Are you looking for a marketing agency as passionate as you?

At Abacus Marketing, we pride ourselves on providing a professional, transparent and high quality service to companies of every size. Not only do we work with lots of ambitious SMEs and start-up enterprises, but we also work with a number of blue-chip corporates too – such as Canon, for whom we create through-the-line advertising campaigns for the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe to promote their cameras and printers. Or Kuehne + Nagel, for whom we delivered an integrated corporate sales presentation tool and an office signage toolkit that is used across their global network of offices. Or Virgin Holidays, who trusted us to deliver their sales conference. Add to that list the likes of MasterCard (integrated TTL marketing campaign for a prepaid product), Land Rover (dealer programmes), IBM (channel marketing across Europe), Tesco Direct (integrated marketing campaign), Esso (customer service programme for their UK forecourts) and AXA (ad hoc marketing support), and you can see that Abacus provides a service trusted by some of the biggest global organisations.

Why is this? Simple – it’s down to three factors; great results, great service and great value. The same three factors that we deliver for our smaller clients, but with a focus on a specific goal or project, rather to create and deliver an integrated marketing plan.

Our team is the perfect partner for big businesses looking for an external marketing resource they can trust, whatever their goals. We don’t specialise in any particular industry because we specialise in marketing consultancy – and the same fundamental rules apply to all marketing projects regardless of industry. If necessary, we bring in people with industry-relevant experience to assist our core team in delivering the best possible outcomes for our clients.

What Abacus offers

What can Abacus offer you and your team, and how do you know we are the right marketing agency for you to work with? Well, the best thing to do is to arrange a meeting for a face-to-face discussion. But, in the meantime, it might be interesting to know that we pride ourselves on the level of service we provide as much as on the quality of the work we deliver.

A tailormade service:

We give every client our full attention and always provide a transparent service. Your team will enjoy a personalised, tailormade service where you can get in touch with your personal project manager anytime, day or night, seven days a week, every day of the year.

Get the best people for the job:

We have an incredibly talented network of media-specialist and marketing-generalist professionals who we call upon to support our core team as and when required to do so to deliver a specific brief, no matter how niche it might be.

No outrageous mark-ups:

Our mission is to work in genuine, trustworthy partnership with our clients and one part of this relationship is that we never charge hidden extras or mark-ups on print and production, digital or non-digital media, travel or subsistence.

Passion:

Our passion is delivering marketing strategies that actually work. At Abacus, we love what we do, and our team will always deliver our work with passion. We never rest on our laurels and are always looking for ways to improve our plans and strategies.

Transparency:

There are no smoke and mirrors when it comes to working with us. You will always understand exactly what we are doing, and you are encouraged to question our ideas and bring your own experience to the table.

Our Six Stage Planning Process

We have developed a six-stage planning process that ensures the marketing strategies we implement will deliver your goals as effectively and efficiently as possible. This planning process is essentially a simplified format of the strategic marketing planning process we have evolved for the SME marketplace.

Briefing

We believe knowledge is the key to success, so we always start with a face-to-face meeting. In this initial briefing we seek to understand your current situation, what you have tried in the past, and where you would like to go in the future. We explore your products, services, competitors and customers to get as full a picture as possible.

Workshop

Stage two is a workshop attended by us and relevant people in your organisation. We go through all the details gathered from the briefing session in great detail. We ask challenging questions, encourage debate and get down to the nitty gritty. These workshops give us a huge amount of information to guide our strategic and creative development.

Research

This is the stage where we delve deeper into your industry and marketplace. We analyse your business plan and sales forecasts, as well as looking at sales performance and marketing activity. We analyse your competitors and gather information about your customers and products in a cost-effective way.

Brainstorm

Once we have a robust understanding of your business and your marketplace, we hold an internal brainstorm to generate strategic ideas and meaningful insights. We take the time to explore a kaleidoscope of possible solutions, from the very creative to the very technical.

Solution

From our brainstorming efforts we are then able to generate a solution to achieve your goals. Our solutions are birthed from a combination of understanding of your business and market, creative brainstorming sessions and the extensive experience of our team (we know what works and what doesn’t).

Delivery

Delivery is the final stage in the process. What makes us different from other agencies is our attention to detail. You will have a dedicated project manager and we are constantly monitoring and finetuning our plan to ensure we are achieving the best possible results.

Blue-chip Experience

We have had the pleasure of working with an extensive range of corporate clients over the years, who believe (quite correctly!) that they get better quality, service and value from Abacus, in comparison with larger marketing agencies in London. That’s why our vision is to provide a big agency experience without the big agency price tag. In fact, most of our senior people have worked at big London marketing agencies over the course of their careers, so we know what its like. And we do it better.

Canon

Canon wanted to improve the quality of marketing support for their DRBG region, that operates in over 100 countries across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

They had been using marketing campaigns created primarily for Western Europe, which had little success as the campaigns were felt to be irrelevant to DRBG region audiences. Therefore, with our help they wanted to create campaign marketing toolkits that regional managers would be willing to use as a basis for producing successful marketing campaigns for their marketplaces.

We worked hard to understand the regions, the markets and the products Canon wanted us to promote. Our creative team provided various services including campaign creation, graphic design, and copywriting. Our campaign ideas and asset creation were so successful that we were commissioned to deliver various other projects within the DRBG region.

Most of the work we now carry out for Canon includes production of promotional videos used for TTL advertising purposes across the region, as well as enhancing toolkits with extra assets and ideas.

Land Rover

Land Rover was looking for a London-based marketing team to help them to work more effectively with their UK dealer network to improve sales performance. We developed a bespoke campaign to target three key areas within the UK’s dealership network: sales, customer service and product knowledge.

Following the success of this strategy, we were then asked to deliver a series of ‘Ride and Drive’ events across the UK. These events included inviting customer-facing staff to test Land Rover cars against key competitors, so they had better first hand knowledge on how to address customer concerns and ultimately deliver a better sales service.

The highlights of our time working with Land Rover included the delivery of big budget events at locations across the UK, and organising group travel trips to beautiful European locations.

IBM

We worked with IBM, one of the largest technology companies in the world, to improve their relationships with resellers across the UK and EMEA regions.

IBM’s goal was to develop a closer working relationship with their resellers and distributors; therefore, we team created a sales incentive campaign to reward their UK resellers for promoting IBM product sales. The bespoke strategy we developed was so successful that it won a gold ITMA award.

We then went on to develop a complex strategy that spanned their Western European region with a budget in excess of £1.5million. The aim of the strategy was to create a database of all customer-facing staff in their network of distributors and resellers across Europe (a total of 15 countries). The database included managers, sales representatives, customer service agents and software engineers. This was achieved by developing a bespoke marketing app using IBM software that delivered this functionality.

The second stage was to deliver a campaign combining elements of communication, education, recognition and reward; this was aimed at managers, sales teams, service reps and software engineers to encourage them to promote IBM products and services to their customers. We held a range of training events across Europe to support the delivery of key messages to meet the goals of improving sales through incentives.

Virgin Holidays

Virgin Holidays were looking for an event marketing agency in London to help their event management company to deliver a high-profile sales conference. We worked closely with Virgin Holiday’s boardroom team throughout the process to deliver the best-received conference in its history.

With some research and meetings with senior directors, we identified the need for intimate break out areas where key messages could be delivered to delegates more effectively. As well as being informative, we needed the conference to be fun and exciting to be in keeping with the company’s core values. To achieve maximum success, we even sat in their head offices in Crawley for six weeks to make sure we were on hand throughout the planning stage for meetings with key people.

Following the success of this conference we were tasked with being involved with an exciting event working directly with Sir Richard. We flew with him on a Harry Potter-branded Virgin Airways jumbo jet to Orlando. We filmed Richard Branson during the flight – serving drinks to passengers, mixing with Harry Potter stars and chatting away on the plane’s intercom. The film was edited during the flight so that it was ready to use that very evening at the Hard Rock Café in Orlando.

Dora The Explorer

Abacus worked closely with the Dora The Explorer team to develop instore promotional concepts aimed at large retailers spanning the UK and Europe to assist their sales teams with agreeing individual sales strategies to stock and sell their merchandise across the stores’ networks.

We provided the sales team with a presentation toolkit to demonstrate various sales concepts to target retailers. The goal was to easily and effectively explain to each retailer that the Dora The Explorer team could create bespoke point of sale campaigns based on the specific needs of that retailer and how a partnership could be beneficial to all parties concerned.

We held focus groups with the target market and used mystery shoppers to check out what other companies were doing, to gain the best insights on how we meet our client’s goals. From our findings we put together three concepts focusing on the achievements of key milestones in a child’s formative years.

How Abacus can help your team

Abacus has worked with many large businesses and delivered great results for them all. For more information about how we can provide marketing support for you and your team, please email Stephen Taylor-Brown, our Client Services Director, at stephen@abacusmarketing.co.uk, or call Stephen on 020 3858 7836. You can find out more about who we are, what we do, and who we do it for by visiting our website at www.abacusmarketing.co.uk.