Enviable PR and marketing campaigns are built on a great story. For us this means knowing your business not only inside out, but from the outside in: understanding the needs and interests of the market you operate in, the influencers you need to reach and the target audiences you need to attract. We use all of this to challenge you to think differently and then work together to come up with ideas that are fresh and exciting, taking away the barriers to getting noticed and speaking directly to the issues that most concern your audience. The end result? Storytelling that rises above the noise, and that can be carved up for use across any media and served for any stage of the buyer journey. From story-driven global, integrated, multi-channel campaigns, to media interview pitches and reactive social media posts, the content we create is designed to engage, influence and ultimately impact business outcomes.

Building a winning strategy starts with market insight. We work with you to build a complete picture of the market including you, your competitors, your audience and the influencers that they listen to. We listen to what you want to achieve in terms of business outcomes – that could be creating a need for your product, increased sales, expanding your team, influencing the channel or attracting partners and acquirers. We then build a plan that maps to your wider marketing activities and will bring the stories we’ve developed to life through a range of traditional and digital content formats. These are then delivered through the appropriate channels that will reach your target audience. Sometimes this process takes weeks but sometimes it can be instantaneous. If you know what you want to say we know how to execute so strategy and planning is an hour on the phone debating ideas and then we get started.

In the age of information overload the importance of great content to engage your audiences a given. Whether it’s a global integrated marketing campaign based on market modelling, a benchmarking survey, a freedom of information report or a research study or a simple media alert on a key issue that you want to become associated with; campaign success depends on how well it resonates.

We will work with you to maximise the types of content that can be created from a single event or campaign. In the planning stage we determine the platforms we want to use and then evaluate appropriate content. This could be anything from reports, online barometers, infographics, blogs, social media posts, microsites and video to traditional PR content such as contributed articles, press releases, media alerts and case studies.

Two things make our content creation capabilities stand out. The first is that we know how to produce the data-driven content that people can’t resist clicking on and has sufficient credibility to be used to influence behaviour change. The second is that we recognise that speed is often the only thing that counts – we make it our business to know what you’d say and are able to create comment in minutes to respond to a topical issue. For us it’s ultimately about taking the headache of content away from you and ensuring it drives the results you are looking for.

As inbound marketing becomes the most effective route to reach prospects, understanding how to engage an audience is crucial to success. Telling a good story is fundamental to business growth. It’s not easy, but we have the experience and know-how, as a result of working with both global brands and start-ups, to make it happen – with UK journalists voting us number one for story quality.

Our clients will tell you that a PR-led story is the only proven route to engagement. After all, if a journalist thinks a story is interesting enough to share with the wider world, that same story will stand out against the competition on social, paid or owned channels. We prioritise activating the influencers in your market: By engaging the people that your prospects and customers listen to, your story will spread more quickly and receive more attention. Whether it’s press coverage in the Financial Times, being part of influential social networks or getting attention from analysts, our role is to deliver the momentum and credibility that brings your audience closer.

We work closely with you to define what impact we expect a PR and marketing campaign to have on your business. You might be just getting started or creating a new market. You may be gearing up for acquisition, IPO or another round of funding. Or you might have a product that sells itself, but just need the people to scale your business. We then set objectives at the beginning of the campaign that will help deliver those business outcomes. It could be educating the market and driving the news agenda, differentiation from the competition or building credibility when entering the market.

We assess outcomes on a quarterly basis. There are a range of measurement criteria and tools available and we work closely with our clients to analyse achievements and progress towards their end-goal. Our service agreements include activity deliverables and for traditional PR we also offer a coverage guarantee.

Marketing can and should demonstrate that it has influenced your target audiences. Working with you we can identify the moment a potential lead was born to the point it enters the sales funnel and how many different interactions there were during that time. We can now answer the ultimate question: have we persuaded your target audience to evolve in the way they think or act?

Spark has a global network of partner agencies. We often work as lead agency, even when our client is headquartered in the US, because of our experience in developing everything whether it’s a one-off global integrated marketing concepts or a regular flow of news and opinion. We are also flexible and can work as part of our client’s preferred network. We offer clients one point of contact for multiple markets (nineteen is our record) and understand the different story demands of each market and deliver accordingly. Clients will vouch for how easy we make it to roll out a global programme and deliver high quality results in every market.