This year the agency Twogether secured 11 new pitch wins, recorded a net profit margin increase of 565% and took home the Marketing communications agency of the year award at the prestigious B2B Marketing Awards, 2019.
Summary
Twogether has been leading a new charge in B2B marketing with a progressive vision for the future. It’s bringing technology to life in bold new ways, giving clients a unique, one-touch agency experience: one seamless strategy, delivered in one place, by one, full-service, integrated team.
This imaginative new approach has really turned clients’ heads. It’s secured 11 new pitch wins including Samsung, Amazon Web Services, and a multi-million pound three-year contract with O2 for its UK marketing and channel communications – all helping to increase the agency’s net profit margin by a stunning 565%. Clients using its new full-service offering have seen campaigns become a roaring success, powered by the launch and expansion of Twogether’s flagship Media, Martech and Voice services.
About the agency
Twogether is a top 20 global B2B marketing agency. Established in 2013 by Managing Director Kirsty Gilchrist after a management buyout, the team has grown from 45 people to more than 130, with four offices.
The agency is 100% focused on the B2B technology sector. Its mission statement, “We bring technology to life”, sets a clear goal for its integrated team: to help tech vendors and their channel partners sell complex solutions to equally complex decision-making units, which often includes non-technical influencers and buyers.
Clients include Lenovo, Hitachi Vantara, O2, Samsung, Here Technologies, Sage, Ricoh, Splunk and KPMG.
Twogether is unique among B2B agencies in that it is a genuinely integrated full-service agency. The only agency to deliver creative, digital, media, content, social, martech, audio, motion graphics and channel marketing, all in-house. This unified approach creates efficiencies and a single point of specialist expertise for its technology clients, simplifying the challenge of addressing elusive and communications-saturated audiences through multiple channels.
Contribution to clients’ businesses
Twogether has achieved 100% client retention for three years in a row. Pitch wins in the past year include O2, Samsung, Unit4 and Here Technologies.
Creative thinking
The move to achieve a true in-house integration of agency services has been vindicated by the growing mix of marketing solutions adopted by the agency’s clients.
When a brief comes in, it can assign ‘special ops’ teams with multiple specialist skills to provide a complete, joined-up solution. Creativity can extend across these diverse disciplines, with teams collaborating face-to-face or remotely to achieve the client’s objective.
Examples include:
- The world’s first voice-assisted partner portal for Splunk, using Alexa to energise the global channel community with new products and opportunities, all delivered through the fastest and most successful content ever distributed by Splunk.
- Lenovo’s all-time best performing door-opening campaign, ‘This Is Not A Laptop’, ensured the media and martech strategy achieved maximum impact for the bold creative and strong partner incentive.
- A classic content-driven campaign, featuring a collectable coffee-table book of case studies, that helped Sage position itself as a voice of calm and authority amid the uncertainty of Brexit by celebrating Britain’s thriving manufacturing sector. For Twogether, creativity is not the exclusive privilege of a traditional creative director. Its model allows collaborative teams to focus on generating the most effective ideas and to stress test them through different disciplines until the winning solution is found.
Financial performance and stability
- 565% growth in net profit margin
- 123% increase in gross margin
- 57% increase in revenue
- 24.5% increase in revenue-per-head
- Ranked top 10 fastest-growing UK agency
- Won 11 new clients at pitch ratio 2/3
Staff and community engagement
The Sunday Times credited Twogether as “Very Good” for staff engagement by in October 2018. Its staff retention figures of 91% for April 2018/19 give substance to the rating.
Everyone has access to funding for continuous professional development activities in areas they are passionate about. In the past year these have included the Oracle B2B Master programme and the DemandBase ABM course. Candidates share their new skills and knowledge through Lightning Learning Sessions and workshops.
The copy and content team has also introduced its own in-house training programme for up-and-coming copywriters. Copywriter Emma Kettley was nominated as a Rising Star in the 2018 Wirehive Awards.
Other individual achievers include Alex Webber, Drum Rising Star of the Year, and Mike Singleton, (Computing Young Marketing Professional of the Year). Four other Twogether staff were all also nominated for awards. Alex Webber is a board member for the Business Marketing Club and Twogether employees are regularly invited to speak at industry events.
Key initiatives and achievements
The Twogether media team has experienced phenomenal growth, increasing from two to fifteen people in less than 12 months.
Twogether is leading the B2B tech industry in the use of voice and audio, producing podcasts for six clients, including Hitachi Vantara, Splunk and Samsung. The Splunk audio project also includes the development of Alexa skills.
Its own 5-star-rated B2B marketing podcast has listeners across 23 countries. It is currently ranked number six in the UK for ‘Marketing Podcasts’ and has been featured four times on Apple’s ‘New & Noteworthy’ list.
In November 2018, Twogether became the only agency founding member of the Inclusive Tech Alliance, working to champion diversity in the UK technology sector.
Its Channel Meet Up, the only global event series dedicated to the $50 billion B2B channel, grew by 200% this year, with 200 attendees across 120 vendors and five events around the world.
Twogether is also the first marketing agency to partner with Salesforce in EMEA, increasing its Salesforce-driven productivity by 200% through technology innovation.
