The origin story
Hello, we're Richard and David, Co-Founders of The Inspired Marketing Group. We're two client-side marketers who have built and run high performing in house marketing teams for the last (almost) 20 years.
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We've been watching with interest as the world of work has changed over the last few years and after the COVID 19 sledgehammer, it's clear;
The in house marketing function needs to be reinvented.​
Winter is coming
COVID 19 had a profound impact on life around the globe. We also believe it's going to drive the biggest economic contraction in a lifetime, even deeper and more destructive than the credit crunch of 2008.
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This will have a deep and far-reaching impact on businesses of all shapes and sizes and of course the people who work for those businesses.
The distributed economy has arrived
At the start of 2020, working from anywhere was seen as a progressive approach and even a perk for employees. This is now business as usual for most businesses.
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And it's working, literally. Staff enjoy the flexibility, businesses are seeing consistent or even better productivity and as a result, businesses have options to save significant costs on offices and physical estate.
Businesses will still need to cut costs
Regardless of how much savings businesses can make on office space, there are still going to be huge job losses.
After making the cuts to save their business, those businesses will then need to either protect what they've built or even attack gaps left by competitors that have exited the market.
To do this, businesses will need a high performing marketing team, but they won't want to add that cost back into their headcount.
Businesses can't afford the marketing talent they need
Marketing is becoming more and more specialised as the skills needed to deliver individual components of the marketing mix become increasingly divergent.
Let's take Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as just one example. SEO is often arbitrarily added to relatively junior marketing job descriptions without understanding the spectrum of skills needed to make that channel work effectively.
The reality is that to 'make SEO work' businesses will likely need someone that is technical, that knows HTML, Python or Javascript, but they will also need a copywriter as well as someone with digital PR experience. There is unlikely to be one person with all of those skills and if there is, they'll be very expensive.
These talented marketers become experts in their specific areas because they love it, whether that's marketing automation, biddable media, front end development, UX design or anything else.
These experts want to spend their time doing the work they love, not all the other stuff on the exponentially growing marketer's job description.
What about agencies?
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We've both worked with some amazing agencies and people, some of those people are now close friends. Agencies are an excellent way to supplement an in house team, adding deep expertise and scalability.
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But the FD always gets twitchy about signing agency retainers, particularly if they are for 6 - 12 month periods and particularly if money is tight. You could deploy multiple agencies but you're compounding the cost as well as adding the job of 'agency management' to the roles and responsibilities of your in house team.
The new world order
Swathes of exceptionally talented marketers are being made redundant as businesses focus on survival.
But, those businesses still need marketing talent, just not on the payroll.
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This is why we created The inspired Marketing Group.
We help businesses get the high calibre marketing talent they need, exactly when they need it and we help talented marketing experts do more of the work they love and get paid what they deserve.​
How we do it
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We give businesses the full breadth and depth of marketing expertise they need from a modern marketing function but with complete flexibility and no long term commitment.
If you already have a marketing function we can support you with a one-off project, extra talent or we can build a complete marketing function for your business from scratch.
Based on your specific business objectives, we create a bespoke and highly dynamic marketing function from our huge community of experts that changes and adapts to your business and your priorities.
It means you have exactly the right experts for any job and you only pay them when you need them.
Our process
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We always start at the end.
Every engagement starts with an objective workshop. We spend at least half a day in your business understanding exactly what you want to achieve, your challenges, opportunities, and how much you want to spend - this is important for later.
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Using your objectives, we'll build a map of how to get there.
In the map, we'll include some of the key skills and areas of expertise you'll need to deliver your objectives.
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From your map, we'll develop a detailed plan and together start selecting experts to join your project.
Using our extensive community of experts we'll build an entirely bespoke team just for your project and only to deliver the explicit items that we need them for.
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Once the team is built we'll manage the entire project, all the people, report on performance and deliver your objectives.
If we need to change strategy, course correct, or adapt our plan at any point we simply adapt the team along with the plan to deliver your objectives.
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Ready to get started?
