Case studies
Powering the people who power startups
A UK-based venture studio required a full-service marketing suite to acquire and retain clients through its agency based model.
We worked across its entire business, including its internal marketing and advisory and implementation on its client’s marketing.
This unique relationship was designed to give the agency a one-stop-shop, using Soba: Private Label’s combined B2B and B2C expertise to tackle the agency’s own marketing and the marketing of its clients.
By deploying Soba’s team across their business, the agency was able to add a full marketing function to its existing services of brand, governance, and software engineering, as well as focus on its own client acquisition - which led to a new revenue stream and the closing of several long term contracts by the Soba team.
These new clients included:
A home fitness company
A dating app
An international hydroponics company
A professional network
A sustainability focused FinTech
As well as leading to new revenue and new deals, our partnership has allowed the agency to have ongoing marketing support across email, content marketing, LinkedIn, and lead generation.
“As a creative partner, Soba has given us a range of solutions to marketing challenges like copywriting, direct marketing, customer acquisition, and creative and strategic thinking.”
Adib Bamieh, Bamboo Orchard
Supporting a B Corp creative agency
The client is a small, London based creative agency, that works with sustainability and B Corp focused businesses.
The agency has been operating for more than five years, and has approximately 10 staff, and while they’ve had some good wins and clients under their belts, they have been struggling to attract new business, and work on the high-value projects the agency was set up for.
We reviewed and assessed the client’s positioning, which included their website, outreach emails, brochures and reports, social media, tone of voice, use of language, and target audience, to best understand where these challenges might be coming from and how they could be fixed.
Through our analysis, we discovered these core issues:
- The agency targeted all businesses, even those tangentially related to sustainability
- Their communications (including web copy) didn’t speak to one segment of their target market, such as decision makers, but -tried (and failed) to capture anyone who might be interested
- The agency didn’t talk about the hard benefits of using it, instead leaning towards soft benefits such as ‘making brands relevant’ and using common cliches such as ‘in a changing world’
- The agency didn’t communicate why potential customers should work with them instead of other agencies.
We then led a series of positioning and niching workshops, which were designed to get to the guts of what the agency wanted to achieve - which companies (based on industry, size, and revenue) they wanted to approach, which decision makers in these companies (Heads of and C-Suite), which of their services they wanted to be known for, in order to best understand where the agency needed to go, and how far it needed to go.
Following our analysis, we developed a ‘self-implementation’ led solution for the agency - where they were able to easily understand what their core issues were, and then how to solve those core issues themselves.
Using our analysis, and our workshops, as the foundation, we created an Action Plan for the agency to follow, which laid out step-by-step what the agency needed to do, in order to have stronger market positioning, and solve the problem of the agency not being considered by the brands and companies it wanted to target.
The action plan included:
- Outlining and defining a target market, including company type, size, and decision makers
- Using benefits focused language across all communications
- Clearly outlining the competitive advantage the agency gives to its clients
- Choosing a hero service to sell to high-value clients and use as a foot in the door
- Do extensive competitor research to understand where they sit inline with their competitors.
“Our workshop last year was one of the most impactful conversations on PTPM's positioning since I scaled up. We're fully booked until August, 100% utilisation through a quarter for the first time. THANK YOU!”
Kevinjohn Gallagher, PTPM Studio
Defining a niche for a branding agency
This South Carolina, USA, based branding agency has worked across large, local, financial institutions and small community centres - developing and refreshing brands, and creating brand strategies and have made clients stand out across the region.
The agency was founded in 2011 and has almost 20 staff, but having got almost all of their work through referrals, they’ve struggled to land the work they want to be doing: branding.
This agency has spent years doing generalist social media marketing in order to fund its pursuit of brand related projects, which make up less than 70% of its income. As an agency that’s heavily reliant on referrals, they’ve felt unable to turn down work they’re referred to, but is outside of their core offering of brand strategy and development.
Having recently let go of their Business development Manager, they have continued to struggle to attract the right kind of clients.
The first step of our analysis was to look at all of the agency’s outward facing collateral and communications, to understand, and create a picture of, the position they hold in the market.
We asked these questions during the analysis phase:
Is it obvious to cold prospects what this agency does and the benefits of working with them?
Is it easy for a cold prospect to choose to buy from this agency, without having a meeting with a c-suite level executive?
Is it clear why you’d choose this agency over other branding agencies in South Carolina?
Our independent analysis found that the agency’s offering was often confused and, despite representing themselves as a branding agency, they asked prospects to choose between two different types of disciplines: branding and social media marketing, on their website and in their communications.
There was no clear path to purchase or decision making for prospects, without having to speak to a representative of the agency, because, despite providing social proof and a unique branding process, these were often buried or lost to the competing interests of the agency - namely, trying to pull in any work it could, whether that work was branded related or not.
We ran a series of workshops with C-Suite level executives within the agency to understand:
The types of companies they wanted to work with (including size and revenue)
Which challenge they could solve for brands that no other agency could
How they could productise their branding service
How they could better reflect themselves as a branding agency, without existing non-brand clients being alarmed.
Following these sessions, we developed a bespoke, self-implementation-led, Action Plan, that the agency would implement themselves.
This Action Plan told the agency exactly what they needed to do in order to solve their customer attraction problems, including:
Defining a niche
Turning their existing unique process into branded IP
Talking about the hard benefits of what they do
Making it easy to understand why prospects should work with them
Create a narrative to underpin all of their communications and the language they use to communicate the benefits of their agency and services.
“Working with Seb and the team with their no-BS approach was a breath of fresh air. They rewrote our entire website to clarify our whole proposition, and helped us show why 21st Century businesses need RevOps (and why they should use us to do it).”
Jamie Shuck, fluidity
Advertising and copywriting for a leading AI firm
A world-leading AI company needed an evergreen nurture flow for their newly acquired leads. Their team had already implemented HubSpot and regularly sent newsletters and event invites to its database, but didn’t have a structured lead nurture programme in place.
The Soba: Private Label team worked with the client’s Director of Demand Generation and internal HubSpot team to develop a lead nurture and qualification sequence to take the leads generated by their marketing activity, and qualify them for their sales teams.
Our team created a 10-week, repeatable, lead nurture funnel that the client could continue to use in all of its outreach activity.
This partnership resulted in large, across the board upticks in email marketing engagement from the leads, often outstripping the amount of engagement driven by the emails sent by the client’s internal marketing team.
At the close of the project, the client indicated that it would continue to use the lead nurture flow created by our team in perpetuity.
“From the first informal call to the delivery of some very sharp, focussed (but also very witty and enjoyable) copy for 3 product landing pages, I rated the experience of working with Soba very highly indeed.”
Shane O’Doherty, GRAFT
Launching a new business in the market
This Scotland based agency was new to the market, having not yet launched, they were working with a branding agency to get the business ready for the market.
Operating in the extremely competitive AI and recruitment space, this agency needed a go-to-market position that was going to clearly, accurately, and compellingly show the market what they could do for their clients, what makes them different to other players in their space, and fit fluidity with the visual aesthetics of the brand they’d had created.
Because this agency was new to the market, we began by understanding what it was that makes it unique compared to the competition. This included an in-depth analysis of four competitors, in order to understand their brand, the language they use, the benefits of working with them, and whether or not they stood out against each other.
We reflected these findings back to the client, to understand how they felt about their competitors, and what their competitors were doing right, and were doing wrong.
From there, we ran a series of workshops, where we worked with the new agency to understand:
What they did that their competitors didn’t do
If their service could or should be prioritised
What opportunities there were for creating branded IP
The tone of voice the agency would have, and the language it would use
How that language would be used
The hard benefits of working with the agency.
We worked closely with the branding and web development agencies to best understand how the positioning and language would fit into the existing designs, so we could optimise for impact, simplicity, and ease of understanding.
We developed a full go-to-market positioning, using our analysis and workshops, which included:
The agency’s tone of voice
The language the agency used
Positioning guidelines that covered all external facing communications
A well defined niche and set of target customers.
Accompanying the market positioning and guidelines, was copy for four page website, including the development of headlines, logo taglines, and recommendations for productising the agency’s offering - so prospects could easily see what they did, why they did it, and how effective it was.