Before hiring a marketing company, most business owners have a lot of questions like...
- What's included?
- What is this going to cost me?
- How long will it take?
- Will I get a return on my investment?
- What can I expect in terms of process and deliverables?
- How fast will I get leads?
And these are good questions.
When working with someone you don't know (doing something you may have never done before), it's completely natural to have questions, concerns, and even doubts, which you should resolve before signing a service contract.
Since you're reading this, I will assume you have the same or similar questions that I mentioned above and may be wondering what it will be like if we work together.
So I'm going to provide you with answers to the questions above. If you have other questions, please feel free to reach out to me directly: jeff@jeffpayne.net.
What's included in a marketing project?
While every marketing project is unique and different, the process is always the same. It's a process I've honed over the last 15+ years of being a business coach and professional marketer, and I rely on it because it works.
I will break this down into two sections:
Before We Start Working Together and,
When We Start Working Together
Before We Start Working Together
Choosing A Marketing Package
I offer three marketing packages.
They are:
- Starter Package: $4,500/month
- Business Package: $8,500/month
- Enterprise Package: $15,000/month
The first two packages offer much of the same services. The main difference is in the investment of time and the budget allocated toward "essential" marketing and SEO initiatives determined necessary for your project. An example would be guest posts service and backlink acquisition. There are other marketing and growth hacking services that may be applicable as well. Many of the essential services are necessary for industries that are very competitive and in a crowded marketplace.
For a small business, the number one concern business owners have from my experience is budget constraints. Therefore we start with the most essential items for your project and work from there.
The starter package is recommended in most small and medium-size businesses until we assess your product or service in the marketplace. Below is an example of how we use the budget allocated for a starter package ($4,500) during the first six months:
FIRST 6 MONTHS
AFTER 6 MONTHS
There are other critical components to a successful marketing project that can increase price such as acquiring backlinks, reputation management, webinar/podcast, and video, and more. These components will be assessed and discussed when appropriate within a project.
How we allocate the budget will depend on the marketing strategy and business objectives.
Below is a broad list of marketing initiatives that may or may not be used in your project. We will determine the initiatives for your project in your kick-off meeting after we have assessed the marketing goals and strategy.
They are:
- Site Audit - Monthly
- Keyword and Competitor Research - Weekly
- Project Meetings with Jeff - Weekly, in the beginning, bi-weekly after that.
- Keyword Management
- Sales Funnels
- Systems Training
- Content Marketing
- Professional Copywriting and Editing
- Email Newsletter
- Case Studies
- Strategic Calls-To-Action
- Social Media Marketing
- Special Growth Hacking Initiatives (e.g., contest, sweepstakes, giveaways, etc.)
- Sales Funnels
- Custom Web Design
- Custom Website Development
- Dedicated Website Hosting
- CRM Integration
- Creative
- Contests, Sweepstakes, & Giveaways
- Loyalty Management System
- Branding
- Style Guide
- Social Media
- Review Management System
- Custom Designed Landing Pages
- Call-Tracking
- Marketing Reports
- Site Audit
- Competitor Research
- Weekly Marketing Report
- Keyword Management
- Chat and Artificial Intelligent Bots
- Usability Tests
- 5-Second Tests - Optimize messaging on landing pages and reduce bounce rates by measuring people's first impressions of our designs.
We do occasionally recommend services on the above list that may not be part of the starter package. In these instances, we will present them as ala carte items.
A good example is a business that does not have an established email list. We may recommend a growth hacking strategy to quickly grow your lists, such as a contest, giveaway, or sweepstakes. This could make a significant impact on the growth of your email list --- in some cases by 5,000 or more new subscribers in as little as 6 to 10 weeks.
Sweepstakes Example
When We Start Working Together
Onboarding
During this phase, I'll ask you for relevant information, including brand documents/images, site analytics, relevant keywords, customer reviews, and more. I'll also have you designate a "Team Champion" who will be our go-to person on your team responsible for getting us answers to our questions and providing us with documents. This person may be yourself -- but I have found it is often someone other than the company leader.
I will also have you complete a discovery questionnaire, which gives me all the information I need to understand your brand, services/products, competitors, and more.
Kickoff Meeting
The Kickoff Meeting is the official start of your project.
It is generally an hour to 90 minutes long.
The purpose of the Kickoff Meeting to run through a series of questions related to your services/products, goals, and customers. Every question is designed to uncover insights, which will help shape the messaging, hierarchy, and more.
I will also use this meeting to define goals, delivery milestones, tasks and make team introductions.
Our team introductions will occur over several meetings. The first phase will be during the Kickoff Meeting, where you will meet our branding and design team and our analytics team. You will also meet Robin, who is the glue in the project and ensures all tasks are delivered, and things get done. She is excellent and a high-detailed person where nothing rarely gets by her. She is also my wife!
I will also go over Basecamp, which is our project management system. I will show you how to use it to communicate with our team and know how to follow your project's progress. We have a rule that if it's not in Basecamp, it didn't happen. It's critical that you use our project management system for communication with the hundreds of tasks being completed.
Customer Research
In our first project meeting, we will review your services/products, features, use cases, differentiators, etc.
We will deep dive into customers (who they are, how they engage you, beliefs, barriers, drivers, etc.)
To get a clear picture of who your customers are, what they care about, how they engage you, and how they communicate with you, I'll need to spend some time getting to know them.
This may include:
- Customer interviews
- Customer surveys
- Heatmap analysis
- User tests
- Visitor recordings
- Feedback polls
- 5-second tests
- Reviewing your Google Analytics
- Reading reviews
- Reviewing NPS scores
- Reviewing chat logs
- Call Tracking
- and more
If you would like to learn more about these various data points, such as what they are and why they are essential, and how we use these data points regarding your project, click here.
Heatmap Example
Comprehensive Site Review
If you have an existing website, we will schedule a project meeting to review every piece of copy on it. We'll discuss what is working, what is missing, and what needs to change during this meeting.
The goal is to leave this meeting with a crystal clear picture of what you want to see.
Site Audit
If you have an existing website that we will be using, we scan your site's health for over 300 common and harmful issues.
The result is a comprehensive report that contains a list of issues that helps our development and SEO team see where exactly a website is struggling. Resolving and fixing these issues results in helping boost the SEO of a website.
We continue to do a Site Audit each month to ensure we are proactive in keeping the site clean and running smoothly.
Competitive Analysis
By this time, I have already studied your competitors and their websites to get a sense of their marketing approach and assess any content opportunities that can benefit your brand. Based on those findings, I will present you with my recommendations, which I'll incorporate into my Insights Report; see below for more information.
Insights Report
Using the insights we gained from customer data and our Kickoff Meeting, I'll present a report which will outline the following:
- Who we're targeting
- What we know about them
- How to effectively communicate with them
To give you a better sense of what that looks like, I've included a sample screenshot below, which is a short snippet from an in-depth Insights Report.
While this is intended to give you a 500-foot view of what it looks like before and when we start your project. There is much more that we cover in our Kick-Off Meeting that brings clarity to the tasks and project initiatives.
If you have any questions, please contact Jeff Payne direct at jeff@jeffpayne.net.