Case study · Marketing Evolve
From ad hoc follow-ups to three governed systems in production
Marketing Evolve is a founder-led marketing agency. Leads lived in memory. Follow-ups happened when remembered. Content moved through Word, OneDrive, and manual uploads. Three channels, no single source of truth, no audit trail.
The starting point
Before any workflows were in place, the business ran on effort and memory. The founder knew what needed to happen, but the system for making it happen consistently did not exist.
- Leads captured across LinkedIn DMs, WhatsApp, and Outlook with no single place to track them
- Follow-ups done ad hoc, by the founder and VA, when they remembered
- No daily view of what was overdue, pending, or waiting on a response
- Articles drafted in Word, shared via OneDrive, uploaded to the site by hand
- Approval backlog grew with no escalation logic and no visibility into what was pending
- No audit trail: no way to know what ran, what changed, or why
Engagement
- Client
- Marketing Evolve
- Type
- Founder-led marketing agency, UK
- Stack
- Notion, Outlook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, OneDrive
- Delivery
- Operations Review + Build Sprint
- Systems built
- 3
What we built
Three systems, all running on the same governance model: draft-first outputs, approval gates on external actions, and an audit row on every run.
Operations: Follow-up queue and morning briefing
Before: Leads tracked in memory. Follow-ups done when remembered. No view of what was overdue or waiting.
- Leads captured in Notion with stage, channel, last contact date, and context
- Follow-up tasks created automatically per stage with cadence rules
- Daily morning briefing assembles queue, pending approvals, and content movement into one Draft Pack
- Auto-snooze on quiet leads with full log; auto-unsnooze when new comms arrive
- Approval fatigue safeguards: age-based nudges, warnings when backlog exceeds threshold, weekly stats
- Every run writes an audit row: workflow, trigger, owner, status, evidence
Follow-ups stopped falling through. The morning briefing replaced three manual checks.
Content: Article production workflow
Before: Articles drafted in Word, shared via OneDrive, reviewed informally, uploaded to the site by hand. Each one took significant untracked time.
- Structured brief submitted once; automation produces a draft article output
- QA gate checks quality and flags issues before output is finalised
- Draft created in Notion for review and approval before any publish step
- Audit trail per run: what ran, what passed the gate, what was flagged
2 hours saved per article. Every run has a trail.
Outreach: LinkedIn pipeline with approval-gated DMs
Before: LinkedIn outreach was inconsistent. Leads came in via DM and often went quiet with no follow-up system and no ICP scoring.
- Leads database in Notion with ICP scoring (High / Medium / Low) by fit criteria
- High-fit contacts prioritised automatically; research brief built per lead from live web data
- Personalised message draft prepared per lead and presented for operator review
- Nothing sends automatically: operator approves each message before it goes
- Replies tracked; follow-up queue updated when new contact is detected
Consistent outreach cadence. No unreviewed sends.
Outcomes
2 hrs
saved per article with the governed content workflow
3
live systems running with audit trails and approval gates
0
unreviewed external sends across any workflow
Follow-ups stopped falling through. Approvals became measurable rather than invisible. The morning briefing replaced three manual checks. Every run is logged with an audit row.
Want the same for your business?
We start with an Operations Review to map what you actually do, identify the highest-friction workflows, and define control points. From there we build with the same method used here.