How We Work
It Starts With Storytelling
Remember that summer night when you gathered around the campfire with a few of your closest friends and… looked at website coding?
Yeah, we don’t either.
That’s because a great story is what brings us together around the campfire. It’s what parents tell their children at bedtime. And it’s what drives us online. (Well, most of us, anyway; our SEO gurus love to admire the technical underpinnings of a great website!)
Let’s be clear: As a digital marketing agency, we love SEO, PPC, social media and the other critical components of digital marketing as much as anybody. That’s why we’ve got a ton of those experts on our team.
But we also know that if you don’t start with killer content — if we don’t feed people’s innate hunger for stories — none of that other stuff matters.
That’s why our work starts with creating and sharing awesome stories. Stories that help you genuinely connect with the prospects and customers you want to reach, from the awareness stage to decision-making and beyond. Stories that build awesome businesses.
You’ve got great stories too. Do tell.
The m3 Marketing Method
There’s a method to our awesomeness: the m3 Marketing Method. Our unique, year-long process ensures that from Day One, we’re working with you to build a digital marketing strategy that tells your company’s story — and generates stellar ROI.
Here’s how it works:
Discovery/Launch. We start by gaining a deep understanding of your business — your challenges, objectives, competitors, prospects and customers, industry, products and services. This 30-day deep dive requires hundreds of hours of time from our team members, but only about 10 to 30 hours of your time for interviews, reviews and approvals.
m360 Marketing Map. At the end of the 30-day Discovery/Launch period, you’ll get your m360 Marketing Map, a detailed, actionable digital marketing strategy. This roadmap to success includes everything we’ll need to help you reach your goals, including:
- High-level marketing objectives
- Differentiators
- Buyer personas
- Baselines and measurable goals (KPIs)
- Influencers to target
- Competitor analysis
- SEO audit and recommendations
- Keyword portfolio
- Strategic social media recommendations
Foundation Building. With the digital marketing plan in place, we’ll prepare for the journey ahead by addressing any foundational issues you may have with SEO, social media or your website. Examples include adding calls to action (CTAs) to key web pages and fixing any technical issues (missing H1 tags, navigation problems, etc.) to ensure that your site can be a high-ranking, lead-generating machine.
This is also when we can start helping with critical sales enablement services, including lead definitions, sequencing, email templates, sales process improvement and more. These services — all of which are led by a veteran sales leader with extensive experience in the field — help bridge the sales/marketing gap that exists in so many companies and allow us to more effectively increase your ROI.
Depending on what state everything’s in, this period can take anywhere from 30 to 60 days.
Monthly sprints. At this point, we’ll go live with your digital marketing program — yep, this is where things get really exciting!
Here’s how it works: For each upcoming month, we’ll propose a month’s worth of activities — a “sprint” that gets us moving quickly while still tying into the overarching quarterly and yearly strategies. We craft each month’s proposed activities from three inputs: our analysis of the monthly performance report; your input during our monthly call; and our recommendations, which we gather during an internal get-together of key team members.
Once we get your approval of the proposed activities, we get started — it’s time to unleash awesome!
Monthly reports. We’ll have regular meetings with your team to review the previous month’s marketing data; to provide our insights and suggestions; and to discuss ways to further improve your program’s results. What’s more, you’ll get access to an online, real-time dashboard where you can check in anytime to view the status of our work together.
Ongoing tactical refinements. As part of the ongoing monthly, quarterly and annual cycles, we’ll regularly analyze the data to continually refine your program, ensuring that we’re maintaining momentum or adjusting course as needed.
Annual m360 Marketing Map updates. Given that it’s the backbone of your digital marketing program’s strategy, we’ll evaluate and refresh your m360 Marketing Map with you at least once a year. After all, your marketing plan should evolve and grow just like your business does.
digital Marketing Tools
We gather analytics for our clients’ programs using a host of digital marketing tools, including Semrush, Ahrefs and the powerful HubSpot platform, the last of which provides closed-loop reporting at the individual contact level (e.g., John Doe from Awesome Widgets visited the site today, read two blog posts and checked out the Pricing page).
Don’t worry about the complexity of these marketing tools; we’ll handle the heavy lifting of integrating and maintaining them. We’ll also take care of the required workflows, list segmentation, on-page SEO monitoring and everything else involved in keeping things running smoothly.
HubSpot Partner Agency
As a HubSpot Partner Agency, we’ve got extensive training and certification on the HubSpot platform. That means you can be sure your marketing strategy will be expertly executed with the latest trends and best practices.
