Through our fractional model, we help businesses stand up marketing earlier, and integrate it into the organization better.
Our roots in consumer strategy lead us — not just in finding opportunities for growth, but also in standing up marketing to reap them alongside other departments.
Get to know your needs, through your people.
Step 1:
You may know exactly what your business needs — a first marketing lead, a new specialty, an intro to consumers — or you may still be feeling it out. Either way, we want to learn more about it, from you directly.
In particular, we’re attentive to who you’re selling to, and how marketing connects to your other teams. We keep a dogged curiosity about what your consumer needs, and how the whole organization can offer it to them, simply because these tend to be where marketing can drive lasting growth & strong partnerships.
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As you'd suspect, this starts best as a conversation. No document is better than a human at diving into priorities, or at giving a read on people. The best orientation is hearing your point of view, and those of the team leaders around you..
From there, we try to get our eyes on anything we can read — audience details, performance metrics, even customer reviews — and to get our asses into seats across from anyone that we can learn from. We’re good at drinking from firehoses, and there’s no such thing as oversharing. Along the way, we summarize patterns we observe, including our “known unknowns”, and prepare to start taking action together.
Step 2:
Develop a “growth map”.
Once we know your needs, teams, and consumers, we can start to be a true partner & a real driver of development.
The touchstone we use to work together is a “growth map”, diagramming the shape that marketing can take in your organization. This visual guide helps us work with clients clearly & fluidly to steer marketing’s impact – offering detailed area-by-area plans (for when founders need to lean in), as well as high-level views on progress & impact (for when they need to focus their time elsewhere).
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The output of this process is highly visual, laying out our thinking in a small number of slides & diagrams. We use these to describe the the full ideal state of marketing in an organization – opportunities that exist with consumers, how they provide tailwind to current marketing efforts, and how everything connect to build a brand & power efforts across teams. We take pride in describing all this in a way that's easy for founders to digest & track over time, and that's practical to execute.
We also use this map directly with teams who we look to empower. Simply put, partner teams need visibility & input in order to 'buy in' on how our plans and processes can meet & fuel theirs. We actively seek this type of collaboration, and use this map within that to ensure a marketing structure that is valuable for everyone.
Step 3:
Pull from our toolbelt to start digging
Strategy isn’t just an academic exercise — we get our hands into the dirt. After all partners are informed & onboard, we actually put the consumer strategy into practice, using our full set of specialties from marketing communications & beyond.
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Defining your company's defining features & critical markets, in a way that consumers and/or team members can understand & act on.
Company purpose
Brand development
Audience segmentation
Consumer research
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Building the constellation of messages & media to surround your brand's "north star". Marketing is much more effective when it can say the right things, at the right times, to the right people.
Full-brand media & communications ecosystems
Go-to-market planning
Creative strategy & briefing
Tentpole campaign planning
Social & digital strategy
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Marketing can't sell what your products, services, and features don't offer. When consumers show a need (or a desire!) for extensions to your existing offerings, we recognize this, and partner with product teams to lay out what a company can do to successfully engage them.
Product design frameworks
Feature development
Product suite roadmapping
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Planning your online presence to facilitate sales, and to communicate your brand & product best.
Website
Social content strategy
SEO & SEM
N.B. We can also build the actual digital sites etc. via these plans, using specialists in our network.
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Designing evergreen programs that generate consistent joy & value for your audiences.
CSR initiatives
Loyalty programs
Targeted outreach (e.g. campus programs)
Customer service principles
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Across any of these disciplines, it's key that your existing teams & people can also begin to develop capability with these tools. Where applicable, we care greatly about growing the capabilities of our partners, particularly with junior talent.
Department leadership
Partner workshops
Team upskilling
…And, for creative needs that come from any of this work, we can tap our network’s many other talents (as listed here).
Our Principles in Action
The devil is, of course, in the details. The basic approach above helps us ground our philosophy in action — but, the most central ingredient is the context of your business, and the specific strategic disciplines it needs from us. As such, beyond the basics, our work is bespoke above all.
That said, no matter how we put pen to paper, it doesn’t change how we show up face-to-face. As a partner, you’ll get our mindset, our curiosity, and our values from day one, however they end up reaching the page.
If you’d like additional specifics or examples, please don’t hesitate to reach out for more detail!
Coming at public launch:
Read more of the specifics…
…on our LinkedIn for how we practically apply this.
…on our IG for the farming principles that inspire us.
