Case Study
How Timu Marketing cut strategy turnaround from days to minutes.
Inside the founding-partner engagement where a lean Seattle agency used LemiLeap to compress research and strategy, the slowest part of every client engagement, from a multi-day turnaround into minutes, and moved clients to live campaigns faster.
“It took me 15 minutes tops to build a strategy I could import over, and about an hour to clean it up into a deck to present to a client. We were at 72 hours to have that strategy done before.”
Timu Marketing
Timu Marketing is a Seattle-based marketing agency founded in 2020 by Louis Newkirk, its founder and lead strategist. The agency helps early-stage founders, small businesses, and growing companies build sustainable marketing engines, spanning branding, market research, acquisition strategy, ad management, social media, and content, and runs a mix of standalone client work alongside engagements funded through the City of Seattle's technical-assistance programs and regional grant partners.
Beyond client work, Timu is woven into the Pacific Northwest startup community, organizing and partnering on events including Founders Live Seattle and Venture Black, often alongside the region's accelerators and innovation hubs. It is a lean, hands-on team: Louis leads strategy and delivery, supported by a strategist, a paid-ads specialist, content and graphics teammates, and a project manager.
Delivering a Full Marketing Program, Client by Client, From a Lean Team
For a boutique agency, the constraint is rarely capability. It's production time. Every Timu engagement runs through the same front end before anything reaches a client's audience: audit the client's existing platforms, pull market and competitor research, build a strategy, then translate that into content, creative, and campaign setup.
Done the traditional way, that sequence is slow and tool-heavy. Timu's strategist would work across SEMrush, Google Trends, and a website grader, listen back through client consultation calls, draft in ChatGPT, and assemble everything by hand into a document. It was a multi-day, multi-tool process before a single campaign went live.
That lag between signing a client and launching their first real campaign was the bottleneck that mattered most. As Louis frames it, the speed at which the agency moves from strategy to actionable work isn't just an internal efficiency question. It's part of the client experience, a satisfaction and retention factor. Every engagement also carried real coordination overhead: a single client could touch six people across project management, strategy, web, content, graphics, and paid ads, each handoff adding time.
Timu was looking for a way to shorten that path without cutting the quality of the thinking behind it, and without adding headcount to a team already wearing many hats.
From Research to Live Campaigns, in One Place
Across the engagement, LemiLeap became the layer where Timu's marketing work took shape, from research and strategy through content, campaigns, and the analytics to see how it performed. The clearest, most measurable gain showed up right at the front of the funnel.
Research and strategy: days of turnaround, compressed to minutes
Research and strategy was the slowest, most tool-heavy part of every Timu engagement, a turnaround Louis and his team budgeted at roughly three days, about 72 hours. Inside LemiLeap, working against a client profile, that changed dramatically. Louis generated a client-ready strategy in about fifteen minutes, then spent roughly an hour shaping it into a polished deck to walk a client through.
Crucially, that speed didn't come at the cost of the thinking. LemiLeap builds each strategy on live, sourced research (market analysis, target audience, industry trends, and competitor analysis) grounded in the client's own profile rather than a blank prompt. The compression is in the assembly, not the substance: research that used to be spread across several tools and pieced together by hand now arrives as a fast, repeatable first step, freeing the team to spend its time on judgment, positioning, and execution.
“It's not really about the specific time saved for me. It's the ability to move into actionable campaigns sooner, and that becomes a client-satisfaction (CSAT) thing, not just the service itself.”
Faster onboarding to campaign: the client advantage
For an agency, the real payoff of that speed isn't the hours on a spreadsheet. It's how quickly a client goes from signed to seeing something live. Louis was explicit that this is where the value lands, and that he thinks about it less as personal time saved and more as a client-satisfaction lever. He framed the compression in concrete terms: work that would typically take a solopreneur a week could, through LemiLeap, become closer to a 24-hour job, with the agency building, launching, and starting to see results inside the same window a client used to spend just getting started.
“We're no longer talking about a point solution. We're talking about a whole system, one that's easier to handle than the point tools agencies usually stitch together.”
For an agency owner, that speed shows up on the bottom line. Louis estimates that generating strategy in LemiLeap, rather than delivering it by hand, saves roughly four to five hours of human work per client, on the order of 25% of the strategy deliverable retained as margin on strategy alone, before counting the savings that compound further down the pipeline in content and campaign work.
“Time-saving on my end as an agency owner means less overhead, and more revenue that stays in-house, in my pocket, so to speak. And we get to campaign faster.”
Content creation, built for control
Timu ran social content generation and scheduling through LemiLeap, and used it the way a demanding agency would, pushing it to produce not just posts, but campaigns with a coherent voice and arc. LemiLeap is built around exactly that kind of control: rather than one-click generation, it lets a marketer steer content by theme, campaign, and brand voice, so the output reflects intent rather than a generic default.
That same philosophy shows up in what LemiLeap deliberately keeps out. Rather than piling on every possible feature, it stays focused and easy to use, a discipline Louis, as a working agency owner, strongly endorsed:
“Some people aren't graphic designers and don't want to be. Don't give them the chance to mess it up inside your system. Your platform's easy to use, don't complicate it.”
Analytics
With performance data across paid and social in one place, Timu could finally see not just whether campaigns were getting engagement, but whether that engagement was coming from the right audience, the one defined in the strategy work upstream. Instead of judging a campaign by surface metrics, the team could tell what was actually working and course-correct with the client's real targets in view.
AEO/GEO: understanding AI visibility
When Timu ran LemiLeap's AI-search audit, the value wasn't a headline number. It was what Louis learned about his own visibility. The audit shows how the major AI engines describe the business, where it surfaces and where it doesn't, and returns a prioritized set of recommendations to act on.
It surfaced things Louis didn't previously know. The audit flagged a gap between how Timu's site positions itself and how AI models actually describe the agency. It named competitors that AI associates with Timu that Louis hadn't heard of, a prompt, in his words, to do more competitive research. And it gave him a concrete list of technical fixes for his own site.
“I really dig the recommendations tab. This really helps with knowing what I need to be doing.”
For an agency that advises its own clients on modern search, that grounding is an asset in its own right. Timu came away with a clearer picture of how AI visibility actually works and a specific set of next steps to act on.
What the Engagement Produced
- ✓Strategy turnaround compressed from a ~72-hour window to roughly 15 minutes to generate and about an hour to make client-ready, collapsing the slowest part of every engagement without sacrificing the sourced research underneath it.
- ✓Roughly 25% of the strategy deliverable retained as margin, by replacing hand-delivered strategy with LemiLeap, with further savings compounding through content and campaign work.
- ✓A shorter path from strategy to live campaigns, turning production speed into a client-satisfaction advantage rather than just an internal efficiency.
- ✓One platform instead of a stitched-together stack, so a lean team spends its time on the work that matters rather than switching between tools and reconciling them by hand.
- ✓Founding-partner feedback shipped as product: a series of agency-requested features were built or scoped in direct response to Timu's input.
- ✓A clearer command of AI visibility from the AEO/GEO audit: clearer visibility across the major AI engines, previously unknown competitors, and a concrete set of technical fixes for Timu's own site.
The qualitative shift mattered just as much:
“On the whole, I've really been loving it. It's been nice to actually get to dive into everything. It gives me a bit more directive around what updates, edits, and tweaks I should be making.”
Continuing as a Founding Partner
Across the engagement, Timu was one of LemiLeap's most engaged design partners, surfacing edge cases, pressure-testing new capabilities, and consistently pointing the roadmap toward what a working agency actually needs. That relationship is why LemiLeap invited Timu to continue as a Founding Partner, a designation reserved for customers whose feedback has directly shaped the platform.
Louis has since begun rolling LemiLeap out across his team and client roster, and has referred fellow agency owners in his network, a level of advocacy that speaks to the experience more than any single quote.
“I can't think of anything that wouldn't have me with you guys.”