Devstars
Blog
Date: 09/12/2025
Stuart WatkinsI started in marketing back in 1989. My first agency was a traditional London advertising outfit, and the discipline was straightforward: understand your client’s goals, understand their audience’s needs, and deliver solutions that work for both. Thirty-five years on, that bit hasn’t changed one bit.
Everything else has gone mad.
Here’s the thing. Producing marketing campaigns has never been easier. Photos? Canva. Videos? CapCut. Articles? ChatGPT can bang them out in minutes. Websites? WordPress. Anyone can do it. And that’s brilliant. Except it’s also a disaster.
Because what I’m seeing across our client base—and we work with everything from property firms to creative agencies to charities—is that having more tools doesn’t fix the problem. It makes it worse. It’s like giving someone a Ferrari when they don’t know how to drive. Fast chaos instead of slow chaos.
We’ve deliberately moved away from the traditional agency model. Not because we don’t like our clients—we do. But because the old model doesn’t work anymore.
Traditional agency: you brief us, we do the work, we deliver something, you pay us. Sorted. Transactional. It works for discrete projects. Doesn’t work if you’re trying to actually build marketing capability that lasts.
So over the last few years, we’ve started working differently. We slot into companies as fractional CMOs. Extended team members. We work with people like Sense London, who we’ve partnered over the last few years. Cushman & Wakefield where we’re doing hyperlocal SEO across London sub-markets. Investors in Property—a decade-long relationship. We combine strategic thinking, technical knowledge, and production capability, but we’re not just doing the work for them. We’re helping their team do it better.
This changes how you think about everything.
We understand their business deeply. Not from a brief. From actually being in their world week after week. Understanding their sales cycle, their customer pain points, what makes them tick. We build capability in their team instead of creating dependency. We measure what actually matters—revenue, qualified leads, conversion rate—not vanity metrics like follower counts.
The model only works if they’re winning. So we’re invested. Properly invested.
I had a conversation with a client last month. Good business. Decent budget. Tonnes of tools. And they’re stuck.
Here’s how it typically goes:
They invest in software subscriptions. Lots of them. Someone’s cousin gets hired who “knows social media.” Goals get set in a vague way (“increase awareness,” “get more leads”). Then they expect results.
What’s missing? Four things. Always the same four things.
Standard Operating Procedures. I know, sounds boring. But it’s the difference between coherent and chaotic.
An SOP is just: here’s how we do this thing. Here’s how we approve a blog post before it goes live. Here’s the steps for creating a social post. Here’s what happens when a customer fills in a form. Here’s who checks what, and when.
Why does this matter? Because without it, you get:
We worked with a hospitality client who had no approval process for their website updates. Wild West situation. They’d patch things through without checking that they broke something else. We fixed the process—documented it, clarified who needs to approve what—and suddenly things actually work. No more panic calls because someone broke the checkout page.
Not the colour palette and logo file. I mean proper governance. Tone of voice. Visual hierarchy. How you handle sensitive stuff. What you’ll talk about and what you won’t.
We had one client—creative agency—who had five different writing voices across their properties. Website sounded corporate. LinkedIn sounded cheeky. Blog sounded academic. Email sounded like someone’s manifesto. No wonder their audience was confused.
Took us a few weeks to document their actual voice. Direct. Practical. A bit cheeky. British. Doesn’t take itself too seriously but knows what it’s talking about. Once that was documented, everything else snapped into place. Their team could write like them. Junior people could write like them. Consistency across the board.
Your guidelines need to work for both your senior designer and someone pulling together a Canva post. If it doesn’t, it’s not comprehensive enough.
Think of Lego blocks. You have standard components. Buttons that work a certain way. Cards with consistent spacing. Colour palettes. Typography rules. They snap together predictably.
Why? Because it means your less-experienced team members can create professional work without needing a senior designer to touch everything.
I’ve got a real example here. Interior design agency we work with. Beautiful work. Problem: they were waiting for one senior designer to photograph projects and create layouts. Became a bottleneck. Expensive bottleneck.
So we built a design system for their project photography. Here’s how you photograph. Here’s the grid. Here’s how it lays out. Junior team members could now do it. Photography comes in, it drops into the system, it looks professional. No waiting for the senior person.
That freed up the senior designer to actually design. Strategy, new concepts, client presentations. The stuff that needs real skill. The routine work went to the system.
This is where strategy actually meets what you’re doing.
You need to know your numbers. Who’s visiting your website? Where are they dropping off? What’s your conversion rate? When are your customers actually ready to buy? How’s your competitor messaging different from yours?
But here’s the bit that’s changed from 1989. You don’t wait for the quarterly report anymore.
You’re monitoring this constantly and adjusting based on what you see.
We had an e-commerce client test eleven iterations of a landing page over six weeks. Tiny changes. Layout. Copy. CTA button colour. By the end, conversion rate had improved by 47%. Wouldn’t have happened if they’d built it once and left it.
That’s the discipline now. Create. Test. Measure. Learn. Improve. Do it again. Weeks, not quarters.
Three scenarios I see constantly:
Scenario one: “We’re creating loads of content but not seeing conversions.”
Usually what’s happening: they’re producing content but there’s no process for ensuring it actually serves their customer journey. Blog posts get written because they’re “good for SEO” but they’re not connected to anything. No funnel. No measurement. No iteration.
Fix: map out the customer journey. What content does someone need at each stage? Awareness. Consideration. Decision. Then you produce strategically, measure what works, improve what doesn’t.
Scenario two: “Our brand looks different everywhere.”
This one’s obvious. Brand guidelines exist on a PDF no one reads. So every piece of content looks slightly different. Website looks one way. LinkedIn looks another. Email looks like something else. Customer thinks they’re dealing with three companies.
Fix: comprehensive brand guidelines that cover tone, visual hierarchy, design approach. Guidelines your team can actually use without needing a designer to oversee everything.
Scenario three: “We outsourced everything and the agency doesn’t really understand our business.”
This is the one that makes me sad. Client spends a fortune on an agency. Agency does decent work. But agency doesn’t understand what actually matters to the business. They’re not connected to the sales team. They don’t know the real customer pain points. They’re working from a brief, not from lived understanding.
Fix: partnership, not vendor relationship. Someone embedded in your organisation. Someone who understands your sales cycle, your margins, your competitive position. Someone who can say: “You’re spending £50k here but that’s not where your customer is.”
I’ve built three businesses and worked across everything from Fortune 500s to start-ups. The thing that separates high-performing marketing teams from everyone else isn’t the tools. It’s not the budget. It’s discipline.
Here’s what discipline looks like:
Clarity on process. Everyone knows how things work. Who approves what. When. What constitutes done. No surprises.
Consistency in voice. Customer hears the same brand voice across every touchpoint. Website. Email. Social. This builds trust. Faster than anything else.
Scalable systems. Design systems and templates mean your team can create professional work without needing senior people for everything.
Constant measurement. You know what works and what doesn’t. Not annually. Constantly. And you act on it.
We worked with Investors in Property—we’ve been with them ten years—and the shift happened when they moved from “let’s do a campaign” to “let’s measure everything and improve based on what we learn.” Now they run their marketing like a performance channel, not a cost centre.
Different world.
We’ve got a pretty specific approach now.
Month one: We audit everything. Your website. Your brand implementation. Your content. Your team’s capability. We understand your goals, your constraints, where you’re actually losing opportunities. Tons of data gathering, honestly.
Month two to three: We figure out what needs to happen. Sometimes we’re building SOPs from scratch. Sometimes we’re refining what exists. We identify quick wins—things you can fix immediately that matter. We help you understand your data. What’s working. What’s broken. What needs to change.
Month four onwards: We embed. Weekly or fortnightly check-ins. We help your team execute better. We solve problems as they come up. We review what’s working and adjust based on results.
Sometimes it’s eight hours a week. Sometimes twenty. Sometimes it’s six months. Sometimes it’s ongoing. What’s consistent: we’re working to make your team better and your marketing actually drive revenue.
Most of the businesses we talk to aren’t looking for a traditional agency anymore. They’re not looking for someone who does the work. They’re looking for:
Strategic clarity. Where should we actually invest? What’s our real competitive advantage? What matters and what doesn’t?
Process reliability. Confidence that things are being done consistently. Quality’s maintained. People aren’t reinventing the wheel.
Capability building. Not dependency. Real improvement in what your team can do without us.
Accountability. Working with someone measured on results, not billable hours.
Partnership. Someone who gets your business. Cares about your success. Will have honest conversations when things aren’t working.
If that’s where you are, we should probably talk.
Client came to us. Property business. Good reputation locally. But growth had plateaued.
They had a website. It was fine. Not great. They were posting on social media. LinkedIn presence was there. But nothing was connected. No strategy tying it together.
Here’s what we did:
First, we mapped their customer journey. How do people actually find them? What do they need to know at each stage? Where are they dropping off?
Then we built an SOP for content creation. Website. LinkedIn. Email. How each one serves the journey. What voice gets used where. Who approves it.
Then we looked at their design. Rebuilt it to be consistent. Same visual language. Same hierarchy. Made it scalable so junior people could create graphics that looked professional.
Then we got obsessed with measurement. Set up proper analytics. Started A/B testing pages. Measured lead quality, not just lead volume. Measured conversion rate across different audience segments.
Six months in, website traffic up 5x. Form completions up 250%. Lead quality up massively because they were now attracting the right people.
Not because of some magic marketing trick. Because they had process, consistency, a scalable system, and they were measuring and improving constantly.
I’ll be straight with you. Marketing in 2026 isn’t complicated. It’s also not easy.
It requires discipline. Consistency. Willingness to measure and adjust based on what the data tells you. Willingness to document processes and stick to them even when you’re busy.
Most businesses don’t want to do that. They want the magic trick. The viral campaign. The thing that changes overnight.
Doesn’t work that way. It never has.
What does work: understand your goal, understand your audience, deliver something that works for both. Then measure. Then improve. Then do it again. Compound that over twelve months and you’ve got a completely different business.
We’ve been doing this for thirty-five years. The fundamentals haven’t changed. Everything else is just better tools for getting there faster.
If any of this is hitting home—if you’re struggling with inconsistency, if your team’s capability feels limited, if you’re not sure your marketing’s actually driving growth—we should have a conversation.
We do a discovery process with potential clients. Takes about three weeks. No big commitment. Just: here’s what we see, here’s what’s possible, here’s what we’d recommend.
Most of the time we find real opportunity. Sometimes we recommend you sort it with internal resources. Either way, you get clarity on what’s actually holding you back.
Sound useful?
Devstars. Bespoke web software, digital growth, and fractional CMO services for agencies, start-ups, property businesses, and anyone trying to build marketing that actually works.
Get in touch if you want to talk about whether a partnership makes sense for your business.
Tell me what you’re trying to fix. Half an hour, no pitch, no slide deck.
If we’re the right fit we’ll talk about what’s next. If we’re not, I’ll point you to someone who is.
