A marketing consultancy registered in England & Wales
Ownmoreofyourmarketingthanyourent.
Almost every marketing budget is spent renting attention. Stake helps established UK businesses build the parts they keep — the site, the search presence, the customer list — and then uses advertising to accelerate those, rather than to stand in for them.
- 01
Independent of every platform and vendor. No commissions, rebates or referral fees, from anyone.
- 02
Fees are set against scope, never as a share of what you spend on media.
- 03
Small on purpose. The person who scopes the work is the person who does it.
The ledger
One line down the middle of the budget.
Sort last year’s marketing spend into two columns: what stops producing the day you stop paying, and what would still be there next year. In most businesses the left column is over ninety per cent of the total, and nobody ever decided that.
Rented — stops with the spend
- Paid clicks, which stop on the day the card does
- Platform audiences, rebuilt whenever a policy changes
- Algorithmic reach, lent to you and never yours
- Agency knowledge, which leaves with the account manager
- Tooling nobody in-house can operate without a licence
Owned — still there next year
- Pages that answer real questions and keep being found
- A site your own team can change without raising a ticket
- A list of people who agreed to hear from you
- First-party data you hold rather than borrow
- Written decisions your next hire can follow
Practices
Fivepractices,oneforeachthingworthowning.
- 01
Owned Search
Asset: pages that keep earning visits
Structure, technical health and writing that turn your site into something search engines keep sending people to.
- 02
The Site
Asset: the pages you send everyone to
Structure, speed and clarity on the pages that every other channel eventually points at.
- 03
Audience & Retention
Asset: a list you can contact tomorrow
Email, lifecycle and reviews — the part of your marketing that no platform can switch off.
- 04
Paid Acceleration
Asset: proven routes to demand
Google, Meta and marketplace advertising used to speed up what already works, not to stand in for it.
- 05
Signals
Asset: knowing which of the above is working
Enough measurement to tell which asset is carrying the business, and deliberately no more than that.
The ladder
We work from the bottom up.
Five layers, ordered by how long they keep working. Most marketing starts at the top because that is the layer with a slider on it. Starting at the bottom is slower, cheaper over any real horizon, and considerably harder to take away from you.
L1
Permanent
The offer
What you sell, who it is for and what it costs. No amount of marketing survives an offer the market does not want, and no consultancy should pretend otherwise. We start here because the answer changes everything above it.
- Positioning and pricing sense-check
- Objections gathered from real sales conversations
- The claim the rest of the marketing has to support
L2
Compounds
The site
Every channel eventually points here, so this is where clarity pays the widest dividend. Structure, speed and plain explanation come before any attempt to send more people to it.
- Journey walkthrough with drop-offs named
- Performance budget and template repairs
- Rewritten copy on the pages that carry traffic
L3
Compounds slowly
Owned search presence
Pages that keep being found are the slowest thing to build and the hardest for a competitor to take away. This layer is where patience is repaid, and where most businesses under-invest because the return arrives late.
- Technical foundations and indexing
- A page map worth defending
- Writing produced from internal expertise
L4
Compounds
The audience you hold
An address collected honestly is reach nobody can ration. Building the list, giving people a reason to stay on it and treating it as an asset rather than a broadcast channel is the highest-margin work in most businesses.
- Capture worth exchanging an address for
- Lifecycle flows written in your voice
- Reviews and referrals as a repeatable process
L5
Stops with the spend
Paid reach
Last, deliberately. Advertising is excellent at accelerating something that already works and poor at substituting for something that does not. Placed at the top of the ladder it does its best work and costs the least.
- Brand and non-brand separated and reported apart
- Creative testing with stated arguments
- A written condition for reducing or stopping
Situations
People call us at four particular moments.
We are chosen for a moment in a business’s life far more often than for an industry, so this is how we describe the fit.
One capable person is no longer enough surface area.
It worked for two years. Now the site, the search presence, the email programme and the ad accounts each need someone who has seen a hundred of them, and no single generalist can hold that. The usual next step is a full agency retainer, which is a large jump in cost for a lot of coordination you did not ask for.
What we would look at
- An honest read on what is already good enough
- Specialist attention only where it changes something
- A structure your existing person can keep running
- No handover of everything just because something changed
Engagements
Three shapes, all priced before they start.
Second opinion
Fixed fee · about two weeks
An independent read on what you already have. We look at the site, the search presence, the list and the ad accounts, and write down what we would keep, what we would stop and what we would build.
- Review of the assets you already own
- The three things we would change first
- What we would leave alone, and why
- A ninety-minute session to argue with it
Taken by plenty of businesses who then do the work themselves. The document is yours either way, and we would rather you used it than filed it.
Build sprint
Start hereFixed scope · fixed price
One asset, built properly, with a start and an end. A page architecture rebuilt, a lifecycle programme written, a measurement setup repaired, a rebuild supervised from the outside.
- Written scope agreed before anything begins
- Implementation with, or alongside, your team
- Documentation and a real handover
- An aftercare window while it settles
Where most engagements start. It is the fastest way for both sides to find out whether working together is worth continuing.
Standing advisor
Monthly · rolling, with notice
A named consultant with your business in their head: available for decisions, reviewing what your team and other suppliers produce, and holding the longer plan between quarterly sessions.
- A regular working call and a written note
- Review of work produced by other suppliers
- Quarterly session on what to build next
- An agreed point at which it should end
We keep the number of these deliberately small, and we will tell you when you no longer need one rather than wait to be asked.
Tools
What we work inside.
A capability list, not a partner badge. Everything here sits in your accounts, and we would rather remove a tool from your stack than add one.
Search & content
- Search Console
- Semrush
- WordPress
- Webflow
Site & commerce
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- BigCommerce
- Hotjar
Audience & email
- Mailchimp
- HubSpot
- Zapier
- Airtable
Ads & signals
- Google Ads
- Meta Ads
- Analytics 4
- Tag Manager
Notes
Arguments we keep having.
Where to start
Find out how much of it you actually own.
Tell us what you have and we will send back an independent read: which parts would still be working if the advertising stopped, which would not, and what we would build first. No obligation attached to any of it.