Episode 10: The Process of Marketing

In this episode of The SME Growth Podcast, Dave Parry and Richard Buckle discuss marketing as a process. By systemising and outlining your marketing process it empower SMEs to make deliberate, calculated marketing choices which can help save time and money when implementing a marketing strategy. Dave and Rich also discuss the marketing process that Wellmeadow use called The Growth Generator. 

As The Growth Generator is referenced throughout the podcast, we recommend you have a look or download it first here.

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Please note: Whilst all transcripts are double checked for accuracy, they are transcribed via Otter.AI so may contain errors.

David Parry 00:10

 So here we are back on Christmas, recharged ready to go? Brand new year. companies all over the country sitting down thinking right? Come on this one. This is the one.

Richard Buckle 00:37

This is the year of opportunity.

David Parry 00:39

I had a lot of messages, you know, you get those emails, don't you? Happy New Year? Hope this is gonna be a good year better than the last one. And on a global scale, you can get much worse than the last one or two because you really

Richard Buckle 00:49

no, no, true. Well, I think there is plenty of opportunity this year, isn't it?

David Parry 00:54

It's funny, isn't it? Because there's a lot of people talking about the impending recession. But this will be the first recession either in living memory or ever. I don't know where there isn't going to be high unemployment at the same time. Yeah, so there's gonna be winners and losers. And even you remember the yield Roger Martin-Fagg presentation talks about the zombie companies and other companies. That's gonna be a shakeout I'm seeing now. Yeah, where we are a couple of law firms have closed down and then the last week? That's you don't see that very often.

Richard Buckle 01:20

So yeah, I think if you know, but I think you've got to, you got to seize the day a little bit with it.

David Parry 01:26

There's always opportunity.

Richard Buckle 01:27

Opportunity. Word of the podcast today. Opportunity. Think I've said it five times already.

David Parry 01:34

Shall we have a tally chart on the wall?

Richard Buckle 01:37

I don't think it will drop in your lap pull it. I mean, it will for some people.

David Parry 01:40

But is that not what business is about?

Richard Buckle 01:42

You got to create your opportunities.

David Parry 01:44

That's all you got to do. Where's the gap in the market? Is there a market in the gap? Develop a value proposition that your customers want? And do it well. I think a lot of people regard business. Maybe it's because they've been lucky. And they've inherited a business. And they keep turning the handle. And it's worked very well for them so far, until a big change comes along. Market moves, customer preferences change, whatever. So yeah, here we are, new year! And you know what, I bet you in our client meetings coming up soon as well. There'll be a general flavour of goal setting, like we talked about in the last podcast. So what are we going to do different this year? And if one has these grand plan, by December we're going to be it'd be twice as big.

Richard Buckle 02:26

Next Year Rodney?

David Parry 02:27

Yeah, one day, Rodney, and all whatever it is. All right, ready for our first podcast of the year, then?

Richard Buckle 02:32

Yeah, let's do this.

David Parry 02:35

So hello, I'm Dave Parry from Wellmeadow and you're listening to The SME Growth Podcast. And we're here to help all those businesses that want to grow. And we're going to talk about various ideas, either to increase the number of leads to get into the business, or ways of converting more of those leads into customers. So what's today's subjects then? We're going to talk a little bit about regarding marketing as a process, the process of marketing. And joining me to talk about that is my esteemed colleague, Richard Buckle. 

Richard Buckle 03:07

Glad to be here. Again.

David Parry 03:08

Here we are, again, talking about the process of marketing, quite looking forward to this subject, actually.

Richard Buckle 03:15

Is that an oxymoron?

David Parry 03:17

Well, I think there will be listeners, yes, that definitely say it is. I think this is why we're different as marketeers isn't it? Because we come from a non traditional marketing background. And we think a bit more about process almost in everything we do.

Richard Buckle 03:34

Well, your background is an engineer. I'm a chemist. So it's slightly odd that we're sitting here.

David Parry 03:42

And yeah, it seems to have worked, great chemistry!

Richard Buckle 03:46

I suppose we've seen it in a lot of our other consulting work as well, haven't we just as a bit of a discussion where

David Parry 03:52

It's served as well, you know, for the last, what, 15 years or so we've been doing this we apply a process way of thinking to problems generally. And it makes it easier to explain stuff and get common understanding or

Richard Buckle 04:04

Or us understand it, at least anyway. But I suppose what we've found is that we've been approached, regardless of whether it's marketing or recruitment or any other you know, operations or something. It's, it's, we're often presented with complex problems to solve. And it's much easier to you know, it's like how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, isn't it. Yeah, so it's that not that we're condoning eating elephants here or anything.

David Parry 04:31

No animals were harmed in the making of this podcast.

Richard Buckle 04:34

Before anyone gets upset about that. But yeah, you it's about breaking it down into manageable chunks and trying to work out, well, what's the next logical? It's like telling a story, isn't it really?

David Parry 04:46

It's a good point that telling the story.

Richard Buckle 04:48

You don't jump straight to the conclusion. You got to build yourself up and you know, build up the plotline and the characters and all that

David Parry 04:53

And if you didn't, and we'll come on to this very quickly, sort of the first point we wanted to make but if you don't regard things as a process It's a bit random, isn't it, you sort of just give it a go winging it a bit. Imagine if you're invited to run a strategy session for someone you just pitched up. So right, let's have a chat, then we're gonna do, I don't know what you wanna do, it's about, you've got to have at least a sort of step, you know, three steps or something to go through.

Richard Buckle 05:16

Even simpler baking a cake isn't it, don't just put the pan in the oven and expect a cake to miraculously appear.

David Parry 05:22

Now that would be a good product,

Richard Buckle 05:24

Spontaneous cake generation, it's more of, you know, you've got to really even you know, you got to get the ingredients together, you've got to have a, you gotta have a step by step thing. So I think we're all used to using processes. I mean, I used to love using this exercise, you know, people that would start with us, just write me an SOP for how to make a cup of tea and

David Parry 05:44

Explain SOP for those people that don't know?

Richard Buckle 05:47

Standard Operating Procedure. So just, you know, write me out the steps to make a cup of tea and a piece of toast in the morning. And we all go through the process with whatever we're doing, we don't just identify it as such. So, but obviously, making a cup of tea to be stoked isn't, it can be a little bit more complicated than you think. But it's something that we do innately. And I think the thing with process is, once you get into it, it does become inante, it does become part of the culture. But that can be a little bit, you've got to put the groundwork in to get the structure in place. So that everything hangs together, everyone knows where things are.

David Parry 06:19

It's certainly about structure. But lest anybody has just had an alarm bell ring in their head, from what you've just said, it doesn't mean everything is written down. Descriptively, step by step, you have to do step a followed by step B. processes can be quite high level. Yeah. So when you talk about the cake, you know, you could have recipe for cake. The process of cooking is get a recipe, buy some ingredients for the recipe, eat it as a process, it's just very high level, it doesn't go into the detail. But it gives you a framework, and you can't do eat a bit before you've bought ingredients. And you can't buy that forget the recipe. And well, if

Richard Buckle 06:51

If you do a Mary Berry cake recipe, it's very prescriptive, and it's, you know, very clinical in terms of its impact. If it's a Jamie Oliver cake recipe, it's like, you know, chuck some ingredients in doesn't matter, put it in the oven doesn't matter what temperature for how long, it's like a different style, isn't it?

David Parry 07:08

So processes can be high level, generic, big, blocky stuff, or you can break it right down to lower. So what we're talking about today, I think is halfway between it starts with that very high level way of thinking about stuff, and then does a little bit of detail

Richard Buckle 07:21

And I think it's it's in response to a seeing quite a few different in our work with lots of different companies. We've seen lots of different approaches to marketing.

David Parry 07:29

Yeah. Now we're in danger of generalising hugely here. But absolutely, I think, let's run through a few of them at the risk of offending anybody that thinks, Oh, they've taken that story from when they spoke to me last week.

Richard Buckle 07:41

Yeah, so there's obviously you know, sometimes what you'll see is quite an ad hoc or intermittent approach to marketing. So there's a perceived need for some marketing. So right, all of a sudden, let's just do a lot of marketing. And it doesn't seem to matter what so long as we're doing some sort of marketing, but then there's no, you know, once that initial campaign has been done, what's the follow on what's the

David Parry 08:05

There's a corollary, or is that the right word, whatever that means. There's another aspect of that relates to that, which is, I see that in smaller, see this sorry, in smaller businesses, where, you know, you have that feast and famine cycle, when you haven't got much work on, you think, Oh, I'll do some marketing. He does some marketing, it's successful, you get some work, and you stop marketing. So you end up in this feast and famine cycle. So that's where this ad hoc nature of what you describe, you know, what you should be doing? You haven't got the time to do it all the time. Yeah, when you got a bit of spare time you do it. And of course, there's always this lag between doing it and having the effect from coming up in the cycle. So we see that quite a lot smaller firms. But I think what you were talking about wasn't so much that as maybe having a full time marketing person or resource available. But even that is a bit ad hoc, you know, what are we going to do this week? I know let's write a blog, or let's organise a seminar or there's an exhibition coming up, we better focus on that, oh, it's Christmas soon. Let's do a Christmas campaign. I'll get an email out on

Richard Buckle 08:59

I think, yeah, it does it tie into an overarching goal. So if the marketing strategy is not tied into the business strategy, then that's when the marketing can become slightly ad hoc. And it's almost not quite going through the motions, but it can become that you're doing it for, you know, because we, because we feel we need to do marketing.

David Parry 09:17

Is there a sense in marketing that as long as you're doing stuff, good stuff, valuable stuff, that that's okay, keep busy. And then you get this aspect, almost like spinning plates, that Well, I better check. I gotta get tweets out this morning. And I'm going to write a blog tomorrow, I'm going to check my Google rankings and my PPC performance on Wednesday and Thursday, I've got to put that, you know, case study together on do the next brochure, or organise an exhibition and then back to Monday gonna do again, long as I'm doing stuff all day long.

Richard Buckle 09:45

Yeah, I think the question is, is it the right stuff? So without having that overarching kind of, you know, process that that identifies what should we be doing? Then you're in danger of kind of just like the kids chasing the football by the football pitch, isn't it rather than everyone playing position?

David Parry 10:02

And that may be relates back to when you do something in the marketing space? What are you doing it for, rather than doing it for its own sake. And this is where you see, and we've seen this in companies, they get quite settled into routine. So we're going to do a tweet on a Monday, as we said, just using the example earlier and LinkedIn posts on the Tuesday something, what are you actually trying to achieve something else. And as technology moves on, there may be other ways of doing it better. So who is still you know, if MySpace was still around, you might have some people putting adverts on MySpace. And similarly with Facebook, it suits some businesses very well. But a lot of audiences have moved on from Facebook, and how many have adopted TikTok, for example, or Instagram Reels.

Richard Buckle 10:44

Another approach we see is people who just got too much to do. Yeah, and they're almost running around like headless chickens. And it's, you know, there's, there's almost either there's too much opportunity, or they've just overloaded themselves. Or maybe there's, often we'll see this where there's lots of different maybe brands or sub brands in the business that people are trying to having to manage across all of those. And again, it's like, almost can't see the wood for the trees, the problem there.

David Parry 11:12

I think there's a variant of that as well. So that one I'm imagining is where someone is put a lot on their own to do list, and they're running around a bit too headless chicken-y. I think another one, and we both know who were who I'm thinking of when I say this, where the marketing department get asked to do things by someone else in the business, that isn't really primarily what marketing is, therefore, but they are communication specialists. So they get asked to help with a presentation here or a press release there to deal with a situation or something. And it's all useful stuff, isn't it? All useful stuff. And I bet you there's marketing people listening to this the country over now, having that same reaction rolling their eyes. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. Yeah, I was in the middle of this great, you know, designing this campaign. And I just spend whole week doing this other thing, which was important to the business, but doesn't help me achieve the lead generation goals that we set out to do.

Richard Buckle 11:59

I suppose there's another aspect that we see where people get confused, maybe not confused, a bit patronising. But there's an awful lot of new technology and marketing, there's an awful lot of new products. It's an ever changing landscape. There's always something new to be looking at. I mean, you know, topical, topical issue at the moment or topical piece of software Chat GPT, for example, which is the AI tool that is it a threat to marketing, is it not? You know, that's just one example

David Parry 12:33

I think we're gonna have to come back to Chat GPT. That's a whole new subject.

Richard Buckle 12:37

But it's, those sorts of things where we see you know, business owners say, Well, I can't even keep up with what, you know, I'm trying to run a business, let alone keep abreast of everything that's happening and in an ever changing landscape of marketing technology. So that, again, can almost be that's almost like paralysis, not quite paralysis by analysis. But you know, there's just too much going on, what do we do? And by the time it picks something, is it out of date?

David Parry 13:02

And I suppose this is true of all disciplines. But if you are 100%, busy doing what you do, generally doing yesterday, again, today and tomorrow, where's the space in your life, to develop your knowledge about using new stuff and to learn? And when did you just talked about people being overloaded, headless chickens, or the plate spinning bit? If you haven't put a certain amount of site to keep abreast of okay, how many people listening to this have heard of Chat GPT, I'm guessing 5 to 10% of our audience? I don't know, but every time I mentioned it, someone new is news to them. And that's where you, and I think this happens a lot more in smaller firms where the marketing department is smaller, and I want to bounce ideas off or to stimulate thought, we're going a bit off base there, but it's, it's all relating to this, how does marketing generally get done, where we see it being done? And more often than not, it falls into one of those categories is either feast or famine or the overloaded or lack of prioritising, ad hoc.

Richard Buckle 13:56

I think you may also see a slight variant of that is where you see maybe different generations in a business where the older or I'll say the more senior, or experienced members of the board, or the partnership or whatever is thinking like the way marketing was done maybe 20 years ago, a lot of referral based work, we don't need to do marketing. Whereas maybe some more, you know, kind of up and coming people, I think you will know where our native environment is within a social media environment. So there is that sometimes that tension that we see, whereas, you know, some people want to do lots of marketing. Other people think, well, we've tried it all before. We've done adverts in newspapers, they didn't work, we've done anything. So you've got that kind of

David Parry 14:43

Well, I think that speaks to diversity generally, doesn't it? And if your market is diverse, you need to be diverse yourself, because you're all gonna You're all right, you're right, for different reasons for different people

Richard Buckle 14:52

So yeah, so that's sort of some of the things that we see. So that was kind of the backdrop to some of this isn't that we're living in this world where we see all these different people having all these things

David Parry 15:05

So why would you want to change that? So, in closing the question, they really, so we've seen it that way. And we thought there's got to be a better way.

Richard Buckle 15:12

I suppose as we said in the opening, we're quite process driven people. So, you know, why would we use a process? Yeah, like what are the benefits of using process?

David Parry 15:20

Now, let's be clear, we haven't invented the idea of putting marketing into a process. When you start looking around there you'll find a few. There are already mnemonics, acronyms and nice ways of thinking about marketing, just like you think about sales or production or, or finance in process term. So most people in marketing will have heard of Five P's. It's not quite a process, but it's a way of thinking differently. It's about modularizing, your thinking in marketing. We've come across as everyone has probably got the hang of now, if you've listened to a few of these through our HubSpot journey. Some of the models that HubSpot as an organisation I've put out there, they've got their flywheel model of attract, engage and delight, our buyer journeys of awareness, consideration and decision. So these are all useful components. But I think when you and I looked at lots of those, they all sort of did it in an area or did a bit of it. There was no all encompassing, Master Theory of Everything. Was there really nothing pulled it all together.

Richard Buckle 16:16

Yeah. And I think we're not we're not saying that we've created a theory of everything. If we had, we probably wouldn't be sitting here. But I think what we were looking to do, is say so how can we, how can we break down this huge subject area into something that is actually manageable? For people to understand when we're trying to explain to clients even internally, when we're trying to organise ourselves, how can we best do that? And we found that like, using, trying to map it out and create like a map of all these marketing concepts, was a good way of trying to think through the problem of what should be the next thing that we're working on? Or what is the priority here.

David Parry 17:03

Which one should we start with? Yeah. So I suppose it started by breaking down the journey that someone takes from being completely unknown to you and you to them right through. And if you take the absolute opposite extreme, it's not only a customer, it's an advocate customer who's bringing referrals into your business, because they're talking positively. So if you go right from someone you never met, right through to that there's more than one or two steps in between. So we started by breaking that down, I think, six, seven steps to get from one to the other. So you got to attract that stranger in but there's still a stranger, and then you got to do somebody to capture their details, and you got to work out who they are, or nurture them get opportunity, convert them and, and so on. So on. So that's, that's the start. But that didn't tell us what to do with it. Tell us where to do it. Yeah. Why would you? So we'll come back to maybe that a bit later on as to how you use that. But that was the beginnings of this framework. But that's only one dimension, that's just saying how you move along a journey?

Richard Buckle 17:57

Yeah, so it's important to identify those that like activities have that journey, but also to look at it and think well, now, where do we? Where do we focus the efforts? Where do we identify bottlenecks in the process, all of those things, which is what kind of led us to come up with our growth generator model. So I guess maybe it's a good time to talk about The Growth Generator.

David Parry 18:25

That's what we call it, The Growth Generator. And you know, podcast, if you're listening to this, rather than watching it, then you'd probably want to see this at some point. So it's on the homepage of our website wellmeadow.co.uk and our resources pages and you can download it and stuff. So you'll get a full version of it there which may help you to understand quite what we're talking about in having used it as a coat hanger, almost a skeleton to put all of these concepts on but in an organised way. And I'm hoping that for those of you who haven't seen that before going now have a look at that you have some sort of aha moment, but it'll be tinged with. That's obvious, isn't it. And I hope that that is the reaction because it should be obvious, a lot of great ideas are simple and they might as well

Richard Buckle 19:05

just add on to that if if you are watching or listening and you want to see more explanation of that we have got an ebook that's free to download Building Business Growth Engines, which is available on the website which goes into a little bit more detail on The Growth Generator and the different aspects of it. So feel free to hop on the website and download that

David Parry 19:28

Yeah, that's quite useful because it steps you through each of those stages almost in workbook style isn't so you can do it. And it brings other concepts in such as the buyer journey that we've mentioned buyer personas, which are important you Who are you selling to what the and all of that. And it's worth mentioning as well around this, this model, there are some sort of foundation-y elements that appear as well as outside the process. Yeah, not to do with that journey I've just talked about from Stranger through to, but having a clear vision for the company and marketing strategy. Your choice of Mar tech stack, you know, as well as buyer journeys, buyer personas and that sort of thing.

Richard Buckle 20:04

Yes that's all important. As we started the process, we'd always start with what I suppose we call growth strategy, which would encompass a number of things like, Okay, what is the vision for the business? If you're looking to grow, you probably need a vision where you're trying to get to that type of thing. What's the strategy, how you gonna get there? And that can be quite high level of doing this doesn't have to be, you know, it's not weeks of workshops, but it's just it's helpful to know. And then looking at things like the buyer persona, the buyer journey, what's your marketing messaging? What's your content, like at the moment content audit? So I think we've covered some of these in previous podcasts, you know, more detail. So that's, that's kind of sort of the scene setter for all of this because we've got to have a foundation in place to, to know where to look. And then things like, you know, Mar tech or marketing technology. What is the technology stack that you're using? So obviously, we're HubSpot partners. We use HubSpot, but it's not happy HubSpot could be anything. are using AI or machine learning forecasting? All these other things around a technology understanding that what's right for the business, those sorts of things are important precursors to actually jump before we jump into the marketing process.

David Parry 21:11

Got to get that done first. And then yeah, so then when you move into the body of The Growth Generator, which is set up like a bit of a grid, isn't it but the journey goes along it and the activities underneath it? Rather than starting with the question of, What do I use social media for? You ask the question the other way around. If I'm trying to attract strangers, what do I do? What activities do I do? Yeah. And does that include social media? Well, it will probably include SEO, because that's how people find new websites search, it might include PPC, if you're paying for it, it might be social media, for sure, depending on whether the social channels that you're using our getting non followers to and especially recommend or to stumble across it, depending on the algorithms. So there are a number of activities in that column, which maybe don't appear later on, you know that that's the purpose, there are certain activities that are much better suited to bring strangers into your system, even if they don't declare who they are, when they visit.

Richard Buckle 22:07

Yeah, so that first stage is really sort of lead generation isn't it is that how are we finding people that maybe don't know the business, attracting strangers, like you say, getting them onto the website, and maybe getting a contact detail or something like that, from them. So that's the first bit of it, then it's then there's a bit where we're looking at maybe more kind of lead optimization, and the nurturing side of the journey.

David Parry 22:35

You've got to try and understand once once somebody has come to your website, obviously got to capture their details in some way. They may have responded to marketing email, if depending on what your email lists are like, and where you get your emails from. But if they've gone to your website, first, you've got to provide them content that's worth entering an email address to get and there's quite some interesting techniques around doing that, you know, only asked for an appropriate amount of information, according to the value of what you're offering, don't get everything give a lot away for free, you got to build trust with people, you know, they owe you nothing when they find you. And so you got to be proportionate. But like you say, once you've got their email address, you still don't know anything about them, you may have first name, last name, email address, that may be all.

So you then got to have a whole other bunch of activities which help to move that person further along, in your journey for like internally to understand them more. So what are their needs, what buyer persona might they be, where are they at in their journey, and it's you can't just put a form up saying who I am, you know, then I'm ready for that you got to, you got to infer it from their behaviour. So you need different types of content, and that the video content or blogs or ebooks or whatever. And depending on whether people consume those other bits of content or not read them, you can then work out who they are. And as you build that picture up of somebody, you can be a lot better at providing the next piece of information to them proactively, because you know where they're at. Now, if they're still at the awareness stage in their buyers journey, and they have a certain type of buyer persona, then send some educational content. You just explain what's going on in in the field, as you know it. establish your expertise, of course, but trying to help them. 

Richard Buckle 24:12

So I think I'd say if you are listening to this, you probably do need to download a copy of The Growth Generator, because we are talking about almost here an awful lot of concepts and there's there's an awful lot of things to do. There's an awful lot of concepts. There's an awful lot of kind of activities to prioritise and all of this. And I guess that's why we actually thought, well, we've got to write this down somewhere because we were struggling internally just to try and hold all these things in our head.

David Parry 24:37

But how useful has it been to have that just in a one image, one piece of a4, you're putting it all the time on screen or print it out using it with clients, you know, this is where we're at and why we're doing that while we're doing this. And maybe even at that diagnostic phase, where are the problems where the bottlenecks in this process for strangers coming in,

Richard Buckle 24:55

I think universally as well. People who have seen it it's not quite light bulb moment. But it's, it's like what we're liking what we're seeing when we see this all mapped out in a logical fashion, that, you know, we always say, we're not just a colouring in department that all kind of, you know, we obviously you got to have nice looking content. But it's more than that. It's, it is about that almost storytelling of the marketing process of saying, Well, how do we find somebody that doesn't know you, and lead them through a journey till they become a customer and then start recommending your business. And there's so much to do under all of those different headings and different stages, that we need some way of having a marketing map, or whatever we want to call it to say, this is the stuff that we could focus on. Now we've got to get down to the exercise of right. What do we need to focus on? And also, okay, we're all constrained by resources, time, budget, people, what's the priorities isn't it?

David Parry 25:58

And I think we've had probably, there's probably two types of audiences that have given us these reactions subtly different. So for someone who's in marketing, they really liked the idea of a growth generator way of describing the marketing world, because it helps them tell that story you explained earlier, of what does was marketing therefore, and look at all this stuff we do, you know, we don't just send emails up, because it's supposed to and keep the Twitter account busy and do the odd, whatever campaign, it's all there for a purpose. So that helps the marketing people really established the credibility of the professionalism of what they're doing. The other people that I think we get good responses from our customers of the process, which might be the sales team who want the leads, or it might be the business owner on the leadership team who just wants you're working. And that's when they get that light bulb moment with the eye see now why we're sending out emails with this frequency to these people. And why we need this new content all the time on why we're doing social media or ranking is because that's the part of the business where we can get the biggest bang for our buck. So for different reasons, either because they want to see everything organised, or they want to tell the story of how it's fitting together, it's proved to be very, very useful for us.

Richard Buckle 27:03

And I think, again, another elements of it is to have that kind of common language, isn't it, then the business. So we find that internally, it's useful. Obviously, every business has their own culture. We've we first started, I suppose another example of this was we do psychometric testing, everybody didn't even they come into the business, just because it's very interesting and useful to know how people think and what their sort of behavioural preferences are, and all of that. And around that we've, we have a sort of, you know, they're more red or more blue, or green, whatever you want, whatever it is, you know, whichever type of psychometric metaphor you want to use. But it's actually proved to be really helpful, because you understand that different people have different behaviours and all that. And it's a common language amongst a business that people understand that. And I think that's what we're trying to move towards, with this growth generating model is to be well, okay, that's, that's more of a kind of attract phase, or that's more of an engagement or nurture

David Parry 27:03

Well, even if they say, I'm right, I need to write a blog. But for which bit, is that? Is that a blog to help with the SEO? Because you're doing the Attract bit? Is that a blog to help analyse a new contact, find out where they're at in their journey? Or is that a blog at the nurture end, where you've got someone you know, got a lot out, and you're trying to keep them interested and give them useful stuff, three very different blog purposes, then you might write them very differently. So yeah, good language.

Richard Buckle 28:24

That's a good language to have. And I think as well, we, you know, we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the fact that we want to put some numbers on this stuff as well

David Parry 28:32

Process people maybe like numbers. Now, the problem here again, is that that's not necessarily a native preference for some styles of marketing and marketeer. It's hard sometimes, and people always moan about unable to measure the return on investment, from Marketing, and so on. But if you've got numbers, and avoiding vanity metrics, and we're talking about elsewhere, but if you've got Numbers that relate to each of these stages of that journey, and the bits we're doing within it, then you can map the two together,

Richard Buckle 29:01

which is something we're starting to do. And it's proven very useful, I'd say,

David Parry 29:05

well, those dashboards that we use with our clients now, always turn heads. Now, I've got to be careful here, because a well designed dashboard will turn heads because it's, it's an attractive piece of graphic artwork. Yeah, he's having a nice wood wallpaper. But it's got to be useful. And as soon as you overlay what we've done with those dashboards, with The Growth Generator to see how it all fits together, then there's this coming together of you know.

Richard Buckle 29:28

And I think as well, it's another way of sparking conversation that we were looking at some yesterday and it's just a great way of being like, Oh, hey, that's happening at this phase. But what's the impact of that on the next downstream phase of the process type of thing so so yeah, so there's loads we could talk about on dashboard, the numbers and things

David Parry 29:50

Hopefully someone will you know, have a look at it on the screen, download the guide or give us a bell and you know, we'd love to talk somebody through on screen just to see if it strikes a chord With someone in their their environment?

Richard Buckle 30:04

Is there anything else we need to?

David Parry 30:05

Well, we could go on and on about this can be I think it's probably just we reiterated, if you go to that wellmeadow.co.uk website is on the homepage, it's just this page, have a look at it, download it, and start to see whether that applies to you, or does it make sense to you? Do you have an aha moment?

Richard Buckle 30:21

We'd love to for people if, you know, if you do look at it, and you've got comments or you know, critique or whatever, like, get in touch,

David Parry 30:29

It's constantly evolving.

Richard Buckle 30:32

I would say, probably in the last six months, it's gone through five or six iterations. You know, as we as we learn more stuff, as we see different applications. It's not a set in stone, this is the way it is. It's an evolving model, that as we learn more, we adapt it and you know, so we're always open to people, you know, engage with the community and see moving forward, right.

David Parry 30:57

Are we good to see it move forward? Right, good. Well, I think that pretty much wraps it up wraps it up today. So we've got time for so you've been listening to The SME Growth Podcast, please subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to it, and maybe more importantly, tell all your business friends about it and get them to listen to us as well. Next week, we'll be talking about leveraging your content. That's quite an interesting subject too. So I hope you can join us for that then. Thanks.

Further resources

Have a look at The Growth Generator and download it here.

Interested in our free ebook  Building a Business Growth Engine? Click here.

We have some great blogs on subjects touched on during the podcast like Buyer Personas, Buyer Journeys and Content Audits.