How to Choose the Right Marketing Service | OYM Derbyshire
Every business owner I speak to ends up staring at the same list. SEO. Social media. Paid ads. Branding. A new website. A CRM. Half a dozen agencies each telling you their thing is the one that matters, and every single one of them uses the word "results" in the first sentence.
I have sat across the table from Derbyshire business owners for 18 years watching them try to pick between these options with almost no way of comparing them properly. It is not that they lack judgement. It is that nobody has ever handed them a decent method for choosing the right marketing service in the first place, so they end up choosing on price, or on whoever pitched the loudest.
This post gives you that method. It is one question, asked three ways, and once you know it you can sort any marketing menu in about ten minutes, whether you are picking your first service or deciding what to cut from a budget that has grown without a plan.
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Get your scoreWhy the marketing menu never makes sense
Open any agency website and the promises all blur together. More visibility. More leads. More engagement. Nobody sells you a worse version of their service, so on paper every option looks like the right one.
The problem is that none of those promises tell you what you actually need to know, which is what you get, how long you wait for it, and what it costs you personally to get it. A SEO package and a paid social campaign can both claim to bring in "more customers", but one might take four months of patient work and the other might start converting within a week. Compared side by side on outcome alone, they look identical. They are not.
That gap between what a service promises and what it actually costs you in time, patience and effort is where most East Midlands businesses lose money. Not because they picked a bad supplier, but because they picked the wrong service for where their business actually was.
The question that actually sorts a marketing menu
Alex Hormozi built a model for this that I have leaned on for years and adapted for how I talk to clients about choosing the right marketing service. Strip it back and it comes down to one fraction: the dream outcome a service buys you, divided by how long it takes and how much effort it demands of you.
A service that promises a huge outcome but takes a year and eats every afternoon of your week is not automatically better than a modest, steady service that takes six weeks and needs an hour of your time a month. Once you can see both sides of that fraction, the menu sorts itself.
Ask three questions about every service in front of you.
What outcome does this actually buy you
Be specific. Not "more marketing" but the actual thing you get: more enquiries through the door, a higher position on Google for a term that pays your bills, a website that finally converts visitors instead of just sitting there. If a supplier cannot name the outcome in one plain sentence, that is worth noticing before you sign anything.
How long before you see it
This is the one most owners skip, and it is the one that causes the most regret. SEO and content work compound over months. Paid advertising and a strong Google Business Profile fix can move the needle in days. Neither timeline is wrong, but if you need cash in the door this quarter and you buy a service built for a six-month horizon, you will feel like it failed when actually you just bought the wrong pillar for your current moment.
How much of your own time it needs
Every "done for you" service still has a hidden time cost. Social media needs your approval on posts and your face in front of the camera. A CRM needs your team to actually log into it. Even a fully managed lead generation campaign needs someone in your business answering the phone fast enough to convert what it brings in. Work out that time cost before you buy, not after, because it is usually the reason a good service gets abandoned three months in.
Most businesses do not fail at marketing because they picked a bad service. They fail because they picked a service built for a different timeline or a different amount of spare time than the one they actually have. Stuart Baddiley, Optimise Your Marketing
Running the BIG12 pillars through the same test
I built the BIG12 framework specifically so Derbyshire and East Midlands business owners had a structure to sort against, rather than a pile of separate quotes. Every pillar sits somewhere different on that dream outcome, time and effort fraction, and once you see them side by side the priority order gets much easier to argue with yourself over.
Lead generation and paid activity tend to sit closest to fast, visible outcomes, at the cost of ongoing spend. SEO and brand work sit further out on the timeline but pay back for years once they land. A CRM buys you almost nothing on day one and everything eighteen months later, once your team is actually using it properly. None of these are wrong choices in isolation. They are only wrong when they are mismatched to what your business needs right now.
What sorting the menu properly looks like
Balance and Beam came to us needing enquiries fast, not a long content play. We built out their lead generation and local search presence first and saw a 500% increase in weekly enquiries, because the pillar matched the timeline they actually had.
See how lead generation worksWhat this looks like for real Derbyshire businesses
Inn Farm Dairy is a good example of the timeline question working the other way. Their business runs on footfall and local reputation, so we leaned into local presence and Google visibility rather than a slower brand-building play. The result was a 366% increase in daily revenue, delivered in a timeframe that actually matched what a seasonal farm shop business needed.
AEGIS Engineering sat at the other end of the fraction. As a B2B manufacturer in the East Midlands, their buying cycle is long and considered, so the right pillar was never going to be a quick paid campaign. A longer, more patient SEO and positioning push delivered a 51% increase in yearly sales, but only because we were honest with them upfront that it would take months, not weeks, to show.
Both businesses got a genuinely good outcome. Neither would have got it from the other business's service.
Where this goes wrong
The most common mistake I see is chasing the biggest promised outcome without asking about the other two thirds of the fraction. A service that promises to transform your business inside a month should make you more suspicious, not less, because dream outcomes with no time delay and no effort attached rarely survive contact with reality.
The second mistake is the effort trap. Owners take on a service that looks affordable on paper but quietly needs three hours of their own week to run properly, and when that time never materialises the service gets blamed for underperforming. It was never given a fair chance to work.
The third is buying services in isolation. A single BIG12 pillar working well can still be dragged down by a weak one sitting next to it. A strong lead generation campaign feeding into a website that does not convert, or a social media presence with nowhere for a warm lead to land, wastes the good work happening elsewhere.
Bringing it back to the BIG12
This is exactly why I built the BIG12 as a full framework rather than a menu of separate services. Once you can see all twelve pillars laid out against the same dream outcome, time and effort test, you stop guessing at what to buy next and start seeing where the actual gaps sit in your marketing.
Most East Midlands business owners I meet already have one or two pillars working reasonably well. The BIG12 exists to show you the rest of the picture, so the next thing you invest in is chosen for a reason rather than because a salesperson called at the right moment.
See where your own pillars stand
The BIG12 Scorecard runs your business through all twelve pillars in a few minutes and shows you exactly where to focus first.
Take the scorecardIf you want the full picture of how the pillars fit together and reinforce one another, our BIG12 training walks through the whole framework in plain terms, built for owners who run the business day to day rather than marketing specialists.
The challenge is never learning. It is doing.
None of this is complicated once you have seen it laid out. Dream outcome, divided by time and effort, applied to every pillar in front of you. Most owners I speak with grasp it within a single conversation.
Where it actually falls apart is implementation. Knowing that lead generation suits your timeline better than a slow brand play is one thing. Actually running that campaign properly, week after week, alongside everything else running a Derbyshire business demands, is a different challenge entirely.
That is the gap Optimise Your Marketing exists to close. Not another list of services to choose between, but eighteen years of doing this work applied directly to your business, so the pillar you choose next is the right one and it actually gets done.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
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