Tank

Founded: 2009

Business type: Digital marketing and PR agency

Team Size: 45

Service: Agency Training

Find out more: tank.co.uk

The Challenge

Tank has grown into one of the leading digital marketing and PR agencies in the Midlands, continuingly expanding its team and acquiring a wide range of new clients. It’s also been through a re-positioning project, fine tuning its status and emerging with a louder strategic voice to help support its B2B and B2C clients.

The senior team at Tank, including Director Martin Stone and Client Services Director Chris Bogin, were looking at training programmes to support the next generation of leaders at the agency. They wanted to increase practical strategic theory and thinking to complement the rapidly growing experience of the internal team. Ultimately, they wanted the next crop of Tank’s senior people to move beyond channel marketing to helping clients solve broader marketing problems and lead more of the strategic conversation.

Tank started out by looking at various industry-based courses but couldn’t find anything that spoke directly to them – as a digital marketing agency – or that offered the flexibility they might need to get nine team members through a course, alongside busy client schedules.

The brief was clear.  The training needed to include, and only include, the vital, must-have strategic tools. We therefore focused on delivering the key, practical components of a marketing strategy toolkit that we ourselves know to be effective in our work as consultants. The duration of the course was also a consideration, as was the desire to get the team sharing best practice that had been building up over time. 

We started with a kick off session which brought everyone together – we outlined what the course would deliver, how important participant engagement would be, and that real client strategies would be analysed and developed as part of the 10-week programme. 

Two small groups then worked collaboratively through two-hour live workshop sessions focused on strategic foundations, strategy formulation, sustainable growth strategies and strategy evaluation as well as a do-it-yourself client strategy session where each participant worked through and applied the content from the course to one of their clients, identifying actions and next steps to work on for that account. 

“It was such a rewarding few months working with the team from Tank. They brought so much enthusiasm and energy to the training programme, and I could really see the shift in approach as we dived deeper into the building of strategies. There were lots of highlights but one thing that really stood out were the discussions we had about the importance of asking the right strategic questions of the client upfront, making sure they had all the right foundations in place for success, well before any conversation about channels or activity ever came up.”  – Jon Paget, Programme Tutor and Senior Partner, Open Velocity

We’ve been delighted by the feedback and believe the survey responses we received after the final session –  a 4.7 out of 5 on overall course satisfaction – speaks for itself. That said, what’s far more valuable are the changes that the team at Tank are now putting in place following the training.

We started out with an ambition to bring the most effective and useful strategic tools to the team at Tank and to bring greater confidence when entering the boardroom to discuss marketing strategy – I believe we’ve delivered on that and look forward to running a second iteration of the course with another cohort of Tank’s future stars in the near future.  – Bethan Vincent, Managing Partner, Open Velocity