Marketing Insight Services

We act as an extension of your business.

Our marketing insight provides a clear and deep objective understanding of the true nature of your brand make-up to enhance and support your marketing activities.

Insight underpins all marketing we do at Mackman, as the starting point that forms the backbone of any project. Being a full service marketing agency means we have a multi-dimensional view of brands and the environments in which they operate.

Our insight tends to be workshop-based, whereas larger pieces of research such as customer satisfaction and employee engagement are delivered by our sister company, Mackman Research.

Our insight services can be conducted in isolation to help your business refine and grow, bringing organisations closer to their customers with in-depth understanding of customer behaviours and needs.

However, each and every project at Mackman begins with insight to ensure that your investment stands the greatest chance of resonating with your audience.

Pearl Buck

How we can help

A plain speaking collaborative approach.

Our marketing insight services are suitable for businesses of any stage of growth.

New businesses can often benefit from reflecting on their foundations in order to kick-start their marketing with the optimal audience groups in mind. More established businesses can benefit from reconnecting with who their customers are, particularly where their audience has evolved over time.

Whether your business sells directly to consumers or other businesses, it is never too late to undertake our insight workshops to encourage internal discussion and re-focus your marketing.

We support clients with varying needs and differing levels of marketing expertise. Our plain speaking, collaborative, can-do approach makes us easy to work with, as together we develop bespoke solutions right for you and your organisation.

We create project roadmaps that clearly define the objectives, scope, process, timescales and responsibilities associated with your marketing insight. If required we can help you to manage key stakeholders, senior leaders, and engage with cynics.

We aim to empower our clients to take their understanding of their audience groups and Contact us today to discuss your marketing insight needs.

Customer Insight

Strengthen customer engagement and develop a competitive edge.

As a full service agency, we have worked with many leading brands to gather customer insight in order to strengthen customer engagement and develop a competitive edge.

Mackman insight specialists enjoy working collaboratively with groups of employees in a workshop setting. Our insight workshops are effective as part of customer defining, profiling, segmentation, customer journey mapping, and brand perception exercises.

Our researchers also undertake perception, satisfaction and other customer research exercises such as mystery shopping to contribute to customer insight.

As a key component of our branding and marketing services, we conduct insight sessions to define and segment your audiences, beginning with buyer personas. Here we engage with key stakeholders within your organisation to establish the defining characteristics of each audience group you regularly encounter, what they need to know, and how that information needs to be communicated with them.

In addition, we ask workshop participants to consider key search terms that their personas may be looking for, along with the communication channels they are present on. We also conduct customer journey mapping sessions to understand how these personas interact with your business throughout their path to purchase, their stress points, and the ways in which you can use marketing to communicate with them throughout this process.

“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

From branding to website design, it is essential for us to gather as clear an image of your audience as possible and understand what marketing will resonate with their specific needs and requirements.

This is why thorough customer insight is an intrinsic part of the way we work at Mackman, and one that sets us apart.

Gemma Mackman, Research Director, Mackman Branding & Marketing Agency

DR GEMMA MACKMAN

Research Director


“Whoever understands the customer best, wins.”

Mike Gospe

Competitor Insight

Stay one step ahead of the competition.

All organisations compete with others to satisfy the needs and wants of customers profitably.

The competitor research we conduct at Mackman helps to ensure that your brand is perceived to be distinctly different to other organisations who offer similar products or services to the same audiences that your brand has relationships with.

Many businesses that we work with associate competitive analysis with a sense of subterfuge, yet all of the information we study is freely available. It is simply a similar principle to checking a rival company’s LinkedIn page, or looking at one of their adverts in an industry publication.

Competitor insight is not the same thing as plagiarism or imitation, and it provides an invaluable understanding of your current market. By gaining an overview of your competitors’ activity, the way they present themselves, and to whom, your own marketing strategy can be developed to differentiate yourself from these competitors, and even to take advantage of areas that those competitors are weaker at.

We begin any competitor research with desk research, where one of our professional researchers will search for competitors informed by previous insight sessions and conversations with key stakeholders. This research involves a thorough investigation of their digital presence through a communications audit and a website audit to gauge their current activity online.

We take into account elements such as tone of voice, key search terms, social media channels, and website user experience. The resulting competitive analysis is structured clearly, and we take you through our findings to ensure that we can incorporate any further industry insight into the final report.

This is then incorporated into any strategy, design, or digital marketing projects that are ahead.

Organisational Insight

Knowing your business inside out

Together with your senior leadership team, our marketing insight specialists will work with you to define organisational objectives and vision & mission statements which provide a guiding hand to all your marketing activities.

Your employees are key stakeholders and from a marketing perspective should be seen as one of the target audiences for your organisational brand. Undertaking regular employee perception and satisfaction surveys is one of the methods we employ to feed into the internal brand insight.

Organisational insight is not just about research, however. At Mackman, we run mission and vision workshops in order to define your business’s goals and articulate them in a way that internal and external stakeholders can buy into.

Working with a senior member of our team, this collaborative process ensures that you can define your strategic objectives in the medium and long term.

We also offer internal communications audits, collateral audits, and brand auditing – an understanding of the internal resources available to a brand will ensure that targets, strategies and training plans are all realistic and achievable.

In essence, marketing is about where you want to be, but it is also about assessing what you currently have. Skill, knowledge or resource gaps will be addressed once identified.

Mackman marketing specialists support brands by providing staff training or becoming responsible for the provision of more specialist tasks. Other workshops that we provide include objective setting and SWOT analysis.

These sessions are all about finding out where your business currently stands, analysing where you want to be, and then establishing a clear roadmap to get there. SWOT, standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, can often demonstrate that threats bring with them new opportunities, while strengths compensate for weaknesses.

Paul Mackman, Managing Director, Mackman Branding & Marketing Agency

PAUL MACKMAN

Managing Director –
FCIM Chartered Marketer

“Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.”

Adlai E Jr Stevenson
Adam Chamberlin, Head of Development, Mackman Branding & Marketing Agency

ADAM CHAMBERLIN

Head of Development

How We Work

We are highly approachable, and will work with you to make sure that you understand what we have done and why we have done it. At Mackman, we do not use jargon – we ensure that your marketing is not shrouded in mystery, but rather provide you with honest, practical expertise.

Our tried and tested approach avoids the subjective, ensuring that we can be relied upon to consistently deliver outstanding solutions that are on time and to budget. This includes delivering collaborative workshops and spending quality sessions with key stakeholders.

We take the time to see your brand from multiple perspectives such as your intended and perceived brand personalities, and a broader market view of where you sit against your competitors.

Our insight team explore new opportunities to develop products or services to better fulfil customer needs. Creative design specialists provide visually inspiring work, including web design, tailored to your organisation and brand.

Our approach to market insight is achieved using an eight step process:

  1. Objective setting
  2. Segmentation and definition of target audiences
  3. Customer journey mapping
  4. Brand messaging
  5. Channel identification
  6. Prioritising market segments and key marketing personas
  7. Planning
  8. Measurement and review

Because we are a full service agency we understand the multifaceted needs of brands and those responsible for them. The thoroughness of our approach sets us apart from our competitors.

“From the moment we left our first meeting with Mackman, we knew straight away that we wanted them to be the brand agency to work with us on our project. We were given a real sense of confidence that Mackman would do a great job and we were not proved wrong. We look forward to ‘growing together’ over years to come.”

Jayne Cotton – Director, ILECS

Why Mackman

Mackman is a full service brand development, branding and marketing agency based in the vibrant market town of Sudbury on the Essex Suffolk border. We work with ambitious organisations of all sizes, across many sectors, with our driven team of marketing specialists who are dedicated to developing growing brands. Clients tell us that they value our ability as a partner to use marketing to solve business challenges. 

Our unifying strap-line is ‘together we grow’ which speaks about the relationships that we have with our clients, suppliers and colleagues. We focus our marketing across six core marketing pillars; marketing insight, brand development, marketing consultancy, communications & content marketing, website development, training and knowledge sharing.