Sometimes it starts with a cat

My husband found a cat.

Bear with me here, there is a point to the story.

She'd been hanging around a local nursing home for a couple of months and the staff had been feeding her scraps but couldn’t really continue to do that indefinitely. She seemed friendly enough so he decided he couldn't just leave her there. So she came home with him. He’s a sucker for a sad cat story.

She did have a microchip, but when we followed it up the details led nowhere. In the meantime she'd mostly kept herself to herself, eating well, sleeping a lot and slowly seeming to come back to herself. But when, after a couple of weeks, my own cats still seemed scared of her, I knew it wasn't to be. So I started ringing around local rescues. Most didn't get back to me, but Royston Animal Welfare did, almost straight away. They had a space coming up and thought they could help.

And as quick as that, off she went to her new home.

I'd already heard of Royston Animal Welfare through a previous client connection. They're a small rescue doing brilliant work, but they're not necessarily the name that comes straight to mind when you're looking for animal rescue in South Yorkshire.

As a marketeer, I knew I could probably help with how they presented themselves to the outside world. But when someone's focus is on helping animals and branding isn't exactly high on their list, you can't just nudge yourself in and say, “I can do that better.”

Having seen what they'd done for this little cat, I had a reason to reach out that wasn't just me turning up and saying, “Hello, can I help?”

So I offered to help with their marketing for free, because it felt like the right thing to do.

One of the first things they sent to me for help with was the opportunity for Barnsley residents to access a low-cost neutering scheme through local vets. It was really useful information, but there was quite a lot of it and it wasn't particularly easy to communicate quickly. And it wasn’t working. Hardly anyone knew about it.

So I broke it down, simplified the wording and made some graphics to go with it. Instead of putting everything out at once, they shared one or two posts a week.

And it worked.

People started using the scheme, and the vet practice noticed the difference too.

That's the bit that got me.

It wasn't some enormous marketing campaign or particularly clever strategy. It was just taking a bit of knowledge and experience I already had and using it to make something easier for people to understand.

And it did the trick.

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about what I want Market'ere to be, and I think this is part of it.

Yes, I love the problem-solving side. Give me something messy, confusing, inefficient or overwhelming and I'll probably want to get stuck into it.

But underneath that, I think I just really like being useful.

Sometimes that means looking at campaign statistics and spotting something that doesn't quite add up. Sometimes it's helping somebody untangle a process that's become far more complicated than it needs to be.

And sometimes it's helping a small animal rescue get the word out about a neutering scheme.

I'm not entirely sure I need a grander mission statement than that.

Sometimes it starts with a cat.