Discover the key to better small business marketing:
Put strategy first!
It's tempting to think there's one quick and easy solution to get your marketing on the right track, but the reality is that the answer to all of your marketing problems doesn't lie in individual tactics. And while it's true that a wide range of good marketing tactics are available and necessary for any small business that wants to establish momentum, at Lift we believe that strategy should always come first!
Our systematic approach will help you combine strategy and tactics in a way that makes perfect sense for your unique business model.
What a Strategy First Marketing Plan will do for you
Once you've developed a strategic marketing plan tailored to your business, you'll start to create the momentum needed for business growth. And you'll begin to achieve great things:
- Attract the clients that are ideal for your business
- Stand out in ways that make the competition irrelevant
- Make confident, informed decisions about what to do and not to do
- Position and grow your brand as an established, trustworthy and valuable service
- Identify the most effective ways for you to attract new business
The entire process takes about 30-40 days and involves three meetings with you and your team.
When you receive our strategy findings you’ll have a clear direction for standing out and attracting the ideal client and a roadmap of the most effective tactics to support your strategy.
What's Included?
- Initial Getting Started Discovery Meeting - During this meeting, we'll use the Business Model Canvas to learn all about your business.
- Competitive Research – Full detailed report on competitive factors for 4 to 6 of your top competitors. High-level summaries including a position in the market, why they win, website ranking factors, social signals and reviews.
- Client Interviews – 5 to 15 ideal client interviews completed by us. You will receive access to full recordings, interview transcripts, and high-level summaries.
- Ideal Client Persona Development – A persona for each of your market segments, including overview, priority initiatives, success factors, perceived barrier, buying process, and decision criteria.
- Core Message Development – A clearly defined unique core difference, talking logo, and messaging for using your core difference when reaching different target markets.
- Customer Journey Map – Using the unique Marketing Hourglass approach, we'll help you create a roadmap of suggested marketing tactics for each of the phases of the customer buying journey: know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat and refer.
- Content Plan/Calendar - Based on our keyword research, we'll build a content strategy using our "hub pages" approach that will allow you to map out 6-12 months of content as part of your on-going marketing efforts.
- Priority Growth Recommendations – From our research and audit of your existing marketing and online presence, we'll recommend the highest impact activities you need to consider fixing or implementing right away.
- Presentation of Findings - Once we complete our work we’ll schedule a time to meet with you and your team via video chat to deliver the items above and map out what we believe is the best strategic approach for you to take with your marketing. From this point, you’ll have several options for how you put our recommendations into action. We can teach you or your staff to do it or we can do it for you.
Not ready for a full blown marketing strategy?
That's okay. It often takes a lot small steps before you're ready to run.
We've designed several introductory service offerings that are foundational in any small business marketing strategy. They give you a chance to gain some early traction while you build the trust you need before jumping into a deeper engagement.
Get Reviews
Encourage your customers to share their enthusiasm for your business on the sites that matter. Run a review generation campaign to past customers and create a funnel that generates genuine, authentic online reviews.
Build Your Online Presence
How is your business appearing in web searches. More and more, people will contact businesses directly from a Google MyBusiness page. Online reviews are a big part of that. Our Local Foundation Plan is an excellent and affordable short-term way to improve and establish a better search experience and start generating more leads.
Update Your Brand
Does your company logo adequately express the professionalism and success of your business? If your logo was designed by a student or a friend for free, it might be time for an update. We can help you refine or replace your brand identity so that it's relevant, impactful and memorable. That's important if you want to take marketing more seriously.