Marketing & Promotional Plans
We bring best-practice insight to your planning process based on extensive experience. We're also highly creative marketers, which means we can position your strengths and uncover opportunities to help you stand out from stiff competition.
Marketing Frameworks
Information Gathering and Setting the Building Blocks
Whether you're just starting your business, have a particular project in mind, or need to pivot an existing business, this is the starting point.
We take a look at your business at a high level to gain a strategic and organized understanding of your situation to start laying the foundation for all the marketing efforts that follow.
Robbin is a bright marketer with good ideas and the ability to listen and understand your needs. I benefited from the hour long consultation we had mostly because she guided me to some effective out of the box thinking. In this day and age where everyone is trying to shove cookie cutter marketing tactics, this was a refreshing change. — Turgay Birand
Discovery and Situation Analysis
We begin with an assessment to gain insights into your business, business model, and marketing activities to date.
We ask you to fill out a marketing input form and to provide background materials (i.e., business or marketing plans), scan your website, and review your traffic analytics to start formulating and organizing a strategy.
Framework Components
We work with you to confirm and clearly define the following for marketing purposes:
- Business and marketing goals, qualitative and quantitative
- Product/service features and benefits
- Target markets and segments (customer profiles, decision attributes, website personas, journeys)
- Core competencies
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- Differentiation
- Competition
- Timing impacts
- Budget and resources
Deliverable and Virtual Consulting Sessions
You get a report organizing the information provided into a marketing framework. We'll then host a virtual 1-1.5 hour meeting to discuss your goals, marketing objectives, audience, gaps and opportunities and discuss how you might achieve your objectives. We'll outline preliminary recommendations for how to move forward based on your needs, immediacy, and resources.
The next step may be to develop your
strategic marketing plan in whole or in part, depending on what we know so far.
Strategic Marketing Plans
Achievable Strategies Arise from the Framework
Once we've gathered information for the Marketing Framework, we can start fleshing out the strategies that connect your goals with the actions needed to achieve them.
There's more to marketing than just digital
These days, most plans focus on digital marketing, but we use our broad knowledge, and experience with a wide range of clients, to develop strategies and tactics that others may not have thought of. Sometimes it can make sense to Zag when they Zig — even if that involves some traditional approaches.
We're not opposed to, and have experience in personal selling, public relations, direct mail, trade shows, and more. We just know when and where they make sense and how to allocate your resources appropriately.
Not every client needs a strategic plan — we can help you determine that
We'll disclose gaps, key focus areas, and priorities. It often leads to finding hidden revenue and promotional opportunities. Most clients save time and money, simply because we help them avoid what they shouldn't be doing in the first place by setting the right strategy.
However, there are times when skipping right to the
Promotional Action Plan makes sense.
Marketing Plan Components
Depending on what was realized in the framework, we will start laying out the following:
- Positioning
- Value proposition
- Key messaging
- Branding
- Communication goals and strategies
- Media
- Marketing calendar
- Budget and resource allocation
Differentiation Value & Why Buy from You?
We start by helping you more clearly define why someone should buy from you. We're experts at value propositions and knowing how to use them to communicate your story.
We may also help you refine your service packages and amplify your message to drive website traffic and sustainable growth.
Deliverable and Virtual Consulting Sessions
We document all the items noted above and their impact on your website, media and social media, and any other tools in the promotional toolbox that you're using or thinking about using, and discuss how you might achieve your objectives. We'll make specific strategic and creative recommendations outlined in a digital workbook.
Promotional Road Map
Getting It Done with Strategy-Driven Creative
When revenue is flat or you're using a confusing jumble of marketing tactics, this action-oriented plan is a shot in the arm that determines what needs to get done and in what priority.
It's designed to prevent you from getting overwhelmed with everything you need to get done, while providing a more organized, integrated, and impactful approach.
It's highly recommended that your website is ready for new visitors before launching into promotions to build awareness. Take a look at how we can transform your existing website or build a website for you.
Execution
Once we have the road map, we can help you execute, whether we do some of the work ourselves or coordinate with you or necessary outside vendors. For details about some of the work we do in-house, take a look at our
digital marketing services
Discovery and Situation Analysis
Depending on where your business is and where we are in the process, we may simply put together a list to deliver a specific campaign or develop something more extensive to support the Strategic Marketing Plan, or an element of it.
Action Plan Components
Action plans may include developing foundational components, like a logo, branded color palette, key message development, or anything else that's missing and needed from the Framework or Strategic Plan. Our typical action plans include:
- A clear list of what is to be completed according to an overall strategy and defined tactics.
- Appropriate timeframe for completion, particularly in light of your marketing calendar.
- Assigned roles and responsibilities (who is to do what).
- How chosen media is to be used and the execution thereof
Virtual Consulting Sessions
You get a list or workbook, depending on the particular project, outlining all the activities, media, and executables that need to take place. Estimates are provided. We hold meetings to discuss the details as needed, and to ensure aspects of the plan we are working on are being executed.