PAY per click (PPC) advertising experts Curo received 55% of the funds they needed to support a new lead generation project, thanks to a little help from Nudl, the Teesside based grant experts for SMEs.

Curo managing director Mark Blacklee says Nudl “took the headache” out of applying for the grant, which saved them £5,500 on the £10,000 cost of the email marketing campaign.

Mark was happy to put his trust in Shak Asghar, CEO of Nudl, after building up a relationship with him from the days when he worked in the business support team at Darlington Borough Council.

“I was connected with him on LinkedIn and that’s where I heard about Nudl when he first set up the company,” says Mark.

“We were looking to grow the business and we knew they could help with funding, finance, grants and growth and Shak has helped us in the past, so going to them was a no-brainer really.

“He helped us to raise 55% of the funds we needed towards the cost of a lead generation project.”

The project was broken down into three phases and at the end of each phase, Curo were able to claim back some of the funds they had spent, up to a total of 55%.

The claims process to recoup funding can often put businesses off applying for available grants, which means they scale back or delay projects to grow their business – or they don’t proceed with them at all.

But Mark said working with Nudl made the process of securing the all-important funds easy.

“If I’d have had to do it myself it would have been too much of a headache,” Mark admits.

“But with Nudl, claiming the money back was a piece of cake.”

With his knowledge of business growth opportunities, Shak was able to advise Curo of current grant funding opportunities that would maximise the amount of funds they were able to claim back.

“He knew exactly what type of funding was available at that particular time,” Mark says.

“We’d never have known about the funding without his help – and raising money through the bank is not an easy process.

“Nudl also dealt with all the heavy lifting when it came to filling out all the forms needed to secure the funding and making sure our invoices were all formatted correctly.

“In short, Nudl made recouping 55% of our spends on this marketing project painless.”

The result has been that Curo now has a number of promising leads with retail sector companies in their target market.

“We’ve generated lots of leads through an email marketing campaign that we were able to make the best it could possibly be, reaching a large number of businesses from our target market,” Mark says.

“The campaign has initiated conversations with the brands that, on paper, we want to be having more conversations with and we’re looking forward to seeing what comes of these.”