Appetite for growth

Originally sent out: 16/01/25

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In the first two weeks of the year, I’ve spoken to the majority of our clients via video call and on the phone.

I’ve visited several of them in person. I’ve already taken two full-day trips, one of which was yesterday (Wednesday) where we went all the way up to Cheshire.

There is no denying that among our clients there is a voracious appetite for growth in 2025.

More than at the start of previous years there is optimism and confidence that true, noticeable, and sustainable growth is possible this year.

We’ve got clients talking about 20% growth, some are talking about 40-50% growth, while others determined to double in size in 2025.

These are all 7-figure turnover businesses in the home, garden and lifestyle space.

It’s great to see.

The conversations my management team and I have been having daily are around how we can make that a reality for them.

What’s interesting is, some recurring themes have come to light and I thought I’d share these with you in this week’s T.E.A Break newsletter.

Willingness to invest: Maybe it’s because we put a great deal of emphasis on educating our clients, but I’m seeing a real willingness to invest like never before.

Our clients know that to grow they need to invest in that growth and that means investing in expertise, in creativity and of course in ad spend.

You’ve got to speculate to accumulate and our clients across the board seem to be acknowledging that and want to put more in to get more out.

Several of our clients are effectively writing us blank cheques on ad spend so long as we maintain the current performance levels in their ad accounts.

Going all in on creative: It seems everyone wants to do more and more creative work, which is great. We’ve long advocated that a brand’s creativity with its marketing can make all of the difference when it comes to their success online.

Our clients are putting much more effort, energy and enthusiasm into things like photo shoots, creating videos, creating content, documenting their stories and raising the bar on the creativity within their ads.

An example of this is, new for 2025 we have rolled out ‘Brand Films’ as a service to our existing clients. In the past fortnight alone, six of our clients have signed up for these brand films. A sign of their desire to be more creative.

ROI on total marketing investment: These days it is increasingly difficult to judge the success or failure of a single channel or platform for example in Google Ads or Meta Ads.

We’ve invested a great deal of time and energy in advising our clients to look at the bigger, overall picture when it comes to their marketing and those efforts appear to have struck a chord with our clients at the start of 2025.

Most of our clients are advertising their businesses in a variety of ways across numerous platforms.

We encourage them to look at their total marketing investment deployed (including agency fees and all ad spend) vs gross sales, profit and growth.

It simplifies things. Rather than trying to work out the ROAS on one platform and the ROI on another.

Our clients are looking at things in the context of:

“My total investment into marketing will be X and that needs to deliver Y”.

In this data driven world we now operate in, this makes a lot of sense and our clients who did this in 2024 saw incredible growth as they made better overall marketing decisions.

There’s a lot more I could share from the conversations I’m having but I’ll save that for another T.E.A Break.

For now, I would encourage you to:

1: Think about investing in growth if you’re serious about pushing on in 2025.

2: Prioritise creativity, it really is the ace up your sleeve. The most creative brands will win this year.

3: Look at your marketing activity and investment as a whole, not as individual channels, it will help you to make better decisions.

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