We Do It With
Solid Marketing Strategy

Marketing Strategy Is More Important Than Tactics

Often, clients come to us with a very specific need. They need help with online advertisingcontent marketing including regular blog posts, lead generation, or email marketing. Some need help with social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc.) or other marketing channels/media platforms. Others are looking for help optimizing their website for the search engines. These are marketing tactics.

Whatever your marketing initiatives are we can help, but let’s start with identifying your business goals. Then, we’ll help you create a powerful digital marketing strategy.

Without understanding your 1) target audience, 2) their journeys (from awareness of your brand, product, or service to becoming an advocate for your brand), 3) what action you hope they’ll take and 4) how that fits into your overall marketing strategy, your marketing efforts will likely be wasted.

We use a systematic, repeatable, and proven approach to ensure that every marketing dollar you spend results in a positive investment in your business. It’s why we’ve been able to provide consistent and trackable business growth for our clients for nearly two decades.

Marketing Strategy

Understand Your Objectives

We start with your answers to the following questions:

  1. What is your targeted revenue growth over the next 12 months (and what was your revenue over the last year)?
  2. What is your targeted profit over the next 12 months (and what was your profit over the last year)?

Simply put, strategy is knowing where you are, understanding where you want to be, and putting together a plan to get you there.

Understanding the Numbers

Transparency allows us to properly evaluate a given marketing strategy. For example, If you need $1 million in revenue growth every month, the sum total of everything we do in marketing must provide the opportunity to make it a reality. If after evaluating everything we can do from a marketing perspective and coming up short, we may need to consider alternate markets – personas with problems you’ve never approached. It might mean expanding geographically or raising prices.  The point is for us to succeed, we have to know your revenue and profit numbers.

By the way, whether we’ve signed an official NDA with your company or not, we always operate as though we have – 100% confidential (if you have any questions about how we operate as an agency, read our frequently asked questions).

We’ll also want to understand the reasoning behind the marketing tactics you’ve suggested. You know your business. You’ve thought about what might get you a lift. We don’t want to ignore your conclusions. We just want to make sure it’s properly weaved into an overarching strategy.

We’ll ask you questions like:

  1. What are all of the problems people solve with your products or services? Even the really weird problems you never saw coming. We’ll encourage you to share opportunities as well – the other ways your product or service could be helping people with their issues.
  2. Who are the people using your products or services to solve their problems?
  3. Have you done any market research to better understand them? If so, we’ll ask you to share it with us.
  4. When they consider your solutions, what questions are they trying to answer?

Personas and Customer Journey Maps

Personas are simplified textual models of the different types of people who have an interest in your products or services. These are the people you want to attract. And when they notice you, they’re going to like what they see.

Essentially, these personas become the driving force for your marketing campaigns.

For each persona, we’ll conduct two or three in-depth interviews. We have a set of 37 proprietary questions which include:

  • Which of these best describe you:

(1) I’m imaginative. I like being absorbed into feelings and spending time reflecting, seeking personal meaning and involvement. My favorite questions begin with “Why”?

(2) I’m analytical. I like listening to and thinking about information, seeking facts, thinking through ideas, formulating ideas – and learning what the experts think. My favorite questions begin with “What”?

(3) I take a common-sense approach. I’m the happiest when experimenting, building, and creating usability. I like tinkering and applying useful ideas. My favorite questions begin with “How”?

(4) I see myself as dynamic. I like doing and feeling. I’m constantly seeking hidden possibilities and exploring ideas to create original adaptations. I learn by trial and error and self-discovery. My favorite questions begin with “What If”?

  • What are the top 3 to 5 questions you might ask yourself when considering/recommending an alternate or new [provider/vendor/product/service]?
  • What’s the most important factor? In other words, what’s the first question you’d ask?

Of course, we adapt our questions to make them contextually relevant to your experience. The entire interview takes approximately 45 minutes.

Our clients are typically surprised and happy to receive actionable feedback on their brand and products or services. It’s an added bonus.

In order to plan and execute great campaigns over the long term, we have to understand how each persona will move through their respective journeys with you.

How will they become aware of you? How will they engage? What will it require for them to convert into customers? How will you retain them going forward? And how will we get them to refer others like them to you?

In our practice, we’ve conducted just over 200 persona interviews, resulting in 91 personas/customer journey maps for 35 clients. As a result, we’ve identified 17 unique journey stages.

For each of those stages, we’ll work with you or your marketing teams to determine the message objectives, key supporting points, and potential marketing copy.

Strategic Marketing Plan

Now that we understand each segment of your target market better, and we understand what they’ll be trying to learn as they move through their journeys – we can decide on the types of marketing to deploy to capture them at each stage.

We can also properly evaluate the budget required to get you there (see our Marketing Budget Calculator). We’ll know what we need to spend by persona type to create the level of brand/product/service interest required to hit our revenue and profit targets.

Branding

If you’re ready to rebrand or simply refresh your existing brand, it’s essential to start with a well-reasoned marketing strategy. Branding is more than a logo. It includes your message and the way you communicate your message to each persona at each stage of their customer journey. For your brand to be effective, it has to resonate with each segment of your target audience.

Website Development

When we think about your website, all of its pages, with the exception of the home page, are there to answer the questions your target audience is asking as they move through each stage of their respective customer journeys.

These are pages that will mostly be found as the result of a search engine query. And those queries are nothing more than the questions they ask at each stage of their journeys.

It is also why we always weave website development and search engine optimization (SEO) together in every strategic marketing plan.

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing consists of all those methods (social media marketing, email marketing, and online advertising) we use to increase awareness of and promote engagement with your brand, products, and services.

In order to make each segment (what we call personas) of your target audience aware of you, we have to know where they’re likely to hang out online. This includes websites, social media, and podcasts.

We do this by interviewing people who are representative of each persona. We also use a few powerful market research tools to uncover these insights.

We value your time and budget.

We meet with each client bi-monthly to ensure they know what we’re working on and what’s been completed. We also discuss marketing strategies to improve what we’ve done. Clear and consistent communication reduces waste and ensures you reach your marketing goals.

Video Meetings

We meet online (Zoom) to reduce travel time and expense, allow for online sharing, and recording of meetings for review by others. This is all done in an effort to respect your time and improve communication.

Review Completed

We’ll review all completed work over the last 2 weeks so you’ll know you’re getting exactly what you paid for, and that the work was done at the high quality you expect and deserve.

Review Work to Be Done

We’ll review the work scheduled to be completed over the next 2 weeks, reprioritize if necessary, and let you know which of our marketing experts will be assigned to the task.

Review Analytics

We’ll walk step-by-step through your analytics dashboards to ensure you know exactly what happens with your website, social properties, advertising, email campaigns, and more. No more frustration trying to find info in complex analytics tools.

Issues and Opportunities

Discussing any issues and/or opportunities ensures we’re addressing any aspect of your marketing strategy and execution that might be deterring your business from growing, or could help it accelerate. As market conditions change, we’ll be nimble and change strategy and tactics as well.

Record If Necessary

Meeting online allows us to record and send the video and audio to anyone on your team that might have not been able to attend. No more having to dig through notes and try to remember what was discussed.

Let’s Talk

We’ve been helping companies like yours accelerate their growth since 2004. Let us know how we can start assisting you with your immediate plans for dramatic growth.

Let’s Talk

We’ve been helping companies like yours accelerate their growth since 2004. Let us know how we can start assisting you with your immediate plans for dramatic growth.

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