SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING SOLUTIONS
MARKETING STRATEGY
A straightforward plan, or marketing strategy, will help identify important things like your ideal target customers and competitive advantages, and give us the road map to know which advertising products make the most sense to use and when to use them.
There is a considerable amount of research and discovery that goes into creating a solid marketing strategy. Oftentimes, businesses jump straight into tactics before creating a solid plan. More on that here.
We start our process by thoroughly researching your business and the competition. This is the part where we are identifying key areas of strength and weakness. The discovery portion is a highly collaborative phase where we require a lot of feedback from you. We present our research and ask all kinds of questions to make sure we’re on the right track.
Generally, this process can be accomplished within two meetings with you and once complete, our team is able to regroup and develop a recommended marketing strategy. The strategy is completely custom for your business and it’s yours to keep.
If you decide to use StraightForward to implement the strategy, our next step is to create mutually agreed upon and realistic goals to track how we’re performing on a regular basis. We also need to set up and test conversion tracking so that the proper tools are in place to measure results.
Ready to develop a winning game plan for your business? Schedule a free consultation to get the process started!
Strategy
A straightforward plan, or marketing strategy, will help identify important things like your ideal target customers and competitive advantages, and give us the road map to know which advertising products make the most sense to use and when to use them.
There is a considerable amount of research and discovery that goes into creating a solid marketing strategy. Oftentimes, businesses jump straight into tactics before creating a solid plan. More on that here (link to blog post).
We start our process by thoroughly researching your business and the competition. This is the part where we are identifying key areas of strength and weakness. The discovery portion is a highly collaborative phase where we require a lot of feedback from you. We present our research and ask all kinds of questions to make sure we’re on the right track.
Generally, this process can be accomplished within two meetings with you and once complete, our team is able to regroup and develop a recommended marketing strategy. The strategy is completely custom for your business and it’s yours to keep.
If you decide to use StraightForward to implement the strategy, our next step is to create mutually agreed upon and realistic goals to track how we’re performing on a regular basis. We also need to set up and test conversion tracking so that the proper tools are in place to measure results.
Ready to develop a winning game plan for your business? Schedule a free consultation to get the process started!
CONVERSION TRACKING
You won’t ever be in the dark on whether or not your advertising campaign with StraightForward is working. We believe on any given day you should be able to look at the scoreboard and know right away whether or not you’re winning.
At StraightForward, we believe advertising should be treated like an investment, not another line item on your expense report. So how do you know whether or not your investment in advertising is working? First of all, you need to be monitoring the right results. Clicks, impressions, likes and shares are great but if they don’t lead to real results like leads or purchases, does it really matter?
Beyond monitoring the right results, you need to have the right tools and processes in place to measure them. Google Analytics, call tracking software and integrated CRMs (customer relationship management) are all important parts of figuring out whether or not you’re making more money than you’re spending on advertising. It’s critical for these tools to be in place and tested before you spend a dime on advertising.
We understand there is a time and place for advertising campaigns with a primary goal of branding and awareness. Marketing strategies often include a combination of awareness and conversion-based tactics.
Interested in finding out what conversion tracking solutions might make the most sense for your business? Schedule a free consultation to get the process started!
CREATIVE DESIGN
This is the fun part of marketing and advertising, where we bring your brand to life! If you’re just starting out, we can help build your new business identity from scratch. If you’ve been around for a while and your brand just needs a fresh coat of paint, we can help there too.
Appearance matters, especially in the world of marketing and advertising. Your website is often the first impression many customers have with your business. Does it bring them in or do they immediately turn around by pressing the back button? What about your logo? Does it reflect your brand or did your cousin design it in 1987 using powerpoint? Then there’s ad creative. Whether it’s audio, video, print or digital, it should be unique, including a clear and memorable message which hopefully, motivates a response.
Let us know if you’d like to take the next step toward building your brand.
TRADITIONAL AND DIGITAL ADVERTISING
Time to tell the world, or at least a region of the world, all about your amazing product or service. We help plan, place, and perfect traditional, digital, social, and just about any other advertising product you can think of.
The amount of options business owners and marketers have to choose from to advertise their product or service is a really really big number. And that number gets bigger every single day. People often rush to the new shiny toys without having a true understanding of their value and purpose. Our approach is well, you guessed it, StraightForward.
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Step One: Help Potential Customers Find You.
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Step Two: Help You Find Potential Customers.
There are more than likely a considerable amount of people in the market for your product or service right now. The first step in our process is to put advertising tactics in place that help those people find you today. These are the high converting tactics like paid search, SEO, and some industry-specific directories.
Step two in our process is all about finding advertising tactics that build awareness with your target customers. We want to make sure your product or service is top of mind when they are ready to make a buying decision in the future.
Of course, your advertising budget will dictate how many tactics your plan includes. The goal will always be to produce a return on your investment so we will constantly measure results using conversion tracking tools.
SALES CONSULTING
No amount of advertising can solve for internal issues like a poorly trained sales team or outdated systems that have been in place since before the Internet was invented. If your sales team or some of your internal processes need a tuneup, we can help you diagnose problem areas and create a plan to get things moving forward.
We can help just about any business but have advanced knowledge within the moving and storage, roofing and foundation repair, and digital media industries. We work with sales teams to improve product knowledge, understand competitive advantage, and overcome common objections. We work with businesses to improve processes and systems for tracking inbound leads. We work with digital media companies specifically to significantly grow revenue by improving and/or establishing vendor partnerships, packaging and pricing existing sales opportunities, developing sales incentives to motivate performance, and more.
In short, if there’s a problem, we can more than likely solve it, either directly or through our network of experts we’ve built relationships with over the past 18+ years.