Beth: I think the same applies to marketing.
A business might say, ‘We need more leads,’ and that can quickly become ‘We need more paid media’ or ‘We need better SEO.’ But before we add more traffic, I want to understand what’s happening to the traffic they already have.
Are the right people finding the business? Are they responding to the proposition? Is the website doing enough to turn interest into action? Is the sales process creating another point of friction?
You can put more budget into acquisition, but if the problem sits further down the journey, you’re just paying to create more of the same problem.
Will: Which is why we’re interested in the thing underneath the deliverable. The deliverable is often how the problem presents itself to the client. Our job is to work out what is actually causing it.
Q: How do you work out what’s holding a business back?
Beth: We start by looking at the whole customer journey rather than one part of it in isolation. And there are a few questions that usually help.
Can the right people find you? Once they do, do they understand what you offer? Can they see why you’re different? Can they easily find the information they need? And is the next step obvious?
The answers start to show you where the friction is.
Will: And there are usually patterns.
If the business has a good offer but customers struggle to understand why it’s different, that points us towards positioning and proposition.
If people understand the offer but can’t navigate the website, find the right information or work out what to do next, then the opportunity may be in the digital experience.
And if the proposition and experience are working but not enough of the right people are finding the business, then marketing becomes a much bigger part of the conversation.
Beth: But none of those things exists in isolation.
You might discover that the business needs a clearer proposition and a better website, because the site is currently making something that’s already hard to explain even harder to understand.
Or you might find that the website is doing a good job, but the marketing is reaching the wrong audience.
That’s why we don’t think in terms of choosing one service before we’ve understood the problem. We’re looking for the point where the biggest commercial opportunity sits.
Q: Do you ever tell clients they don’t need the thing they came to you for?
Will: Yes. And sometimes the answer is still the thing they originally asked for. That’s important.
We’re not trying to avoid doing a website because we want to prove a point. If the website really is the constraint, then a new website might be exactly what the business needs.
The difference is that we want to understand what the website needs to achieve before we start designing it.
Beth: The same goes for marketing.
Sometimes a business genuinely does need more demand. But we’d rather know that because we’ve looked at the customer journey and understood the numbers than because ‘more leads’ sounds like the obvious answer.
The role of strategy is to help decide where effort and investment will have the greatest impact.
Will: And that sometimes means challenging the original assumption.
A founder knows their business better than anyone. They know what’s changed and what’s frustrating them. What they may not have is the distance to see how all of those things connect.
That outside perspective can be invaluable.
Q: What do you notice when brand, web and marketing are working together properly?
Will: Usually, things start to feel clearer. The business can explain what it does and why it matters more consistently, and the brand, website and marketing stop telling slightly different versions of the same story.
As well as being better for customers, it makes decision-making easier internally, too.
Beth: From a marketing perspective, you start seeing fewer points where people drop out.
People stop dropping out because of a confusing website. The proposition is strong enough to support the campaign, while the customer journey makes sense from the first interaction through to conversion.
And when something doesn’t work, you have a clearer idea of where to look.
