Sad to admit but our own self-promotion has taken a back seat recently, much due to other pressing matters it has to be said.

But now we’re back on track and happily have released a new website.

We’re confident that it will provide visitors with a good understanding on who we are, what we do and who we work with. We’re not big on showing pictures of ourselves in various guises, so there is no ‘..and here’s the team’ tab to look at. Suffice to say, we are all mature adults who have an abundance of expertise covering all corners of the marketing and social landscape and we all serve a common purpose – to do great work for our clients whilst enjoying the moment.

Please have a look through the site, the content of which will be refreshed regularly (particularly client case studies). If you like what you see and would like to see us, please get in touch and let’s discuss further.

The move to develop brand status from “industry leader” into “thought leader”, presents a daunting challenge for many SMEs.

All too often, highly successful businesses, benefiting from a wealth of expertise, experience and industry knowledge, struggle to convert all of the above into effective marketing content. All SMEs can gain a real advantage from thought leadership content that will help to reveal innovation and drive conversation – significantly differentiating your business and your level of expertise.

Here are some simple, general tips that you can follow to make your content stand out in a crowded online marketplace.

• Focus – It is important to assess what is trying to be achieved through the content. Why is it important that your audience sees this piece of work? For example, one of the key methods for a standard thought leadership article is to identify and illustrate a recent common customer challenge, then detail unique solutions to this issue that relate back to the services that your business provides. By always looking to position your business as the solution provider within your content, you will benefit from showcasing a superior level of expertise. But be warned – there is a fine line between communicating what your business can do, and pushing your products.

• Provoke – While your overall content plan may primarily be designed with the main goal of showcasing your services, thought leadership articles can also be used to provoke thoughts, ideas and discussions amongst readers.There may be a trend or topic of discussion within your specific industry that your business is yet to have a say on, or there may be a wider, top-level matter that no one in your industry has even talked about yet. Exploring ideas, and inviting others to do the same with you, will show your audience that you are an innovative organisation, with one eye on the future.

• Optimise – Once it has gone live, your customers will want to have access to the content in a variety of ways: in print, online, via social media and on their smart devices. It is therefore important that it is quickly adapted for those output channels, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Some general social rules of thumb: only brief summaries and statistics should be shared on Twitter, a conversational tone should be used on Facebook, and LinkedIn – often the preferred channel for thought leadership content – should be a place where you look to invite professional discussion and talk industry trends.

Guaranteeing that your content is optimised for all channels will go a long way in ensuring that the desired impact is achieved across the board.

With so many big-name agencies dominating the marcom space, it is a familiar tale that the small agencies are often overlooked.

Why? This is largely due to a shared perspective amongst some enterprises that the larger firms are a “safe bet”, which is of course understandable given their obvious successes. But is this really still the case in present day?

The marketplace is evolving like never before. Digitalisation is empowering smaller agencies to become increasingly competitive by doing more with less. Businesses are subsequently beginning to now take note and assess what is truly being achieved with their money by the bigger names, and if their approach needs a revamp.

Outlined below are some of the benefits of working with smaller agencies:

• Quality – It’s not an outlandish claim to say that the big-name firms are often guilty of spreading their efforts a little thin across their broad and expansive client list. This is only understandable when the majority of businesses that they work alongside would be considered ‘priority’ by the smaller agencies.

A big client working with a small agency will benefit from being treated exactly as that would suggest. Here there is a greater commitment of efforts to ensuring that the client’s goals are being met, and therefore the best people are put on the job to guarantee that this happens. A big-name client will always be more valued at the smaller agency, and this will inevitably be reflected in the work that is provided.

• Speed – No matter the industry or line of work, time is always a crucial factor. In smaller teams, processes are more streamlined and projects generally have a faster completion time. There are fewer people to clash heads with, allowing for content review stages to be less than what typically exists in larger agencies.

The traditional agency structure often found in the larger firms can be quite limiting when looking to innovate and think of new ways to meet the evolving needs of the client. Small agencies benefit from a less-structured approach, an environment in which creativity can develop better. With fewer barriers, original ideas occur more frequently, and can be activated and applied at a faster rate.

• People – Instead of handling just one component of a single account, staff in the smaller agency are used to having a much broader scope of capabilities. Working across the entire company, those at small agencies are able to get involved in every aspect of a project, thereby benefitting clients by removing over-dependencies on certain specialist staff. There is also the advantage of being supported by smaller teams. Better able to communicate and collaborate with one another, teams of fewer people generally benefit from greater clarity – both between themselves and with the client – and stronger internal relationships. This ensures that communication siloes are almost non-existent in the smaller firms, as each employee’s voice is heard and every opinion is valued.

Ultimately, there is no question that you should be choosing to work alongside the agency that is in the best position to meet your specific needs. Just don’t discard the little guy before he’s had his say.