Barker Associates: driving 58% organic increase in prospects

The Marketing Centre helped Barker Associates, an integrated property consultancy that specialises in designing and creating inspiring, sustainable spaces where people work, learn and play, to make strategically aligned data-driven marketing decisions to support its business growth targets.

Working Together

Selina Noton, one our experienced Marketing Directors in the Eastern Counties team, delivered a marketing strategy to support Barker’s 5-year business plan. This included implementing a marketing CRM system to increase efficiency and track meaningful data from which Selina and the team could extract actional insight to drive future marketing decisions and calculate a marketing return on investment.

The Journey

Barker had experienced a long period of successful growth that had seen the company increase in employee numbers, as well as opening 3 new offices in London, Cambridge and Birmingham. The Partners realised this geographic expansion needed to be supported with brand awareness and lead generation activity to build a strong sales pipeline to feed the growing team.

With that in mind, in 2022 the Partners agreed they needed some senior marketing expertise to support the small, existing team with best practice guidance, build a dynamic marketing strategy and prove which day-to-day marketing activities were working.

The Challenge

• To develop and execute a marketing strategy
• To implement a marketing CRM to drive efficiency and gather data
• To review the current agency partners and ensure value for money
• To build a marketing machine to build the Barker brand
• To deliver new business opportunities from agreed target audiences
• To measure the impact of marketing and deliver a positive ROI
• To report on progress and success to the Partners
• To coach and mentor the growing marketing team

The Solution

• By starting with an audit of existing activity, Selina created a Findings and Recommendations report with a list of priority actions and any red flags that needed addressing immediately with deadlines and action owners to ensure accountability.
• As part of the above, a review of agencies was undertaken and this led to a change in outsourced services.
• A rolling timeline and plan of strategic and tactical activity was drawn up to keep the team focussed on what was important and working on activities that would deliver the required brand awareness and lead generation.
• A longer-term CRM implementation project was scoped out and possible partner companies assessed for support.
• A marketing Key Performance Indicator dashboard was established with benchmark statistics gathered to track and measure success on a monthly basis to show what was working, what was not and where revenue was being generated from marketing activity.
• The team appreciated having an experienced sounding board in Selina to ask questions and brainstorm ideas. They also feel supported with advice, continued professional development and learning opportunities.
• A marketing presence in the Partners meetings which has helped the non-marketers in the business to understand the department is a revenue generator rather than a cost centre. This has helped the Partners to agree future marketing budgets with confidence as they can see a positive return on their spend.