How we work

We’re not your typical marketing agency

In fact, consultancy is only a small part of what we do.

Every brand and business is on a digital journey with varying needs and challenges. Our team of senior marketing practitioners – with extensive backgrounds at world-leading brands, agencies, small businesses and startups – deliver value at every level, building and strengthening your digital capability across a range of digital marketing disciplines.

The Digiterati coaching, training and consultancy services give businesses the confidence and skills to become digitally empowered – enabling them to do it for themselves – to create better, longer and more profitable relationships with their customers. And where it’s simply not practical for you to do it yourself, we are happy to help fill the void in turning strategy and planning into ACTION.

That’s one of the reasons that we have invested so heavily into our Digiterati Academy because we wanted to make our expertise available to even small businesses at a low cost and enable them to be equipped to take their digital marketing and social media in-house (after all no one knows your business and your customers like you do).

Our approach – relentless pursuit of digital excellence

We’re passionate about digital, and relentless about getting the details right. One of our first questions will always be to understand the objectives of any strategy, idea or practice you have. We’ll then ask the difficult questions (you’ll find us quite straight talking) and help you implement what might be quite challenging solutions.

We often find ourselves the instigators of significant cultural and digital change in organisations. Brought in, perhaps to advise on social media, but then catalysing considerable transformation in other areas. Organisations are often what we describe as “unconsciously incompetent” in aspects of digital. Our goal is to move you to conscious competence and we can do that through consultancy, mentoring, training or a combination of all three approaches.

Our relationship with you

Our goal is not to get you on board with an expensive retainer arrangement and then sell additional services on top.
We don’t even have the usual Account Director, Account Manager and Account Exec structure. Digital project managementEach project is allocated to a Lead Consultant with the appropriate skills and experience to your project who will bring in other Digiterati as required. Like this 2+2 can end up being 5 or more as we pool our collective expertise for client work.

Our philosophy is always client empowerment so, unless you specifically want a purely outsourced project, we can work with your in-house teams and incumbent agencies to bring a deeper level of digital expertise, sharing our knowledge as we go.

The consultancy process

When you contact us we’ll normally suggest an initial Skype call with a couple of our team to get a better understanding of the brief and ask more detailed questions about your project objectives and expectations. We’ll then go away and work up a costed and timed proposal.

Digital team meetingEach project is clearly scoped with an agreed specification. You will be allocated a Lead Consultant. They will be the people responsible for working on your project managing any technical specialists (developers, designers etc). Whilst we recognise that most projects experience some degree of “creep” we see this as an opportunity to bring positive change to other areas uncovered in the course of our work. As with all work, these new elements are identified and costed as part of the process.

Our goal is not necessarily to retain clients for the long term (although we are quite happy if it suits you to outsource that way), instead client education and empowerment is crucial to what we do. We don’t hide our “trade secrets”, in fact we’re happy to deliver training that sets out in a step-by-step manner exactly how to work smarter with digital approaches. We can coach your staff one-on-one or train up the entire marketing team. Like that in working with The Digiterati you are not just investing in your brand, but in your entire team.

How are we different?Carlton making a point in a digital strategy workshop for a client

  • Our team are all experienced, senior digital marketers – so you’ll only ever deal with director-level consultants
  • Our network includes some of the most able and experienced digital marketing practitioners in the business
  • We bring critical thinking and innovative, creative solutions to your big issues
  • We’re a virtual agency, so we don’t charge inflated prices to cover the cost of expensive London offices

Who we’re not

We’re not a marketing agency. We won’t hoard knowledge or keep you locked into a retainer – our goal is always helping you to build your own world-class digital capability. That’s why training (and giving away our know how) is an important part of what we do. And unlike many agencies, the senior staff don’t disappear as soon as the purchase order is signed.

Marie coaching digital marketers from Glen Dimplex Group (Roberts Radio, Belling, Stoves and other brands)
Marie coaching digital marketers from Glen Dimplex Group (Roberts Radio, Belling, Stoves and other brands)

We’re not management consultants. We’re not turning our hands to digital like it’s just another project – our practical, first-hand knowledge means we know exactly how to meet the digital challenges you’re facing. And we know that using digital to create lasting, impacting business transformation never ends with a lofty strategy and a fancy presentation.

We’re not digital trend chasers. We’re not aiming to make viral videos or get your Twitter hashtag trending – unless we can prove it’s going to make a positive, lasting impact on your business. Big follower numbers are great, but engagement is better and return on investment better still (hint: that’s always our goal). We never chase the newest big thing without considering how it actually fits in with everything else you’re doing.