Calibre FAQs
How long has Calibre been in business?
As a full-service outsourced marketing and communications agency, we have been delivering our expert marketing services for over 25 years. In that time, we have helped a wide variety of clients, from large corporates to small businesses, across a whole range of market sectors to take off and fly high. You can read more about our history here.
What services does Calibre offer?
We are a fully integrated outsourced marketing and communications agency. Our services include:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
- PR (Press and Public Relations)
- PPC (Pay Per Click) / Google AdWord Campaigns
- Website Development & Optimisation
- Social Media
- Content Marketing
- Digital & Online Marketing
- Marketing Data & Analytics
- Direct Marketing (E-newsletters and Direct Mail)
- Email Sequencing
- Graphic Design
We offer flexible marketing packages for every business need. We provide a fully integrated outsourced marketing service that includes all or several of our services used strategically together to achieve the best results possible. We can also provide any one of our services as a stand-alone service, for example, PPC programmes and website optimisation services. You can learn about our services here.
Why use Calibre when my business can hire a marketing person(s) in-house?
Compared to an employee who, as one individual, may have a less extensive knowledge of marketing, our crew of marketing experts are each experienced and specialists in their particular area of marketing strategy and delivery. Your activities will be coordinated by your own Calibre Account Manager, an expert marketer and copywriter themselves.
With the help of this Calibre Marketing expert, our relevant crew members share information and knowledge between themselves to make sure all your promotional activities work together in a joined-up approach and achieve more for you. We like to think of ourselves as an extension of your team, offering skills you cannot recreate in-house. Our crew can cover all aspects of marketing. Click here to meet the crew.
How long do I need to commit to working with Calibre?
We ask you to commit for a minimum term based on the initiation and setup of your marketing campaigns or project and agreed objectives. This gives us sufficient time to acquire data, study it and implement a strategy that will start to generate the results you need.
After that, it’s a rolling three-monthly agreement. We are not interested in locking clients into long contracts. We want you to stay with us because we are generating you and your business great results. We’re proud of our client retention rate. In fact, we’ve been working with some of our clients ever since Calibre started over 25 years ago, click here to learn more about us.
Are there any additional or hidden costs?
No, there are never any hidden costs with Calibre. We cover all of our work in the agreed monthly retainer. You will just need to cover any media spend such as Google Ads and press advertising costs. Also any other pre-agreed costs. We will not spend your money without prior authorisation. These are billed separately to our management fee.
Who will be working on my account?
You will have a dedicated Calibre Account Manager to liaise with you and manage all activities. They will be your main, day-to-day point of contact. You will also have contact with our Managing Director, Martyn, who will work with you on your overall marketing strategy and delivery.
Depending on the project, various other Calibre specialists will feed into your account, working on specific areas of the project such as SEO, PPC, Social Media, or Content Marketing. We are always open and transparent about who is doing what, and how we are meeting your objectives. Click here to meet us.
Will Calibre share what is being undertaken on my website and the reasons why?
Always. We pride ourselves on transparency and we will always take the time to explain the work we do, updates to your website and the reasons behind them. You can find out more about this on our webpage.
Is all the work done in-house by the Calibre crew?
Yes, almost every service we offer is completed by the Calibre crew. We have extensive in-house marketing expertise and experience that we will utilise to take you to new heights. When needed, we call upon our trusted network of graphic designers, illustrators, web developers, photographers, video producers to help with projects that can help enhance your marketing activity. Alternatively we are happy to work with existing contacts and partners that you may have.
My business is based in London, Calibre is based in Sussex. Does this matter?
Where your business is located is no problem when it comes to the work that we do. In fact, we work with clients across the whole of the UK and abroad.
When it comes to communication, we see our clients for regular (usually monthly) face-to-face or online meetings. In addition, we arrange regular calls for our clients as required. Video conference and online meetings allow us to work with you wherever you are.
How will Calibre get to understand my business?
Getting to truly understand your business is something we take very seriously at Calibre. We dedicate time to get to know you and your business so that we come up with the most effective marketing strategy possible.
We do this by talking to you and your team both before and at your project’s kick off meeting, which will typically include our Brand Discovery Workshop. In this meeting we aim to get as much information about the business as possible by interviewing you about your objectives, products and services, competitors etc.
Aside from that, we also do a lot of research into your industry, and spend time analysing external and internal data. We ‘listen’ to your audience on social media to get an idea of the things they expect from your business, and lastly, we take a detailed look at your website and into your competitors and what they are doing online.
All of this helps us to gain the best possible understanding of your business and industry, plus particularly your target audience(s), to formulate a strategy and schedule that will really help you fly high.
What will be delivered and when?
When you start working with us, we’ll arrange a meeting with you and your team. This gives us the opportunity to get all the information we need to put together our suggested marketing strategy and schedule of activities and costs.
This will outline when and what we plan to deliver. It will be a comprehensive plan that outlines the various aspects of your campaign or project which will be delivered and the timescales you can expect to see them undertaken. We update and refresh this on agreed periods of time (monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly) with a detailed set of action notes so that you are always in the loop about when you’ll see deliverables completed by us.
How does Calibre create website and communications content without knowing my business or my industry?
Our marketing crew is made up of highly skilled content writers who take the time to understand your business, industry, target audiences and your content’s aims.
When writing content, we carry out in-depth research using a range of tools such as Answer the Public, Ahrefs, Google Trends, SEMRush, and Buzzsumo. We also get direct input from you to make sure we’re working along the right lines and to the right objectives.
How quickly will I start seeing results when working with Calibre?
This depends on the channels you use, your competition, your budget and the condition of your website and other marketing activities before we start working with you.
However, as a general rule, you should start to see an uplift in online visibility and improvements in your key metrics and goals after the first three to four months.
Projects that use PPC and Biddable Media tend to see results faster as qualified web traffic starts to come through instantly. For all clients we provide a comprehensive set of marketing metrics showing statistics for your website and online activities, social and direct marketing campaigns etc.
How often will results be reported?
We provide bespoke monthly performance metrics and reports that include all the statistics that are important to you. Your Account Manager will spend time taking you through these reports – explaining all the data and performance metrics and the work we have typically been doing on a quarterly basis. We may request extra information such as the number of leads, enquiries, orders etc, to ensure we track the wider impact of the project. Often, the digital data we provide is only part of how our project is benefitting your business, so by combining our data and your feedback, we are able to demonstrate the real impact our work is having on your results.
What is Calibre’s new client onboarding process?
Step 1: We arrange a call to scope out your requirements and understand if and how we can help.
Step 2: Martyn (Calibre Founder) will arrange a face-to-face meeting, video conference or call (depending on location) to further discuss working together.
Step 3: We deliver a proposal, examples of past work, a project plan / schedule and deliverables, including full costings, often with options depending on your priorities, urgency and budget.
Step 4: You decide if you want to proceed and fly with us.
Step 5: We arrange a kick-off meeting, usually including our Brand Discovery Workshop.
Click here to get in touch with the Calibre crew and start asap!
