The Client Factory is family owned digital marketing agency based in Totnes, Devon, established in 2005 by current MD, Dan Smale. We’ve created and managed campaigns for well over 100 clients, spanning different industries and business sectors, from Retail to Manufacturing, Travel and Leisure to Legal and Financial Services.

Our clients range in size from individual professionals and small business owners to one of the world’s best known football clubs and some of the UK’s best known racecourses and come in all shapes and sizes in between. Our clients are mainly UK based, though in some cases their campaign reach is worldwide.

The vast majority of our business comes either from personal recommendation from satisfied clients (for which we are always extremely grateful), or from our network of strategic partners, such as web designers and business consultants, who recommend our services to their clients.

How It All Began

My introduction to Internet Marketing was around 17 years ago, when I was setting up a new business, which needed an online presence. The business started on a shoestring, with two staff, a tight budget for most things and no budget for others.

Having commissioned our website, I discovered there was a bit more to it than ‘Build it and they will come’. We started with an SEO campaign, using a company offering what seemed too good to be true: ‘First page results or your money back’. As with many such promises, it was indeed too good to be true and the promised refund was not going to happen without legal proceedings.

So I had to multi task and learn about SEO and PPC myself. Several years later we had the budget to outsource again, but our online marketing was producing around 95% of our turnover, which had grown to over £3 million. We tried another agency, but found that we were better at than they were, so we kept it in house.

When it was time to think about a new business and a new challenge, I knew first hand both the power of successful Internet Marketing and the need for a competent trustworthy provider of these services.  I decided to start a digital marketing agency and so, The Client Factory was born.

I never forget how that journey started and that many small businesses start their own campaigns out of financial necessity and/or as a result of a bad experience with one of the cowboys that still roam the plains of online marketing. But I also know how much the scope of the digital marketing industry has grown over the last 10 years, how difficult it is to devote time to your campaign when it isn’t your full time role and how expensive that can be for your business in the long run.

Having spent the last quarter of a century in sales and marketing, over several sectors, that experience allows me to ensure that The Client Factory offers more than just Internet Marketing advice and a couple of decades of  Networking means we often identify off line opportunities to develop strategic partnerships, adding more value to our client relationships.

If we sound like the sort of business you’d like to work with, then we’d love to hear from you and discuss how we can help improve your online presence and the new business that generates for you. Please call me on 0845 431 0367 or email dan.smale@theclientfactory.co.uk

Dan Smale, Managing Director
The Client Factory, Digital Marketing Agency, Totnes, Devon.