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Client Story: IES
Cutting through the clutter
Is there such a thing as too much content? Sticking to a content plan to meet KPIs can make it easy to lose sight of the volume that’s being created. Over time, a vast archive of legacy content accumulates, making it difficult to leverage important pieces and identify strategic gaps.
When Faith Pennycook, Marketing Manager at IES, reached out to Ros at the beginning of 2022 she felt like she was drowning in a sea of marketing content. She was looking for someone with a new perspective to help her “step out of her boat”, review her strategic plan and get confident in her route to achieving her goals again.
On our initial call, she explained that she was “struggling to see the wood for the trees.”
She explains, “I was confident in managing IES’s marketing. I’ve been with the business for over 15 years now! But, without a marketing team, I was looking for someone to help me do a complete overhaul of our marketing, looking at everything we’ve built up over the years and making sure it still reflects IES as a business and is helping us to achieve our sales goals.”
The challenge
When a business has an extensive archive of marketing materials (like IES did) it can pose several challenges for a business.
- Excessive unrelated blogs diluted their brand, causing irrelevant inquiries
- Communicating a clear proposition was difficult amidst the noise of out-of-date content
- Identifying opportunities for new content was a challenge because it wasn’t easy to see what they had already covered.
It was also making it difficult for Faith to clearly get their proposition and niche expertise across to IES customers through the website as it was getting lost amongst all the clutter.
“I had lots of different campaigns on the go,” Faith explains “and we were getting a steady flow of new leads into the business but we just had so much going on that it wasn’t always easy to see where those leads were coming from and what we needed to improve on.”
The solution
When Ros and Faith first sat down together, it was clear that Faith had done a lot of work narrowing down their ideal customer. She had categorised them by job titles and the value they’d get from the work IES does and had ended up with quite a few ideal customer personas. Having lots of ideal customer personas isn’t uncommon in complex businesses, especially when you service many different industries. However, the more personas you have, the more complicated your marketing becomes because each one needs a different approach. We’ve found most businesses can narrow down their audience to 3 or 4 personas (or less if possible!). This then makes their marketing feel less overwhelming while still being effective.
Ros and Faith started with a 2-hour strategy session to identify the gaps and overlaps in their current personas and narrow down to focus on just 4. This meant they were then able to focus their marketing on a small number of specific personas in the short-to-medium term and find messages that resonated with each group.
Once they had condensed these down to 4 ideal customer personas, Ros and Faith set to work decluttering IES’s buyer strategy and simplifying their ‘buyer labyrinth’ into a clear path to purchase.
“We did a ‘Marie Kondo’ declutter of IES’s marketing strategy and content,” Ros explains. “If you’ve never heard of Marie Kondo, she’s the queen of effective organisation. She goes into her clients houses, pulls everything out of the wardrobe and cupboards and is then very purposeful and considered about what is allowed back into the house. That’s exactly what we did with IES’s marketing. Although it was a bit uncomfortable looking at the overwhelming amount of existing content laid out in front of us, it made it far easier to sift through everything and judge what's aligned to our ideal customers, what can be tweaked to resonate more strongly and what can be archived to clear space for new content.”
As part of this process, Ros and Faith also mapped out IES’s buyer journey to identify how this content was currently supporting their customers and where there were gaps and opportunities in their marketing. They also outlined a plan for Faith to join forces with some of the other departments in the business so she could gather an accurate image of the results the different aspects of her marketing were producing. By having this framework to measure her marketing, Faith was then able to identify opportunities to incrementally improve each component of her marketing machine to improve the quantity and quality of leads being passed to the sales team.
The result
Since giving her marketing archive the “Marie Kondo treatment”, Faith now has a clear plan in place and a system to keep their marketing strategic.
She now has a clear plan that she's working on, their website is specifically aimed at their audience and she knows what she's focussing on and working towards. This means she can be much more productive and effective in her role generating leads for IES.
