After nearly 20 years running in-house marketing for a series of B2B (business-to-business) SMEs, a variety of factors convinced me it was time to move away from in-house marketing.

It was time to setup a ‘no compromise’ agency…

• where I could set up marketing processes the way I knew they were meant to work.
• where I could dedicate myself to setting up the perfect marketing machine.
• where I could showcase what modern marketing can do for businesses.
• where I could produce practical, demonstratable results.
• where I could combine the commercial theories I follow and admire with the technical tools that deliver results.

That’s a lot of blah about me. How does it help you?

1. Let’s start with strategy. Yeah, boring, I know. But it’s the most fundamental process that businesses ignore. Especially SMEs. So we waste time and resources chasing pipedreams that even a cursory strategy would have revealed as fantasy. If you don’t have the time to sense-check a new project, that’s one place where FBA helps.
2. How about market research and competitive analysis? Nobody likes doing it. We’re usually worried it might show our favourite idea is under-spec’d, over-priced or heading for shark-infested waters. So we go ahead blindly with a bucketful of gut instinct, wishful thinking and the confidence that Steve Jobs never did market research (which is rubbish, by the way). FBA gives you the insight you need.
3. What about your sales channels? Whether you rely on an in-house sales team or dealers and distributors, you need tools that’ll make their lives easier. You need to help them sell. Your need to make your business the best part of their business. That takes time-consuming research and meticulous development. You can trust FBA to produce effective channel programmes and sales-enablement tools.
4. We’d better not forget efficiency and cost-effectiveness. You don’t have a big marketing department and you don’t want one. You can’t put processes in place that cost more than the national debt and take armies to administer. That’s why FBA is built on automated processes that can be replicated in your business. And those processes are developed in Zoho One, a truly exceptional suite of marketing and business applications that’s inexplicably cheap.
5. And finally we have to come to what most people recognise as marketing: getting the message out there. Website optimisation, inbound marketing, advertising, social media, presentations, exhibitions, webinars, analytics – even boring old collateral – this is the cornerstone of what FBA does for its clients.

If you read between the lines you may notice that the five preceding points paraphrase the four Ps of marketing: product, price, place and promotion. That’s no coincidence. They may be old but they’re still the fundamentals of good marketing. Hell, they’re the basis of good business. We ignore them at our peril.

I am a technophile. There’s no denying it. That characteristic is reflected in the way FBA operates. Technology underpins everything from marketing (of course) to internal comms, finance, time-management and planning. Setting up my own agency allows me the freedom to deploy the tools and skills that help clients as well as my own business. Because I can see the results they deliver.

I’m on a mission to show SMEs that they can have the marketing and marketing technology that is every bit as good, if not better, than the marketing you typically find in multinational enterprises. SMEs can have the facilities and the technology without the bureaucracy that ties down larger organisations.

I hope you’ll join me on that mission.

Steve Baxter