Anyone looking for an agency or a studio already has an idea and a budget in mind. They want to know whether you do exactly that, on which stack, and roughly what it costs — before they fill in a form.
A portfolio without context convinces nobody. What lands is the case: the situation, what you changed, what happened next. Three paragraphs per project beat twenty logos in a row.
What clients have been burned by is the handover: who owns the code, what happens the week after launch, who answers when something breaks at six. Answering that on the page wins the projects other studios lose at contract stage.
Say how you charge: fixed price, monthly retainer, day rate. Nobody expects a figure without a brief, but a client who cannot tell how the bill will be shaped keeps looking until somebody explains it.
Start with what is already running. An audit of existing automations regularly finds messages going to people who unsubscribed, duplicates receiving everything twice and flows nobody remembers approving.
Be honest that data comes first. Deduplication, field definitions and a decided source of truth are unglamorous and they are the whole project, so pretending otherwise sets a client up for disappointment.
Say which platforms are known deeply. These systems differ enormously. Name the two you work in every week, and say plainly that you do not touch the rest.
Explain how it is handed over. Whether the client's team can maintain what was built, and what documentation exists, decides whether the investment survives the next staff change.
Cover deliverability. Authentication records, a dedicated sending domain, warming before the first large send and keeping transactional messages away from marketing decide whether any of this arrives, and almost nobody in this field explains it.
Put a figure on the leak. What one enquiry is worth, how many go unanswered past the first day and what that adds up to over a quarter turns automation from a nice idea into a project that pays for itself out of the ad budget already being spent.
The client usually bought the software already. A licence is being paid for every month, almost nothing has been switched on, and somebody internally is quietly embarrassed about it.
Most of this work is plumbing. Systems that do not talk to each other, duplicated contacts and fields nobody agreed on are the actual obstacle, not the clever campaign anybody imagined buying.
Written for somebody paying for software they cannot use: an audit of what already runs, data work named as the real project, deep platform knowledge stated and handover explained.
The first deliverable is usually a relief: a list of the automations that should be switched off today.
Your website will look flawless on social media and WhatsApp too: we take care of preview images, copy and speed, so every time you share your marketing automation agency it makes a good impression and adds customers.
Your website will appear on Google when people search for a marketing automation agency in your area, because we design it optimised for local rankings from the ground up. A website that gets found and converts: that's the plan.
