Flow State: An introduction, three years on

What does Flow State Marketing actually do, and why should you care?

Intro

Flow State has now entered its third year, and it's changed a lot since those first early days trying to avoid making slides and building things on the go.

The company is at this point the culmination of my experience over 20 years in the digital industry. I've worked in agencies, I've contracted, built grassroots communities, and built my own businesses (services and SaaS).

All of this has given me a view from many sides of this here industry - some might say life - I choose to love.

When the idea of Flow State first formed, I saw a need for a new kind of solution merging marketing and sales thinking together to address the many issues slowing growth in B2B brands.

Traditional agencies are trapped in an inwardly focused mindset by a set of compounding issues tied to their operating model (bums on seats, media billing etc), a shrinking talent pool / senior brain drain, and almost constant under-resourcing in key roles.

Flow State was built on a hybrid model blending the best parts of People, Process, and Technology together into a new kind of flexible, knowledgeable, highly effective service partner.

Our team

Our team are all senior, highly specialised experts in their respective fields. When you engage Flow State, you get me and anyone else we bring onto your engagement.

We've built a core team based out of Australia, my business partner in Denver, and a roster of fractional experts across APAC and the US. We also partner with a few special agencies who bring their own specialist skills in as required.

This approach gives our clients (and you) access to the kind of expertise and actual work experience you rarely receive anywhere else.

This level of thinking is particularly important now, as GenAI continues to be adopted without oversight across your business, and the evolution of the digital industry continues to churn out tactical nonsense at an alarming rate.

I can tell you more (and show you the faces and skills of all these awesome people) when we launch Phase 2 later this year!

Specialisms

We connect brands with customers throughout the B2B buying journey in key digital channels.

Where we focus

1. Search (and increasingly AI) - SEO, Paid Search (or SEM), Everything Related
2. Digital Content - Strategy, Marketing, Production, Publishing
3. Social Media - Audience Dependent, Management of Pages & Profiles, Communities, Content
4. Direct Communications - Email (classic), Messaging, Chat, Phone, Actual Mail (old school)
5. CRM / Customer Data - Deployment, Audit, Optimisation, Management, Support - you name it, we can probably do it

This is all underpinned by our expertise in extracting stories from data to inform growth strategy, and taming technology to your specific requirements and needs.

Why we focus here

We focus on these channels for a few very important reasons:

1. They are all based on actual, determined user behaviour - not bullshit, poorly targeted "advertising data" cohorts (they have their place, just not here). Search data is as accurate as you're gonna get, we can extract very useful insights from content, and social media is (sometimes) real people.
2. You maintain control of your assets and build value in environments that you own—namely, your website and CRM. It's a fool's game putting all your eggs in someone else's basket (unless you're a cuckoo). Hub and spoke style owned (directly) assets outwards is the way.
3. You can measure what matters here and easily build a picture that impacts revenue.

The challenge marketers face right now is that there is a huge unmeasurable element of our work (see the recent "Is Tesco's new add rubbish or not" debate) that the last 15-20 years of digital obsession have eroded.

It's important to measure what we can, but it's also imperative that we remember that digital attribution is only a part of the overall picture. Tapping into the zeitgeist with an awesome idea or campaign cannot be measured by solely looking at Google Analytics.

Core Solutions

Growth Program

The Growth Program started life as a scoping/structure document to build out our early engagements. It incorporated requirements, OKRs, scope, and pricing for our early client relationships, all pretty standard stuff.

Since its inception, however, as we have used it, rebuilt it, and refined it over the past few years, it has become something more!

Today, the Growth Program is the modular foundation of all our relationships. It still serves its original purpose as a scoping tool, but it's also a playbook, a guide, a conversation starter... We use it to establish the firm foundations upon which successful relationships can be built.

The essential idea behind the Growth Program is to give us a standardised, proven approach to building tailored engagements. It incorporates what we know works (which I touched on above in this article) as well as what we know our clients need from us as a partner.

It helps us get started quickly and deliver impactful, effective work.

The Growth Hub

The Growth Hub has similarly humble beginnings, starting life as a Google Sheets tool for internal data management and reporting.

Soon after, we began surfacing data and trends to our clients (instead of remaking them in reports—I didn’t create a slide for the first two years of Flow State!) to give them and their stakeholders access to the trends we monitor.

Now, we're building v9 of the portal and web app onto our new site (Flow State Phase 2 - coming before the end of the year!) of what has become the focal point for our larger programs. The Growth Hub still houses all our core data, organised and analysed by our team, as well as our proprietary analytics solutions, output and communications in our engagements, resources, training, and a ton more.

I'm super excited about the new version; the Growth Hub is one of the areas I'm really glad we invested in.

How You Can Engage Us

Our hybrid model means we can be very flexibly engaged to support you where you need us and keep out of the way where you don't.

(*Active) Consulting

My team and I have something ridiculous, like over 200 years of combined marketing, sales, and technology experience between us. We are happy to translate that into guidance for you and your team if you just want to get a fresh perspective on your challenges and objectives.

*I say active consulting because none of us are fans of the classic consulting model of "turn up, look at stuff, leave massive report". We strive to share our knowledge in more tangible ways to help you both learn and actually take action.

Education & Enablement

Our team specialises in facets of growth, from comms right through to the hardcore end of sales. We have a number of different options to deliver education and enablement to you and your teams.

So, if you know you're in between pure "I'd love someone's perspective" and "I need help with something", thinking about development and upskilling your team is a great place to start.

Also, you can pull this from the company L&D budget, so it doesn't even cost you anything. You're welcome.

Programs & Projects

And of course, our bread and butter is working with you on defined programs and projects that drive growth in the business.

As I mentioned above, we use our Growth Program to inform conversations here, coupled with a chat about where you need help or think there is an opportunity to try something new.

We have a couple of fresh case studies on larger programs (one on Account Based Marketing, one on Social Selling) that will give you a more detailed view of what working with us looks like, or you can speak to some of our clients to get the good work directly.

I'm happy to share case studies or references, just send me a message.

Finally, for fun: The Flow State Podcast

If you're not ready to start a conversation, then you can listen to some instead!

I started the Flow State Podcast in 2023 with a view to stay across what's on my customers' radar, meet fun people in the industry, and as a way for potential future customers to get to know what I'm all about.

You can find the pod on your app of choice, follow the page or subscribe to the Flow State Marketing YouTube channel (the main home of our video and audio content).

Starting a Conversation: Where Do We Begin?

To attempt to summarise all that and give you a specific idea of how we begin, we always chat about your customers and their buying journey as a way to focus conversations.

If you're not obsessing over your customers, you're doing something wrong.

Some common themes that emerge from these conversations include:

• You support a complex customer journey, often long (3 months+), with multiple stages or jobs to progress through to a sale
• The customer interacts with many touch points and people in your brand, but they are often disconnected from one another
• You need to influence the early stages of the buying journey, but a lot of the focus is at the very start and the very end, with a big grey area in the middle
• You sell complex products and services that require a lot of assessing, research, and qualification before sales conversations can happen
• You are engaging with groups or committees made up of 5-20+ people at all levels of the target customer business, all with very different requirements and levels of involvement
• Your remit often relies on the activities of other departments (cough SALES), but you don't have direct control or oversight of their activity
• ...

Thanks for reading!

... and now being part of the Flow State journey.

We all like working with people whom we get good vibes from; that's why I still work in digital and still run service businesses (despite regular complaints about both - but that's part of the fun).

So, I hope this soup?on of the Flow State experience has piqued your interest and given you a flavour of the why, the what, and the how of working with my team and I.

Stuart P. Turner,

MD, Flow State

When you're ready to learn more...

• Message me to chat or request a case study (on here or at [email protected])
• Follow Flow State Marketing and The Flow State Podcast