Corporate Structure and Strategy

Your organization’s structure can be very important to your marketing strategy, as I’m sure you know. From a very base level, an LLC is run very differently from a sole proprietorship, which is run differently from a non-profit, etc.
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As we go into our Research, Audit, and Strategy Phase for your business, it’s very important that we understand how your business is structured. If you have one umbrella company with multiple entities underneath it that might make a difference in your marketing strategy and message than if you just had one LLC.

Below are some of the different types that we have come across that have had noteworthy effects on marketing strategy:

Umbrella Corp with multiple branches under an LLC

This kind of structure can be very advantageous if you have multiple different things going on within your company; for example, we are setting up our business this way because we have fulfillment arm, a joint venture arm, and in the future, a foundation. These different parts of our organization all have very different tax structures and operations so we’ve created three different entities under one LLC.

Now what this means for marketing is that each of these branches will likely have its own marketing budget as they have their own separate financials. The joint venture arm might not spend as much on marketing as the fulfillment arm, and the foundation may not be spending anything at all. So it’s important to understand what your structure is and who’s going to pay for the marketing.

Furthermore, the marketing campaigns we run for our fulfillment arm will be different messaging than that of our foundation. For fulfillment, our target market is businesses with $1 million + in revenue. Our foundation’s target market will be other non-profits. This will mean completely different marketing strategies between the two.

Sole Proprietors and Partnerships

These types of businesses that are owned by one or two people individually are going to be marketed very differently from an LLC. In an LLC, the company owns almost everything, meaning the company pays the bills, the company signs up for different social media platforms, the company has a marketing budget, etc. But in a sole proprietorship or partnership, everything usually ties back to the individual owner.

This might mean setting up social media accounts in a different way than if you have an LLC or Corporation. This may also mean that you’ve spent a lot of your own money on marketing and so this shifts how we do the budget, rather than if an LLC was paying for the marketing.

Nonprofits

Nonprofits or 501(c)(3) entities are a completely different creature when it comes to marketing. There are so many different grants, free software programs, and other advantages when it comes to marketing, and most of the nonprofits that we’ve come across are completely unaware.

The biggest one is the Google Ad Grants program. If nonprofits qualify (and this is a lengthy process which we will guide you through), you can receive up to $10,000 a month in free ad spend. This is a huge advantage that only nonprofits have. This can save you so much money because you won’t have to pay for the ads plus a team to manage them for you; you would only have to pay approximately 15 to 20% of the ad spend for ad management, which is industry standard.

While we are not business lawyers nor experts in the area of corporate structure, we are familiar enough with different corporate strategies to know how important it is to understand them and how it ties into your marketing. If you want some more information on different structures or what different structures mean for marketing strategies, please contact us below. If there is a question that we can’t answer, we will be happy to direct you to one of our personal business coaches to help you with this.