CONSULTANCY / FRACTIONAL / STUDIO
STORY
PROPERLY TOLD.
Strategic marketing consultancy for businesses built on a standard most of the market simply can't match.
From the positioning, and everything that carries it afterwards.
MORE THAN JUST WORDS:
Every business worth its reputation is built on something specific. A way of making, a way of hosting, a way of setting a stone that took years to get right and would be obvious to anyone who knew what they were looking at.
Most of that never makes it into words. It sits in the hands of the people doing the work, understood but unsaid, while the website and the emails and the room itself say something far more generic instead.
It’s the specific, particular, thing a business actually is, said with enough precision that a stranger feels it on first contact. Then makes sure that sentence turns up everywhere the business does, not once, in a strategy document nobody reopens, but consistently, in the site, the photography, the emails, the room a launch happens in.
That’s the whole discipline. Not decoration. Not noise. The truth of a business, put into a form other people can recognise.
94%
OF CONSUMERS RECOMMEND BRANDS
THEY EMOTIONALLY CONNECT WITH
Emotional connection isn’t a nice-to-have sitting on top of good marketing. It’s most of what makes marketing work at all, and it comes from specificity, not volume.
Somewhere between four and ten thousand marketing messages reach your customer daily. In this world, a good number of them are beautifully shot, decently written, nothing wrong with any of it. What makes one stop someone mid-scroll is rarely louder. It’s more precise, about a person who’s easy to picture and impossible to mistake for anyone else.
Precision is the mechanism. The story is the strategy. Everything else, the website, the photography, the emails, the room a launch happens in, is where that precision either shows up or quietly doesn’t.
WHERE THE STORY ACTUALLY LIVES
Nobody meets your business through a strategy document. They meet it on your website, in an email that gets opened or doesn’t, in a room at a launch, in whatever a friend of theirs happened to say about you afterwards.
So the work carries on past the positioning stage. Into the site, into what gets photographed and how, into the emails that actually go out, into the press, into the evening you put on when something new arrives. Same sentence, said in a dozen different rooms, until it stops sounding like marketing and just sounds like you.
I’ve been obsessed with stories since I was a child.
The kind of obsession that meant reading with a torch under the duvet long after I was meant to be asleep, and a proper mourning period once a book was finished, before the next one could start.
That habit is more or less the whole business now. I’ve spent years watching companies try to tell their story, and the ones people actually remember are hardly ever the loudest. They knew what they were, said it plainly, and said it the same way wherever anyone happened to come across them.
Most people who end up working with me have tried this before, with someone else, and know exactly what they’re after the second time round. Usually it’s a foundation that actually holds, and someone willing to see it through properly rather than handing over a document and moving on.
Over a decade in, it’s still the only thing I want to be doing.
SPEAK SOON, LUCY X
Rebecca came to Ibali with a business she was genuinely proud of and marketing that no longer reflected it. Six months later: the right clients were finding her, her prices had gone up, and her marketing finally said what her business had always been.
‘The best investment I’ve made in my business.’
Rebecca Clissett
THREE WAYS TO WORK WITH IBALI
All three start in the same place, with the story and the thinking underneath it. What changes is how far we take it, and whether that’s a defined piece of work or something more ongoing.
MARKETING CONSULTANCY
Rebuild the story. Reposition the business.
For businesses ready to re-evaluate from the foundation up: positioning, audience, the language that holds it together, a way of talking about the business the whole team can actually use.
FRACTIONAL CMO SERVICES
Senior marketing leadership. Embedded.
For businesses at the point where marketing decisions carry real weight. A marketing mind in the decisions, in the leadership meetings, accountable to the commercial results. Not just a consultant who submits a report.
STUDIO SERVICES
The story, made real everywhere it needs to live.
For businesses that want the positioning carried through into the actual work. The website, being found by the right people, the photography, the emails, the events. Not just a strategy document handed over at the end and left there.
‘Lucy has a knack for anticipating the needs of
both my business and my clients.’
Robert Harris
I only work with a handful of businesses at a time. Mostly that means the people who get in touch already know what they’re looking for, and have usually been looking for a while.
If that’s you, let’s talk.
lucy@ibali.co.uk - Subject: Let’s talk