Why Do You Need a Consultation?

At the heart of every successful marketing campaign is a sound plan that helped set it all in motion. In today’s saturated digital marketing landscape, it is critical to set yourself up for success with a calculated approach to your marketing schemes. Before you can understand where your customers are and how to hook them, we need to dial in your voice, aspirations, and identity as a company.

This is why we take our initial consultations so seriously – our Research, Audit, and Strategy phase of your marketing helps us formulate the perfect plan and execute it with razor-sharp efficiency. We achieve this by taking a deep dive into the soul of your business by performing research on you and your competitors, your business decisions, organizational structure, branding, long-term goals, and more.

Our deep technical backgrounds and years of experience have given us the ability to keep our clients informed on this process in a way they can easily understand and contribute to. Most of the time, our clients end up with a more complete vision for their company and how they can utilize a tailored, full-spectrum marketing plan to bring it to life.

There is a reason that our retention rate is over 90% – our methods are smarter!

Why Should I Worry About the Consultation?

Your marketing is vital to your business’ success, and in order to execute it properly, you need to connect with your marketing team. This is why handling the consultation properly can be the difference between pinpointed campaigns and cluttered nonsense.

The reason for this is simple – when two teams communicate effectively and align their goals, great things can happen. Consulting is meant for learning, diagnosing, data collection, and implementation. It is a process that requires the know-how of a professional and experienced team. Don’t settle for cookie-cutter marketing plans, your business deserves a strategy that brings out the best of your brand.

Bolt Goodly Digital Marketing: Through years of trial and error in the digital marketing field working with a variety of different clients, we have developed a proven system that consists of 3 different steps. From the consult to the execution, we’re here to build you a solid foundation that can work for you long into the future. This plan consists of:

Research

In order to paint the best picture of your company we need to not only know your brand inside and out, but we need to learn about your competition just as deeply. We assess the current state of your business and factor in the industry trends surrounding your niche to help us make an impact.

The research we perform lasts throughout the entire process. Early on, our research will deal with overarching company goals as well as industry and competitor research. After we have met and gotten a feel for who you are and what you are all about, we take a deep dive into everything about your brand including:

• Industry research utilizing NAICS data and other industry trade secrets
• Competitor research
• Your internal business strategy:
• Do you have a mission, vision, values?
• What are your business objectives?
• Do you have clear brand positioning in the www?
• Are your internal business systems sound?
• SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis
• Business forecasting
• Financial planning
• Organizational behavior – what does the culture look like?
• Corporate structure, long-term strategy, exit plans, and investments

After we have a thorough report of the overall status of your business, we move into the audit phase where we are taking an inventory of all things that may affect a marketing strategy.

Audit

Brand Identity Audit

Your identity as a brand is what will set you apart from the competition and is what will give you that deeper connection with your audience that is so crucial. Our deep dive into your brand’s core involves reviewing your logos, copy, manifesto, and other factors that make up your company’s core. The point of this process is to help ensure all of these pieces fit together perfectly and will help leave a lasting impression on everyone who is exposed to it.

We also do a technical brand audit, in that we thoroughly review your website, all of your social media accounts, and any other public-facing accounts we can find on the internet to ensure there is continuity across all channels. Here we are looking for:

• The same contact information
• Correct logos
• Correct colors
• Correct fonts
• Optimized accounts (i.e. even if the logo and colors are correct, are they the right size? The right style for that specific element? Profile picture vs. background)
• Does your content across these mediums tell the same story in the same voice?

Website, SEO, and Technical Audit

After we have developed a clear idea of your brand, it is time to audit your website and SEO. Here we are really focusing on content and keywords, basically, anything that will help determine organic traffic ends up on your site. We will dig into various reports that will tell us if you have rich enough content on your web pages, if your keywords show up enough times, if your sitemap is correctly structured, and if your sitemap is submitted.

This then transitions right into the technical audit of your website. This is the stuff that most amateurs or “weekend web developers” miss, mainly because they don’t know about it. We’ve been working in the field collectively for over 30 years, so we have developed best practices and tools that we know from experience will help your site run better. Here we look at site speed, hosting, SSL certification, PHP settings, plugins, updates, tracking codes for various 3rd party platforms, media SEO (alt -text, image smushing, etc.), and more.

The technical audit is something we pride ourselves in and while it can be a long list of seemingly tedious details, it’s these small details cared for on a consistent, ongoing basis that truly makes for successful technical SEO.

Marketing Campaign Audit

Now we dive into the real fun stuff – all of your online activity. Have you been running email campaigns? How about generating consistent, on-brand content? Are you running any paid ad campaigns? Are you gathering data on your website traffic and marketing campaigns? We ask all of these questions and more to really know where you stand and how much you are getting out of your marketing. Everything from social media to the plugins your website utilizes will be covered. This audit is truly extensive, but it depends on what you have active already. Here are some examples of data we will pull in regards to social media:

• Average Posts Monthly
• Brand Consistency
• Social Reach
• User Engagement
• Relevant 3rd Party Content
• User interaction Score
• Conversions from posts

Strategy

Once we’ve run a full audit of all things marketing for your brand, we now have some really solid data and information from which to formulate a marketing strategy. This is really the final piece of the consultation. Armed with information about your brand voice, core, identity, marketing, and more, we can now offer you educated suggestions on where to take your advertising strategies based on what we learned. Can you see right away the value in this versus us just throwing a content package at you?

We wrap this entire report up for you in a brand document with a full strategy at the end on how we’d recommend that you proceed. You are then welcome to shop these recommendations around, sign an additional contract with us to implement the work, or just hold on to it for some internal strategy work.

NEVER Underestimate the Consult

At the end of the day, it’s all about sharpening the saw. Before we can execute an incredible marketing campaign, we need to fully understand what your brand is and the best type of marketing strategies to expose and capitalize on your greatest qualities.

This is why we take the time to really understand what you are all about. This consultative approach ensures the viability of the campaign and creates a synergy between your business and Bolt Goodly.

When you retain us to consult on your business, you get a team of unbiased, seasoned digital marketers looking at your business and digital footprint with a fine-tooth comb in search of any and all ways to add value to your marketing efforts. We can uncover hidden value not visible on the surface, giving you a fresh perspective you may never have seen coming.

In addition, our consult allows us to establish a baseline of where your business stands from where we can measure all of the progress from. This will allow us to scrutinize all of the decisions and consequent results of the campaigns we launch and determine what was successful and what needs improving.