Marketing Ahead of the Curve

What's included in Marketing Ahead of the Curve

Intensive Review

We work with you to perform an intensive and detailed review of your challenges and goals. This is entirely different from the intelligence-gathering meetings that kick off most projects. In the Intensive Review, we're looking for ways that the decisions you make about your marketing can solve problems, support departments and efforts, and improve results throughout the company.

Marketing Plan

A strategic and tactical marketing plan sets objectives and milestones for the team, and helps maximize productivity, value, and results during the program.

Market Watch

We put ourselves where your customers are—online and in the real world. It helps us identify emerging trends and be attuned to customer needs that may be new to you. In our experience, this aspect of the program has far-reaching benefits that last long beyond the MAOTC program period.

Quarterly Convergence

These quarterly meetings include representatives of every department within your company that touches your customer. (We attend, too.)

For many of our clients, this is the first time since a company's infancy that executives, sales, R&D, production, shipping, marketing, and customer service have been together in a room to talk about their customers. It's always revelatory, and often exhilarating. It's also an extraordinarily effective way to profile the ever-changing face of customers, markets, and challenges.

To-Do List

Call it "marketing on auto-pilot." We help you identify important marketing projects that are continually postponed because there's just no time to get them done. We work with you to prioritize and budget for these projects. Then we execute them automatically and in order.

Creative Bank

We build, maintain, and distribute a bank of creative resources for your entire organization. This includes web- and print-ready photographs, product and service descriptions, and layout templates for in-house documents and presentations.

The creative bank is a more extensive, and more versatile, version of our standard Creative Asset Management services.

Strategic Evaluation

Throughout the MAOTC program, we gather our own data and evaluate data supplied by our clients. We continually compare results to expectations, test our plans against the realities of a changing market, identify new opportunities, and make recommendations that keep our clients ahead of the curve.

Case Study: Finding Hidden Profits in an Email

To say that we found hidden profits in an email is not entirely accurate. We actually found hidden profits in hundreds of emails.

Our very first MAOTC client said that they wanted help with three specific challenges:

1. They had a long-established website that regularly landed them at the top of search engine results. Yet they had so few leads from the website that they weren't sure the lead system was working.
2. They wanted more efficient ways to reach their relatively small audience of decision-makers.
3. Over the long term, they wanted to even out cash flow, to generate more income between their busy seasons. But they did not expect this to happen.

The solution to the simplest problem turned out to be the key to the others. That's because first, we looked. Second, we knew what we were looking at. Third, our client allowed us to act on what we'd learned.

To solve the leads problem, we set up the website to copy us on every lead that came through the site. It only took a few days to identify and fix the technical glitch that caused some of the leads to get dropped.

But we were reading the leads, too, and we kept reading them, for months. We tabulated all the job titles and other details. And we discovered that fully half of the inquiries came from influencers, not decision-makers. Not only that, but they asked for different products than the traditional buyers, at different times of year.

The client was aware of these leads, of course, and had responded to them. But it was conventional wisdom that since this audience never wrote checks for these products, it was a waste of time to market to them directly.

With the client's enthusiastic permission, we talked to them anyway, in a way that directly addressed the concerns and needs that the influencers had addressed in their lead forms. We refocused part of the client's website, and some of their marketing, to talk to this audience directly.

The result was gratifying to everyone.

Sales went up. Seasonal dips began to flatten out. And our client was delighted to see that he was making gains against competitors in an area that they had not yet identified.

In fact, and to our surprise, many of them still haven't identified these influencers. Which is why we're not identifying our client in this case study.

FAQs About Marketing Ahead of the Curve

How long does the program last?

Six months is the minimum. Twelve to eighteen months is about right for most companies. After that most programs can go on at a less intensive pace. Marketing Ahead Of The Curve requires a serious commitment from both agency and client. Once we sit down with you to review your goals, we'll help you determine whether the program is a good fit, and recommend how long we'll all need in order to achieve your objectives.

Can the program start at any time of year?

Yes. As long as one of the three slots is open, you can start at any time.

Who should consider this program?

Marketing Ahead of The Curve is designed for:

• Organizations that want to invest in a big leap ahead in marketing impact and growth.
• Organizations with big marketing needs, but limited in-house resources.
• Organizations launching new brands, lines, and initiatives.

If you'd like to know if you're a good fit, contact us.