Who Is Charlie?

I’m Charlie and for the past six and a half years, I’ve been COO at Thinkplus.

During that time, I’ve led our teams and supported the agency to achieve some incredible results. In this period, company revenue has increased 244% and we’ve become the long-term marketing partner for many of our fantastic clients.

We’re proudly a search-first marketing agency and in 2021, 2022 and 2023 ​​we won a stack of industry awards for our SEO and PPC campaign successes. These included three Global Search Awards this year! We’re currently shortlisted for five UK Search Awards as well.

In 2023, we expanded our services to include ROI-focused, no-fluff branding services. These have been incredibly successful, shaping our client’s brands and bolstering their conversion rates. We’ve had some phenomenal design innovations and tone-of-voice transformations for our clients through these services so far.

It’s not all about the bottom line though. In May 2023, we achieved our B Corp certification. The process took a lot of hard graft — thinking about our impact, writing up policies, doing our figures, benchmarking and figuring out how to keep improving. Achieving B Corp status that recognises our passion and work to make our industry even better has been one of the proudest moments in my career.

There have been challenges too. During my time as COO, we had the COVID-19 pandemic which hit many of our clients’ industries hard and made the marketing industry a turbulent one. We had 40% of our client base pause their marketing services overnight, but through effective leadership from our management team, we were able to support our clients to pivot their businesses and rebuild (and even grow) our client base within just two months.

Enough about Me. What Will Tim Be Doing?

I have some huge Ninja shoes to fill following on from our founder and former CEO, Tim. But I have learned from the best, having been managed, coached and mentored by Tim since I first began working at Thinkplus.

But the question on everyone’s minds is what will Tim be doing?

Tim plans to continue to be involved with the running of Thinkplus, and will still be involved in hands-on marketing work for our clients behind the scenes (just try and keep him away!) You’ll still be seeing him on our YouTube videos too

However, Tim’s always been one to take things to the next level, and he plans to do this by acquiring new businesses and expanding the Shinobi Group.

You can learn more about Tim’s future plans, and a bit more about me, in this video:

What Does This Mean for the Future of Thinkplus?

We’re still going to be the Thinkplus that our clients know and trust.

We’re relentlessly focused on driving results through search for our clients. Our ROI focus will continue to be our DNA as we develop our services and processes to deliver incredible marketing results and create long-term partnerships with our clients.

There is no time more important than now for our team to continue to be at the cutting edge of search, and that is exactly where we are. As Google plays with and plans for wider rollouts of SGE, we’re expecting significant disruption in the industry. In true Ninja style, we’ve been all over this.

We’ve run innovative tests and experiments to figure out SGE ranking factors to bolster search positions for our clients. We’ve found a set of ranking factors for SGE and have successfully got content ranking in the carousel. Whilst the rest of the industry panics, we’re confident in our search expertise.

Building on the success of our newly launched branding services, you can expect more creativity to come from our Ninja team too. We’ve loved collaborating with our clients on more creative projects, including branding, design and content strategies, and feedback from clients has been glowing.

We’ll continue to innovate by pairing up our search expertise and ROI-focused mindset with our creative branding. Our vision is to create brands for our clients that customers fall in love with, and that drive conversions from search traffic through to repeat purchases.

The ultimate goal, as always, is to drive leads and sales for you, our clients. And to have fun doing it.

I’d Like to Thank My Mum…

It’s not an Oscar speech I know, but it wouldn’t feel right for me not to share my thanks for the support, feedback and encouragement I’ve had throughout my career and moving into the CEO role.

I hear this is a common ‘trope’ of women leaders to thank others rather than credit themselves, but none of us exists in a vacuum and I believe that all leaders can only be successful thanks to the team around them. If this is a trope of women leaders, I hope it will become a trope for all leaders.

Firstly, thank you to Tim who since the very first day we met believed I was capable of anything and everything. There’s a lot of power felt in having someone else who believes in and trusts you, and taking the baton as CEO is a privilege.

Thank you to all of our Ninjas. There would be no Thinkplus without you, and I am in awe of your ideas, hard work and super talents of you all daily. I could not be more excited to serve as CEO for such a brilliant bunch of people.

A special mention to some of our long-standing Ninjas who have contributed to creating the amazing culture and company we have now too. Rain, your numbers are the backbone of everything we do. Luke, who is stepping up to be our new COO, I couldn’t be more confident in your leadership. Benz, your design wizardly is second to none. Dale, you have rooted for me always.

And of course, I would like to thank our SLT and management team who are relentless. Tim, Rain, Ali, Vic, Luke, Dale, Nic, Jenny, Abi, Andy, Gemma and Andrea — your support, encouragement, endless hours of hard work, end-of-the-day fried(-egg) brains, obsession with improvement, care for our clients and our team, and motivation to climb mountains is everything.

(I would also like to thank my mum — the original cheerleader, advocate and believer in me).

The post Meet Our New CEO, Charlie Marchant appeared first on Thinkplus.

What is a B Corp?

B Corp is a certification for businesses that want to use their business as a force for good and make the world a better place. Achieving B Corp certification is a rigorous process examining how businesses treat their workers, customers, community, and the environment.

A heap of questions, which turn into sub-questions and sub-sub-questions, culminate to give the business an overall score across these different areas. If you hit a score above 80, then you achieve B Corp status. It’s kinda like getting a high score on the most important, socially-aware video game ever!

So does this mean you’re “eco”?

A key misconception about B Corp is that it’s just about being a green, eco company. While environmental impact is a factor for B Corp (check out the wild number of trees we’ve planted! ) it’s only one part.

What initially drove Thinkplus to go after our B Corp certification was simply that we care about our team members, each other and our communities.

Let me explain…

For us, running a business has never been about just chasing ££££ (though the bottom line is important). It’s what we can do with the £s to do some good in the world that we care about. A company is, after all, the people that make it.

Before B Corp was even on our radar, we’d decided to do a bunch of things over the years at Thinkplus because we felt they were the right thing to do. Some of them came from our Head Ninja, Tim, some came from my brain, and, for the most part, they came from our team and them telling us what they value. Here are just a few:

• Remote working (we were doing it way before COVID-19 made it cool) and working with marketing specialists and clients worldwide.
• Flexi working so that our team can make time in their lives for what they love the most — whether that’s time with their family, travelling the world, writing a novel or crushing it at the gym.
• A % of paid work time spent training. Growth and development are a high priority in our agency because the world of marketing moves so fast (algorithm updates and AI, anyone?!) and as a service-based business, our team’s skills are essential for delivering excellent results to our clients.
• Mentoring for aspiring marketers aimed at supporting those trying to break into the marketing industry.
• A health and wellness subsidy to spend on whatever our team most needs for their health (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual etc).
• A generous sick leave policy which we modelled on the UK teacher’s sick leave policy. I’ve never seen another agency come close to rivalling how good our sick policy is. For us, this was about taking care of our team when they’re most vulnerable — we hope they’ll never need it, but if they do, then it’s there.
• Generous maternity and paternity policies give mums eight weeks of maternity leave at full pay and dads a matching eight weeks of paternity leave at full pay too. In the UK, our statutory maternity and paternity policies incentivise men to stay at work and women to stay at home, and this was our first step to making this more equal.
• Various projects that we do pro-bono because we want to. An example was the free websites we built for some of the British BAME community, including for Black History Walks.

Basically, we did a bunch of positive stuff because we wanted to. Some of these may sound like no-brainers to some; to others, they might seem like costly decisions (and they are).

At this point, one of our clients mentioned B Corp to us and said we should go for it. We hadn’t heard much about it before then, but we knew some big brands like Patagonia, Pukka, and The Body Shop were B Corps.

We looked into it and were excited to find that B Corp was essentially a roadmap that could inspire us to do even more good stuff. It turns out that a lot of what we were already doing was part of the B Corp criteria and benchmarks, and it unearthed even more opportunities for things we could be doing.

What Being a B Corp Means to Us

At Thinkplus, we’re obsessed with how we can make a positive impact. Our B Corp certification has shown that for-profit businesses like us can take care of their bottom line while also caring about their people, communities and our planet.

The process of becoming B Corp certified has been fascinating and a lot of hard work. It has been really useful to benchmark our various initiatives and realise some of the areas that hadn’t occurred to us before. It’s been full of growth, learning, a lot of policy-making, doing our figures, benchmarking and figuring out how to keep improving.

We’re one of only 1000 businesses in the UK to achieve B Corp status, and we’re proud to be among other companies that give a c%*! and are committed to looking after their people, communities and our planet.

The most exciting part is we’re not stopping here. We’re excited to share our journey as we aspire to be a more positive force and inspire other companies to join us in the B Corp world.

A huge thank you to everyone in the Thinkplus team who made becoming a B Corp possible and whose values, ideas and dreams led us down this path. An especially big thank you to Emma Lamont, Rain Agustin, Maisa Garcia, Tim C-K and Vic Lane, who worked their socks off to get us here.

If becoming B Corp certified is something you’re interested in, then I’d be happy to chat any time. I’d love to share our story, offer advice and encourage more businesses to join B Corp.

The post What B Corp Means to Us appeared first on Thinkplus.

Today we’re proud to announce Thinkplus is becoming an AI-integrated digital agency, helping our clients grow faster using generative AI.

AI is a transformational technology and has become the stated top priority for the biggest names in tech, who have made it their goal to revolutionise the world of digital marketing with it.

We feel that both the pace of improvement and the quality trajectory is so steep that this technology will heavily impact not just how marketers use their existing tools but how consumers find the products and services they want to buy.

With Google’s Project Magi, Bing Chat, and of course, the search queries that don’t even find their way to a search engine because they’re being typed into ChatGPT, we are already seeing battle lines drawn in the fight for consumer search volume and attention.

And with evidence emerging of AI tools already disrupting buying habits and hiring, it’s clear that we have reached a point where forward-thinking marketing teams and company leadership cannot ignore AI.

We believe that as marketing changes, every brand that relies on search or content for discovery will HAVE to have an AI marketing game plan if they’re to defend their existing market share. And just like the shift to digital led to winners and losers in the 2000s and 2010s, those with the most aggressive AI game plan will use this “changing of the guard” to steal market share from rivals.

We’ve made it part of our mission to help our clients defend and steal market share during this next technological shift.

How Are We Integrating AI into Thinkplus’s Services?

We have integrated generative AI into our digital marketing services on an opt-in basis and are offering this to clients that are a good fit for it.

Our team has been testing the performance and suitability of AI tools for each core marketing task across the channels we work (SEO, Content Marketing, PPC & Paid Media, Website Development, CRO and Email Marketing).

In particular, we’ve been looking for opportunities to use AI that makes our work better or faster (which leads to cost savings). Crucially, when we find a way to meet one or both of these, we pass 100% of the benefit onto any clients we use it for.

This means that our clients receive 100% of the cost savings, speed improvements and quality output resulting from generative AI. Working with Thinkplus gives them the full benefit of the latest generative AI technology AND the benefit of an experienced, ROI-driven team of experts.

ChatGPT vs agency using ChatGPT.

I.e. Isn’t this the end for agencies altogether?

While tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney do a great job of writing convincing-sounding text and creating images, there are clear limitations. Most brands are too sensible to post pure GPT-4 output without any human intervention on a website they care about. For example, “out of the box” rarely matches style guidelines or “feels” as engaging to read as content produced by an experienced copywriter. Even AI content should “feel” like the business it represents, which currently takes some fairly significant human intervention.

For other tasks (e.g. strategic and technical SEO tasks), the AI will “have a go” and produce something convincing-looking to an outsider but not viable to an expert. But this is early days, and we expect the tools to continue developing.

And, of course, there is the well-documented habit of AI tools hallucinating (making stuff up that sounds convincing but isn’t true). This is where our dedicated editorial team (and we’re lucky to be one of the few agencies with a dedicated editorial team) is so useful for fact-checking all AI-generated content. Factual accuracy is important for all businesses, but the implications of factual inaccuracy in published content can be severe in some industries.

In our extensive testing, we’ve found these tools to be dramatically more powerful when collaborating with a skilled human marketer who can direct, give feedback and refine the output.

In the case of generative text, this output then needs to go through fact-checking and editorial to ensure that it is totally accurate and matches the brand’s style guidelines. Importantly, we apply exactly the same quality and accuracy standards to content produced with AI as to content produced fully by a human. In marketing, quality matters.

Despite this, content writing is certainly one of the jobs where AI can dramatically reduce the cost of production, even when considering the extra time required for task editing and fact-checking.

For example, in our tests so far, we’re already producing 30% more content for the same time allocated. And we are aiming to increase this to 60% or more within the next six months. In some cases, the benefit is even greater.

What If Expert + AI Isn’t Right for You?

Generative AI content isn’t right for every business, and we appreciate that some clients will have reasons that AI is a “no” or a “not yet”. We totally understand this and are offering these AI services on an “opt-in” basis, so clients have the choice to continue working with our team in the traditional way.

Some businesses are so specialist that generative AI content doesn’t offer significant time savings compared to one of our expert human writers doing it from scratch.

How will AI change marketing in the longer term?

User behaviour is already shifting, albeit at different speeds for different demographics.

It’s easy to forget that most AI tools capturing people’s attention are still in Beta or even Alpha mode. Basic interfaces, prompting through Discord chats, having to install code locally on your machine. This is extraordinarily disruptive technology considering it is still so new to the market.

But with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Snapchat, Quora, Meta/Facebook, Reddit, Twitter etc. all racing to release and improve their AI products, the companies that built the digital landscape we marketers play in are investing in the future of their businesses in reshaping it.

At EN, our approach to dealing with the unknowns and rapid advancement in AI is to make it an organisational priority to keep our teams up-to-date with the latest advancements. We require our management team to test the tools, working out how to implement them into our work. We have dedicated discussion groups inside the company, where teams are encouraged to share what they see, learn and test. And we publish our AI research on the Thinkplus YouTube channel.

We are also starting a sister AI Consultancy firm, Powered By AI, which will give us close proximity to specialist AI expertise that we can both deploy internally and share with clients.

Nobody knows what the AI future looks like. But one thing is for sure: it looks different to the past. Our mission is to help our clients grow their revenue, and we believe that this next phase of tech will bring both new threats and opportunities to them. We, Ninjas, are here to help them avoid disruption and find marketing opportunities.

If you’d like to request a free digital marketing review, including an assessment of your potential to use generative AI, go to https://exposureninja.com/review and fill in the short form. Eligible businesses will receive a 15-20 minute video review, typically within 2-3 working days, with a customised plan outlining key opportunities and competitor threats.

The post Thinkplus Is Now an AI-Integrated Digital Agency appeared first on Thinkplus.

Hey Wayne,

Hope you’re doing well!

Got a few updates for you:

I’ve finally hit the £8k a month goal! (3 month’s late but we made it happen)

I’ve also hire someone part-time to help with the current client work (8 clients as of now), 2 days a week. The plan is to bring her in full-time in August.

I’ve been making a lot of internal changes to support the massive growth I want to achieve these coming 6 months.

Last year, Wayne was part of our Digital Marketing Mentorship programme and made a life-changing impact on a fellow marketer’s life.

When we launched our mentoring programme in 2021 our objective was to make an impact, in accordance with our values.

• We’re obsessed with positive impact.
• We’re relentlessly proactive.
• We enjoy the journey.

Our values start with our Ninjas.

We’re obsessed with making an impact on their lives. We’re obsessed with our clients and making a positive impact on their businesses. And we’re obsessed with making a positive impact in our industry.

Unfortunately, not all marketers have the same support network we aim to provide to our Ninjas. Not all marketers have a network to rely upon or connections to help them advance in their careers.

Disappointingly, some marketers are denied the opportunity to start or advance their careers because of their background, gender, disability, finances, or location.

The objective of our first digital marketing mentoring programme’s 2021 intake was to provide that support.

We’re delighted to share that it was a success.

Here are a few examples from our mentees:

Final session complete with my mentee Frank. He surprised me at the end by telling me he has took a full time job as a Digital Marketing Manager for a start up company!

So proud and what a great way to end our time together.

— Andrew, Account Manager

I just wanted to let you know I managed to score a job a week or so ago – a digital account manager in a small agency which focuses on not for profits.

I am beyond pumped because this role/place has an emphasis on relationship building (which is a professional strength of mine) but also 100% digital marketing.

You might recall I was trying to move into the industry in a full time capacity but was having problems due to the lack of experience.

You were helping me understand/realise my experience to assist with that.

— Feedback from the mentee of Victoria Lane, our Head of People

Fast forward to today, only 5 months after we set those goals, he’s left his job and is running his own digital marketing business full time!

He has a bunch of clients on retainer and does paid ads, email marketing and web builds for his clients.

— Emma Lamont, Content Marketing Strategist

Following the success of the 2021 intake, we’re delighted to share that we’re today taking applications to join our 2022 programme.

Our digital marketing mentoring programme has been designed to help digital marketers or business owners who are:

• In the first few years of your marketing career
• Studying at college or university
• Unemployed
• Working in a temporary or zero-hours contract role

The programme includes:

• 6x 1-hour phone calls over six months
• Structured sessions to help you get answers from people who’ve done it before
• Access to support and advice from our team of specialists
• The opportunity to expand your network and meet more people in the digital marketing community
• Confidence building and coaching
• Creation of an actionable development plan

The 2022 programme will run from December to May.

If you’d like to apply to the programme then please fill out the form at the bottom of this page: Apply for the Mentoring Programme.

The closing date for applications is October 21st 2022.

We look forward to reading your application.

The post Thinkplus’s Digital Marketing Mentorship Programme Reopens for 2022 appeared first on Thinkplus.