Hi, I’m Sarah Butler and welcome to my brand spanking new website for my new consultancy firm. I am delighted to announce that I am now officially working in an independent capacity as an online marketing consultant across Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire.
Let me start by telling you a little more about me...
I worked in London agencies for over 10 years, during which time I lived through the shift from traditional and offline marketing to online and digital marketing. Having started in branding and comms, I went on to specialise in traditional ‘design and build’ of websites before finding a love for customer (or ‘user’) experience and content marketing. Prior to leaving London, I was MD of a customer experience design agency in Shoreditch.
Fast forward a few years (and two small kids) and I now live and work from rural Cambridgeshire. I’ve spent the past four years consulting as a Social Media Expert for a training company who specialise in helping mums achieve that elusive work-life balance by retraining as Social Media Managers. The biggest part of this role was to set the direction for the social media strategies for their clients - hundreds of them over the course of 4 years!
When that contract drew to a close I wanted to combine these experiences to set up my own consultancy as a Digital Marketing Strategist.
So what’s this new consultancy all about?
I’m a people person. I have always been passionate about people. In fact the first thing I do when anyone asks me about the approach they should take to their marketing, is to create a typical customer profile for their business in my head. Without fully understanding who it is you are targeting it is impossible to think in strategic terms about your marketing.
My biggest love is developing strategies to help brands and businesses market themselves in a way which is true to themselves and the products or services that they offer but also resonates with the audience they want to target and, crucially, is presented consistently across all of the most relevant applications.
I will help create the strategy and give you the tools and training you need to be able to implement that strategy moving forwards, as well as the metrics you need to measure its success in order to refine your approach over time.
How can you work with me?
My key areas of expertise are customer segmentation (identifying your audiences and considering their needs and wants when designing any online product), online branding (presenting your brand consistently online in terms of look and feel, personality and tone of voice) and content marketing (creating and curating the right content and distributing it in the right places to get your brand in front of the right people).
I can therefore look at who you are targeting and on what platforms, what you are saying and whether it is consistent and relevant to those audiences. We can review whether your online products (websites, apps etc) are meeting the needs of that target audience and making it easy for them to reach a point of conversion. And finally we can look at how you can use various forms of content in various applications (social media, e-marketing, guest blogging etc) to engage that audience further.
And the beauty of being independent is that the way in which you choose to work with me can be super flexible too. It could be:
1) On a project basis. This is the most common way to work. Whether you are looking for a full strategy for your business, some guidelines as to how to be more consistent or one area of strategic input - such as your social media strategy - I would provide a cost for the time involved in devising that strategy for you
2) As a retained resource. I would agree to work a certain number of hours per week in order to provide marketing support to your business as and when needed. Examples of this include: the point at which you are launching a new product or you would like to make your marketing processes more automated. Or perhaps you need someone to be on top of your content strategy and feeding into the business on what content to create? Maybe you feel you can manage the marketing in house but you need someone available to bounce ideas off or assure you that your marketing efforts (and budgets) and being focused in the right areas. 3) Through training & workshops. I offer bespoke training and workshops which can be completely tailored to the needs of your business. Want to know more about how to use social media for your business? Just starting out and thinking about your brand positioning and how to present yourselves consistently online? Want to involve your team in improvements to your website or marketing and sales processes? I will devise 1:1 training or group workshops in response to the specific marketing challenges you are facing and give you the tools you need to deliver against these challenges and measure their success moving forward 4) Via a Power Hour. Have you got a specific question which has been bothering you? Maybe you're not sure you are on the right platforms? Perhaps you need some help creating a content plan for your business? Maybe you want to understand how your website could be working harder for you to drive conversations? Or how you could make your marketing more automated to save on resources but maintain customer contact? With a power hour, you present me with a problem and as much background as you have and I will work with that brief and deliver a targeted hour of advice and training on how to resolve that problem. This can be face-to-face but is often conducted by phone or video call.
It's a pretty scary moment when you take that leap into a new venture but I can't tell you how exciting it is to finally be working independently and using the knowledge I have gained over the past 15 years to inform strategies for local businesses and brands to start taking control of their marketing.
I'm always open to a chat so feel free to get in touch if you fancy a catch up to discuss all things marketing over a cuppa or by more virtual means; Google hangouts or Zoom anyone? Or find out more at www.imsarahbutler.co.uk
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