Growth Strategy, Analytics & Digital Marketing Consulting to Help You Escape the “Messy Middle”
We design, install and optimise systems for growing marketing and sales teams that have good people and plenty happening, but too much guesswork about what’s bringing in the right customers, where opportunities are slipping away, and what deserves attention next.
Get your messaging, website, digital campaigns and sales follow-up working together, with data you can actually use and a team that knows what to do next.
Less guesswork, fewer technical headaches, and progress that doesn’t depend on a few very tired humans holding everything together.
Some of the smart people we've worked with since 2007
💥 What is the Messy Middle?
At the start, growth is close enough to touch. The founder knows the customers, the team knows the founder, everyone can feel what matters, and decisions happen fast because the context is basically in the room.
Then the business grows.
Now there’s a marketing manager. Maybe even a Marketing Director or CMO. There are agencies, freelancers, tools, dashboards, campaigns, content plans, sales targets, reporting meetings and twelve people with opinions about the homepage.
Everyone is busy. Some of the work is good. But the whole thing still depends on a few very tired humans carrying too much context in their heads, joining dots manually, chasing decisions, interpreting fuzzy data, fixing handovers, and quietly stopping the system from turning into soup.
It’s not that your team is bad.
It’s not that your marketing leader isn’t trying.
It’s that the old way of growing has reached its limit.
Welcome to the Messy Middle.
⚙️ A Marketing & Sales System for Scale
The goal isn’t to replace your founder, CMO, Marketing Director or marketing manager with yet another outside expert who disappears into a strategy cave and returns with a deck no one uses.
The goal is to strengthen the system around them: how people find you online, understand why they should choose you, become good leads, and get the right follow-up to become customers.
That means clearer priorities, sharper customer focus, better digital decision-making, useful reporting, stronger messaging from ad to proposal, cleaner handovers, and a shared rhythm for deciding what matters next.
So your marketing manager isn’t constantly chasing context.
Your CMO can make sense of digital performance and explain the commercial picture without one eye twitching.
Your founder isn’t being dragged back into decisions the team should be able to handle.
And your agencies, freelancers and internal team aren’t all working from slightly different versions of “the plan”.
You get a growth system your people can actually run with. You get a system helps the team understand the strategy, judge the work, use the data, brief the right things, and keep improving without everything sliding back into chaos, guesswork and marketing soup.
🔥 Stop Chasing the Next Big Thing
When growth feels messy, the temptation is always to look for the next magic lever.
A new SEO push.
A GEO strategy.
Another Google or Meta Ads campaign.
A website redesign.
A shiny tool.
A fresh digital marketing agency.
A bold new “thing” that will finally fix the wobble.
Sometimes those things are useful. There’s a chance one of those may be what you need.
But if the system underneath is unclear, they just become more expensive activity layered on top of the same old confusion.
Real growth doesn’t come from chasing silver bullets.
It comes from building the operating system that helps you choose the right work, do it properly, measure what matters, and keep improving.
⚙️ Real Growth Requires Strategy
Not a vague slogan. Not a three-hour workshop where everyone says “alignment” and then goes back to whatever they were doing before.
Real strategy means knowing:
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who you need to reach
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what they actually need to hear
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what matters most right now
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what should wait
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where to focus your team, time and budget next
That includes developing your positioning and messaging, sometimes right down to the words your customers actually see. The thinking doesn't end when the brief is written.
When everything feels important, everything competes for attention — and the loudest, shiniest or most urgent thing usually wins.
Good strategy turns “everything is important” into a clear set of choices your team can actually act on, so time, budget and energy go where they’re most likely to move the business forward.
📊 Real Growth Requires Decision Analytics
Not every number deserves a meeting.
You don’t need to track everything you could track.
You need the right signals, and the skill to work out what they’re actually telling you.
Good analytics is more than dashboards and reporting. It means joining the dots between sales, marketing, customers, channels and behaviour to understand where growth is leaking, where momentum is building, what’s changed, and what might be causing it.
Are we reaching the wrong people? Losing them on the website? Or losing good enquiries somewhere in the follow-up?
Sometimes the useful answer is hiding behind three apparently healthy metrics. Sometimes the scary-looking number is completely fine once you understand the context. And sometimes the dashboard is just vanity nonsense wearing a very professional hat.
The goal is not more data.
It's to understand what’s really going on, so you can make better decisions about what to do next.
🧠 Real Growth Requires Quality Execution
Strategy only matters if it survives contact with the work.
Your team needs to know what good looks like: a clear brief, a well-designed page, a properly set up campaign, a trustworthy report, a clean handover, a good supplier response, and a test that can teach you something useful.
Otherwise, even smart people can produce disconnected work that looks busy, feels productive, and quietly fails to move the business forward.
Quality sales and marketing work is not just “getting things done”.
It's making sure the strategy is carried through properly into the campaigns, website, tools, systems and handovers, so the work actually does the job it was intended to do.
Sometimes the missing piece is an experienced eye that can look across channels, spot where the strategy has been lost in translation, and help your team improve the work.
🔁 Real Growth Requires Improvement Cycles
Growth compounds when each cycle builds on what came before.
You set a focused priority.
You do the work.
You measure what happened.
You learn from it.
You improve the next cycle.
Over time, the strategy gets sharper, the team gets better at judging what works, the data becomes more useful, and each new piece of work has more context behind it.
Instead of starting from scratch every few months, you build on the customer insight, messaging, campaigns, website improvements and sales lessons you already have.
Use what you’ve built. Sharpen what’s working. Improve what’s weak. Keep the flywheel spinning.
🛠️ How Hells Bells Helps
We provide senior marketing strategy and digital marketing consulting, with the analytical, creative and technical experience to get beyond the presentation and into the actual work.
Our territory runs from paid media, SEO and AI visibility through messaging, content, website user experience and conversion, into CRM, email nurture and inbound sales.
Every engagement starts with a deep discovery and systems install phase. We map how the pieces fit together, then dig into the areas most relevant to your immediate growth priority.
The initial phase builds your strategic foundations, practical analytics and a focused plan for the next 90 days.
Mapping the whole system does not mean trying to fix it all at once.
From there, you can keep working with us in 3-month improvement cycles: applying the plan with quality execution oversight, supporting your team, interpreting the results and choosing the next useful move.
The customer thinking, messaging and planning tools stay in use.
They become part of how your business makes decisions, not souvenirs from a workshop.
A little proof that it works
Eight years of knowing their business, not just the marketing.
“Michèle has an excellent understanding of SEO and, just as importantly, knows how to ensure that the message we communicate to our target audience is clear, relevant and aligned with our brand.”
“Her contribution helped us achieve year-on-year growth of between 25% and 30%.”
Pierre Burden · New African Safaris
From his Google review
🤝 Upskill Your Existing Sales and Marketing Team
We work with marketing and sales teams, their leaders and their suppliers. Not around them, not instead of them, and definitely not from some mysterious strategy cave where finished documents go to die.
Our approach is done with you. You bring the knowledge of your business, customers, commercial priorities and people. We add another senior perspective, with deep, hands-on expertise across digital marketing strategy, decision analytics, messaging, search visibility, conversion and quality execution.
We're here to work alongside your existing leadership, contributing specialist knowledge, challenging assumptions where useful, and helping turn good strategic thinking into effective marketing and sales activity.
You don't need to replace good agencies or bring everything in-house. We help your team get more from the people and suppliers you already have, with clearer briefs, better communication, stronger technical understanding and the confidence to recognise what good work looks like.
That might mean co-creating campaign briefs, shaping website pages, reviewing analytics, sharpening messaging, improving enquiry follow-up, sense-checking a sales proposal, or planning a small test before committing a large budget.
The work moves forward, and your team builds the skills and confidence to do more of it themselves.
Sometimes, yes, we'll get hands-on for short spells.
If a lean test needs a first version, something is stuck, or briefing another specialist would take longer and cost more than getting the thing moving, we'll roll up our sleeves.
But the aim is not to make you dependent on us.
The aim is to strengthen the expertise, tools, working habits and confidence already inside your business, so your leaders can make better-informed decisions and your team can keep improving without needing us to hover over everything forever.
The real win is not “Hells Bells has to approve everything.”
The real win is a team that can run the system.
👋 Who We Are
Michèle Macnab
Fractional CMO meets Head of Digital. Strategy brain, digital operator, and professional “should we actually do this?” person.
Michèle brings 19 years of digital marketing and growth experience, including 14 years in digital marketing leadership. Her background spans business and growth strategy, paid media, analytics, positioning, messaging, branding and creative direction, content strategy, website UX, conversion and the journey from first interest to sale.
She's worked in agencies, run her own since 2015, managed agencies and suppliers on behalf of clients, and advised entrepreneurs through City of Cape Town development programmes.
That means she's seen the disconnect from both sides of the table. Businesses talk about customers, sales and commercial priorities. Digital specialists talk about channels, platforms and performance metrics. Both can be good at their jobs and still end up talking past each other.
Michèle helps bridge that gap, translating business priorities into useful direction for marketing teams and suppliers, and turning digital recommendations and results into decisions the business can actually understand and act on.
She's the person asking:
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Who are we trying to reach?
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Why should they choose us?
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What should we focus on next?
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What happens between the first click and the sale?
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What does the data actually say?
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Are we solving the business problem, or just the marketing problem?
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Is this a good use of time, money and team energy?
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In short: Michèle helps you work out what should happen, why it matters, and how to get your team and suppliers working towards the same commercial goals.
Dean Claassens
Technical marketing whizz, search nerd, and professional “can we actually make this work?” person.
Dean brings 14 years of SEO and technical digital marketing experience, including 12 years in leadership. He works across SEO, AI search visibility, technical audits, tracking, reporting, WordPress and marketing tool integrations: the fiddly behind-the-scenes bits that quietly decide whether your lovely strategy can actually survive online.
He’s the person asking:
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Can people find this?
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Can search engines and AI tools understand it?
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Is the site technically healthy?
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Is the tracking working?
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Are the tools talking to each other?
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Is the execution clean enough to support the strategy?
In short: Dean helps strengthen the search visibility, website and measurement foundations, and helps your team understand what good technical work looks like.
⚡️ Together
Together, we help you answer the two questions most growth work depends on:
Should we do this?
And can it be done properly?
Good growth needs both.
A beautiful strategy that can’t be executed is just expensive theatre.
A technically perfect campaign pointed at the wrong customer is just a very tidy waste of money.
Hells Bells combines marketing strategy, creative judgement, digital expertise and inbound sales support. We help your team connect how people find you, why they choose you, and what happens next, then keep improving the system together.