A New Breed of Marketing Consultants

Our Story

Using an existing network of contacts, Simon found three clients who needed experienced marketing support in-house. Not just for the ‘doing’ side of the marketing but more for support in their strategic direction – helping them understand the best way of growing their businesses. So he began working with them as a contracted marketing strategist, becoming part of their in-house team on a regular basis, varying between one to two days per week. Clients liked the approach as they believed they had someone who could properly understand their business, because they were there in the office with them. It helped with decision making, advice, team building and faster delivery of marketing activities.

A year later, the demand for this in-house service expanded with new clients needing additional services and support. With Simon’s time now stretched to the point he couldn’t support any more clients, he formed a business relationship with Matthew Clarkson. Matt had a background in start-ups and marketing data and analytics, and had held a number of CMO roles. He’d been working on a software start-up when Simon and he were introduced, and quickly they both realised that Matt could also deliver similar marketing consultancy services to the expanding base of clients, but that he could also add another level of expertise when it came to development, marketing automation, CRM implementation and operational excellence.

The business was rubber-stamped in April 2018 when Matt and Simon formed a company – Those Digital Guys. For a while, they built the consultancy business under Simon’s original branding SimonDell.com, but when Matt decided he was sick of everyone asking him if he was ‘Simon’, they decided in June 2019 to change the name to Paper Planes.

Whilst they loved that brand and name, in October of 2019, Matt stumbled across a five-letter domain name (rare as hen’s teeth) that linked in with what we were trying to build – cemoh.com. In corporate land, a Chief Marketing Officer, the head of a company’s marketing effort is often referred to in her or his abbreviated form: CMO. Phonetically this is pronounced as ‘cemoh’ (See-Moh) and hence, the new company name was born. After all, that was where they were having the most success with clients: acting as an outsourced Chief Marketing Officer providing advice, strategy and ongoing support.

This fit with the structure that they’d been modelling in the previous years – allowing businesses to outsource their in-house marketing experts. No longer did businesses need to rely on full-time marketing staff who had no ongoing training or weren’t being utilised 100% of the time. Nor did they need to rely on expensive agencies whose staff changed frequently and weren’t really invested in their customers. Now they could get the best of both worlds and work with Cemoh to get marketing advice, strategy and execution all from one place.