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The Factory Partnership Limited
First Floor · 4-6 Church Lane · Leeds · LS28 7BD
Telephone: 0113 290 9244
Facsimilie: 0113 290 9263
Email: hello@the-factory.co.uk

When we established The Factory Design and Marketing Agency back in 2003 the founding members, Tim Chorlton and Chris Hay had both working in large design and marketing agencies and small design and marketing agencies in Leeds, London and Manchester.

We both had a belief that a small design and marketing agency could be run to be more efficient than some of the bigger design and marketing agencies providing there was structure and organisation in our approach to dealing with clients and gathering information at the beginning of any design project or marketing campaign.

To do this we designed a spoke and hub CRM system from the ground up which we called The Conveyor Belt. The Conveyor Belt sits at the very heart of The Factory and allows every member of the company to know where our clients design and marketing projects and campaigns are up to.

This organisational tool means we are far more efficient at handling campaigns so we get to spend more time on design concepts, marketing strategy and building websites or handling social media and less time on admin and pointless meetings.

As a result, our clients benefited from far more of our time going on creating marketing strategies or creative solutions to their problems than we had been able to spend in our previous employers companies.

As our clients were getting better thought through strategies and campaigns, they began to get better results. Some of our sales strategies and marketing consultancy was gaining our clients far higher return on investment than they had received from their previous agencies. But we didn't stop there...

Making marketing and sales processes visible to achieve better results...

No one is perfect, we understand that, but where in our previous jobs, work completed for clients was followed by some internal back slapping and a trip to the pub before moving onto the next customer, at The Factory, we wanted to find a way to make our marketing and promotional activities more visible, We thought if we could find a way to monitor marketing, advertising and sales activities, we could seek to get even better results. As the old adage goes, 'if it can be measured, it can be improved'.

So while our old agency counterparts where attending marketing awards ceremonies in Leeds, we were burning the midnight oil trying to find ways to make marketing activity more visible.

We became experts in not only adding google analytics to websites but also in interpreting the marketing data provided by google analytics. This allowed us to build websites more effectively, but more on that later.

We found ways to track print, advertising and even business cards. We learnt all there was to know about coupons, redemption's schemes, affiliate marketing programs and vouchers. We found out how EPOS systems worked, we learnt about marketing KPI's and how to make all the time people sink into social media visible and accountable.

We were like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, suddenly we could see exactly how our clients marketing budget was performing for them and so we began making suggestions as to how they might improve it.

Improving website performance and it's relationship to SEO or Search Engine Optimisation.

One of the first things we began to notice was how ineffective some companies search engine optimisation was (or SEO as we like to call it here in Leeds). People were paying big bucks to companies without actually questioning what they were paying for. We saw websites for companies who operate in Leeds and the surrounding Yorkshire area who where receiving increased traffic, but on closer inspection, the website traffic was coming from places like Thailand, India, American and Poland. What good are visitors from mainland Europe to companies who get their sales from Leeds and West Yorkshire. So we developed a new service called WPO. WPO stands for Website Performance Optimisation. It's a bit like the SEO or Search Engine Optimisation services offered by other experts in Leeds, but better. Much better in fact.

Why WPO is better than SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation is still a service in its infancy and the logical conclusion for marketing experts was always 'more is better', but as Google became more sophisticated, we realised as marketing experts, more is not better, it's the quality of the traffic to the website with is more important than the quantity of visitors to the web site.

Also, SEO or Search Engine Optimisation concentrates mostly on getting the site to appear on page one of google. What it doesn't consider is what happens after your visitors arrive. It's a bit like arranging the party of all parties, getting hundreds of people to show up and then not having any music or booze.

Our WPO Website Performance Optimisation service not only gets websites found on page one of google just like SEO or Search Engine Optimisation does, but focusses on the quality of visitors arriving at the web site. Ideally visitors to a web site should be arriving in the early stages of their buying process, because of this, our marketing consultancy skills came into play as well as our website design skills. We realised that getting customers to a website is only part of the job. By monitoring how they use the website by studying analytics we could start to make small changes to the website design as well. In some cases, just moving a button and changing it's colour on a website design can improve the goal conversion quite considerably.

Because WPO or Website Performance Optimisation works to a). optimise a website to appear on page one of google, b). uses techniques to drive 'relevant traffic' to the web site and then c). alters the design and layout of the web site based on user statistics and analytics it is, in our opinion, a far more effective product than SEO or Search Engine Optimisation and we are, to the best of our research the only company in Leeds or Yorkshire to offer Website Performance Optimisation as a marketing service.

But we do more than design web sites and got them found on google, we can also manage your social media strategy.

Social media is a relatively new marketing tool and one which is hugely misunderstood. Companies waste so many hours using social media, often late into the evening but with absolutely no tangible results to show for it. Social Media is considered to be free by most people, but if you factor in the time required to execute a successful social media strategy it's possibly one of the most expensive marketing tools currently used by companies, especially when you factor in the incredibly low return on investment most social media strategies seem to deliver.

Twitter, Facebook, linked In, Google +, four square, Qype and all the other social media tools all have their place and can be used to great effect if a sound marketing strategy is in place to support the social media. Social Media experts will generally suggest that social media activity is carried out in a 'little but often' kind of approach as suggested in books such as the fantastic Social Media Marketing: An Hour A Day. But as ever, at The Factory, we decided to take a closer look at social media strategy. We have realised that social media only works when dovetailed with a companies brand, marketing and sales strategies. It fails to work in isolation. Also, very few agencies try and add analytics to their social media strategies which in this day and age is almost unforgivable.

If I was investing at least an hour a day into creating content for my social media marketing, which is nearly half a week of time every single month, or a month and a half a year - I would want to be able to determine some sort of return on investment from that social media marketing.

We can use all manor of tools to determine not only 'social reach' but also the overall effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts. By having visibility, it means that over time, we can help our clients spend more time on the effective social media marketing activities and less time 'shouting into the void' as we like to call it.

Not just a digital and social media marketing agency based in leeds, oh no, we are so much more.

We started our careers as designers. Graphic designers to be exact. We worked for graphic design agencies in Leeds, London and Manchester. We produced fantastic brochure designs, logo designs and stationery for all sorts of customers. Our experience of design for print and producing marketing literature for marketing departments and other clients gave us a sound understanding of working to brand guidelines and producing branded literature that met said brand guidelines. In fact, in our early days as graphic designers, our design work was always highly complimented upon whenever brand audits were carried out.

As digital marketing became more and more prevalent, we were able to carry our brand expertise over to online digital design and production. In a world which, in the early days certainly, was largely inhabited by 'techies' we were one of the few marketing companies who recognised the important of delivering a continuous brand experience onto website design.

We now work with our clients to produce not only brand strategies but also design brands with brand guidelines which take into account website design as well as other digital media which we are all exposed to every day.

Digital Brand management doesn't stop with website design...

Digital Brand Development needs to reach much further than just web site design. Emailers, Facebook landing pages, web banner advertising and smart phone, android and iphone apps are all areas where customers are exposed to branding - touch points as we marketing consultants or branding experts like to call them. Brands need to be delivered consistently for them to be effective, brand consistency in digital marketing is difficult to achieve, especially when using multiple suppliers to fulfil your brand, marketing and sales strategies. We like to think of ourselves as brand development specialists or a brand strategy agency on a par with some of the bigger brand strategy agencies in leeds and yorkshire.

We think this because brand strategy should be intertwined with a companies marketing strategy, the two go hand in hand to support a companies sales strategy, and like many of the bigger agencies, we have CIM trained staff who follow best marketing practice in our agency to deliver joined up marketing, brand and sales strategies and solutions.