evidence and ensure that sales and marketing are fully engaged and involved at all times

These actions form the basis of our Route to Growth, a process we have developed over the last 19 years to help businesses generate sales and protect margins. They are the foundation of every successful sales and marketing plan we have implemented.

We have experience of generating growth for businesses of all sizes across multiple sectors. While the specific tactics we use in each case may vary, the fundamentals of how we work will remain constant unless evidence tells us to change them.

“What are these fundamentals?”

Essentially they boil down to four things:

1. we begin with our Route to Growth process, which creates a strong evidence base for the marketing decision we make
2. we are transparent in everything we do. Most of what we do is effective but occasionally we miss the mark and when we do, we take full responsibility and amend what we do or do something entirely different. Which of these options we choose, depends on what the evidence tells us
3. we integrate and automate as much of what we do as possible and that gives us the data necessary for us all to be held accountable for the decisions we make
4. we are available to you on a daily basis and hold at least one formal meeting a month where everything we do is reviewed and refined.

“What tactics do you recommend?”

Generally, we don’t prejudge what we will do for any client other than we will use every element of the marketing mix, including outbound methods such as advertising where evidence tells us it’s useful. However, our dominant focus is on Digital, PR and Content as these are the most cost-effective methods for generating leads.

“How much will working with Cognition cost?”

The cost of any marketing strategy depends on the size of the business. However, we don’t believe it is possible to get profitable growth on a budget of less than £4,000 a month and some of our larger clients invest as much as £15,000 a month to get the results they need. In reality, these costs are offset by the sales generated by our clients.

Working back from the value inbound delivers, the numbers are astonishing:

• 54% more leads are generated by inbound tactics than by traditional marketing (State of Inbound).
• 84% of marketers cite blogging, SEO and social media as essential to their marketing strategies (State of Inbound).
• Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads (The Annuitas Group),
• 82% of marketers who blog every day acquired a customer as a direct result of their blogging rate.

With delivery like this, it is little wonder that there is a growing clamour for inbound marketing from businesses in all sectors.

What, then, is inbound?

Inbound marketing is defined by the use of quality content to attract prospects rather than using advertising or other outbound methods to interrupt a prospect’s time with unwanted and often irrelevant messages.

The definition of quality content is not defined by stylistic elegance. It is defined wholly by what your customers find meaningful and commercially relevant.

“But I’ve been creating content for a long time and I’m not getting results. Why?”

Inbound is effective only if…

1. …You are creating content across multiple platforms as part of an integrated ad automated marketing strategy and…

2. …Measuring everything, yes EVERYTHING, you do and…

3. …Changing what you do as soon as you have the evidence telling you it’s not working.

Inbound is an effective approach if it’s managed well.

Your website is the cornerstone of your inbound marketing.

Google ad words is an outbound marketing tactic.

If neither is working for you, they will require different approaches to fix them.

First, your website.

In modern marketing, your website is the hub of your brand and all the marketing you do. This is why:

• SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate while outbound leads have a 1.7% close rate (Search Engine Journal)
• 86% of consumers stated that using a search engine increased their knowledge or led them to some valuable information (Pew Research Centre)
• 60% of all organic clicks go to the top 3 organic search results (Business2Community)
• Mobile commerce will account for 24.4% of ecommerce revenues by the end of 2017

Failure to optimise your website effectively both for search and for mobile is the best thing you can do to stunt the growth of your business. There are, however, other less obvious ways to make your website work for you:

• To get any of your web pages ranked in the Top 10 for any keyword on Google, ensure it’s about 2,000 words long
• You will get more than 6 times the number of leads if your website has more than 400 pages than will get if your site has less than a hundred pages
• We developed Search Content Optimisation (the blending of traditional SEO with Inbound) and it is one of the main reasons our clients are growing by 3 times the average for their sector

“So what about Google ad words?”

Like all forms of advertising it can work a part in an integrated marketing plan but with an average click through rate of 2%, it’s best used as a back-up to a structured content strategy rather than as the main focus of your online marketing.