At Grid, our goal is to provide you with the best marketing strategy tailored to your specific industry and business goals. There is no one case fits all for a marketing strategy. Our approach to making recommendations for your situation will always begin with assessing any previous or current marketing efforts, helping you define specific business goals, and then assembling a plan to help you reach them, all while keeping in mind your budget and timelines.
With that being said, we think it is important to provide you some general ideas of pricing for some of the most common packages of work that we provide. The below packages make certain assumptions about your business and available resources, and may not accurately reflect the final scope of work (and thus, price) that we recommend to you, based on our above mentioned discussion. However, we encourage you to use these packages as jumping off points for determining where your budget may be used most effectively.
New Branding or Revamp
One of the keys to your business’ future success is to establish consistent, professional branding that conveys a clear message to your potential clients. Your branding should reflect your capabilities, inspire confidence and credibility, and be recognizable by and memorable to your target demographics. Branding is not just another term for your logo - your logo is part of your overall branding, which also includes things like typography style for various applications, color palette, photography style, tone of the language you use in your marketing efforts, and much more, depending on your specific business.
We begin our work by doing market research into your current brand (if one is being used), local and national competitor brands, and any brands that resonate with your target demographic. Using this information, we put together a set of 3-5 buyer personas, which represent the categories of your ideal clients. We highlight things such as their age, family makeup, household income, interests, brand affiliations and communication preferences. We clearly outline what your marketing efforts need to do in order to reach these buyers.
Using the information above, we go back and forth with you to determine a new logo that will represent your business, keeping in mind the demographics you are trying to appeal to. We also provide you with versions of your logo that can be used in different types of situations, such as full color, greyscale, mono, or when used in very small applications, again, to ensure consistency with your overall brand.
Lastly, we compile all of this information into one overarching style guide, which can be used by you or any agency in the future to help guide design and marketing decisions. A comprehensive style guide is a must-have for any business!
Brochureware websites are the quickest and most budget friendly way to get a clean, professional website up and running. We will work with you to find a website design template that best suits your brand, and the type of content that will be on your new website. We will make any tweaks to the template to really make it yours, including changing colors to match your logo, moving around blocks of content, or removing unnecessary or adding needed features.
We then integrate this template with the popular WordPress content management system, which is a free (but powerful!) platform that enables you to make easy and quick updates to your website. Since WordPress is so widely used, you will also have the benefit of an extensive third party plugin network, which allows us to use free or low cost plugins to add functionality to your website without requiring custom development.
Once your WordPress instance is set up, the modified template is integrated, and we’ve installed and set up all necessary plugins, we will input all of your content so that your website is ready to launch as soon as possible. Once launched, we provide unlimited training on how to perform any updates or changes you may want to make to your content moving forward.
After launch, we include six months of our support to make unlimited software updates to your instance of WordPress or each individual plugin, as they become available. This ensures that every update is cross compatible with the various features on your website, and that your website remains as secure as possible.
Making the decision to sell your product online can be a very rewarding decision for your business. But it’s very important that you approach your new eCommerce website with a complete understanding of how eCommerce works, what makes it different than a brick and mortar retail shop, what experiences online shoppers want (and do NOT want) to have, your responsibilities for handling financial information in an online environment, and how the eCommerce portion of your business will align with any other sales channels, such as a retail store or sales team.
We begin your eCommerce website by examining other local and national competitors to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses in their online experiences. If you have buyer personas available, we also assess the brands that your buyers associate with, to better understand their specific expectations and desired aesthetics. Using this information, and our experience from designing other online shops, we will create a custom and unique website design that focuses on highlighting your products in the best manner for your target demographics. We also pay particular attention to creating responsive breakpoints to allow content o be presented uniquely on mobile versus desktop browsers.
Your website design will then be integrated with a carefully chosen content management system that is selected based on the unique nature of your business processes, types of products, and needs. We use modern, accessible, standards-compliant website markup and coding best practices, which is critical to avoiding poor performance, ensuring readability by search engines, and making sure that your website is cross browser and cross platform compatible.
Our team will input all of your website content and products so that your website is ready to launch as soon as possible. Once launched, we provide unlimited training on how to perform any updates or changes you may want to make to your content or products moving forward.
Outside of the direct website design and development, we will work extensively with you to understand and define a number of specific business processes related to eCommerce, such as shipping options and pricing, fulfillment processes (including warehousing and drop shipping), credit card processing options and costs, information security, and online specific customer service.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the general term given to the process of improving the organic display ranking of a website for specific terms on one or more search engine platforms. All major search engines, including Google, Bing and Yahoo, use their own specific, secret algorithm that is used to try to provide the best results for every users search query. SEO works to improve Google, Bing or Yahoo’s understanding of the purpose and content of your website, and improve your websites credibility with each engine so they are more likely to show your website higher in a list of search results than another website. Improving overall SEO is a long-term strategy that requires ongoing review and adjustments, especially as your business goals or objectives change in reaction to industry trends.
We begin this work by analyzing the current state of the website, including the content management system being used to manage the website, the settings within that system that may impact SEO, any plugins and their level of optimization and ongoing development, the design of the website (whether custom or a template), image optimization and file naming, the informational architecture that forms the structure of your content (such as the hierarchy of pages or posts), the actual content of the website including terminology and phrases being used, cross-linking, optimization and hosting location of all development code, page load speed and server response time, use of browser cacheing and redirects, and the responsiveness of the design and development for improved experiences on mobile devices. Each of these areas plays a role in the overall SEO performance of your website, and only by making sure each of these areas is functioning at optimal level can you judge any further SEO efforts. From this review, we will compile a detailed list of problem areas, in their order of importance, and our recommended solutions.
Next, we will set up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool accounts to collect information like what search queries people have used to find the website, what the average rank positions are for each query, and which queries are providing the most effective click through rate. Although these tools will give you a good indication of your performance for a variety of organic search results, the outcome of making any changes to your overall SEO can take as long as 4-6 months to show any outcome in your rankings. For more immediate feedback on the changes to your website, and to see a marked increase in the amount of pre-qualified traffic to your website, we will create a Google Adwords campaign to see how your keyword choices stack up to your competition in a much shortened time frame - as quickly as 2 to 4 days later. This will include a tiered set of daily budget recommendations and their expected outcome, a list of positive or negative keywords that should be included in the campaign, ad creation and full implementation.
For the next six month, we will send you monthly analytics of how your website is performing, as well as perform our own ongoing review and adjustments based on the data we are seeing. These reviews allow us to identify what SEO changes have been successful or which need continued improvement based on your business goals.
Review Available Analytics
Analyze Website Design and Development
Setup Google Analytics and Webmaster Tool Accounts
You may have the best website in town, but if you aren’t driving traffic to it it’s a wasted marketing opportunity. Thankfully, there are a number of ways to drive pre-qualified traffic to your website. Using platforms such as Google AdWords and Facebook, we can help you create website traffic campaigns that are targeted at your specific demographics, and encourage interaction on, and contact through, your website.
We begin by working with you to define the target demographics for your website, down to such detail as gender, age, income, marital status, geographic and even personal interests. This ensures that you drive traffic to your website that is most likely likely to be interested in the products or services you offer. We then create and setup a Google AdWords campaign and a Facebook ad campaign that are targeted towards these demographics, using terminology and calls to action that they are most likely to respond to.
As your campaigns run, we send you monthly analytics of how each campaign is performing, as well as perform six months of our own ongoing review and adjustments based on their performance. These reviews allow us to identify trends, demographic shifts, and user flows through the website, to make sure your website is as effective as possible.
First impressions can make or break your brand, and you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. With our positioning package, we aim to set your marketing off on the correct foot, right from the start. We begin by researching other businesses in your industry, including what makes them successful and their marketing strategies, and what current trends are impacting your industry on a local and national level. We also research your target demographics, building a framework to understand what motivates them to purchase, their communication preferences, and what messaging they expect to receive. This real, factual information will form the corner storm to successfully positioning your company in your industry, as well as shape your future marketing efforts.
The next step is to build buyer personas of your target demographics. These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer(s), based on the market research and real data about any existing customers. These become an avatar of who your perfect customer is, including things like how they live their daily lives, what they value, what motivates them to make a purchase, and what they aspire to. The most successful marketing plans use the buyer persona as the foundation for every facet of branding and the marketing plan, including tone, messaging, placement and methods.
At the completion of this work, we will present you all relevant findings, highlighting important facts and figures, out analysis of the findings, and what it all means for your business. This is all presented in clear, specific terms as to why the data matters to your business, what it means for addressing a specific market sector, and how best to get the most appropriate messaging in front of your target consumers.
We then work with you to build a comprehensive business launch plan, which might include efforts such as a focused public relations or social media campaign, a grand opening event, giveaway(s), direct mail campaigns, branded apparel, etc. This plan will include a detailed timeline and projected costs, including Grid creative time and any third party costs (such as printing, permits, etc).
An effective launch, however, is just the beginning of a successful marketing timeline. To ensure that your business is meeting or exceeding your expectations, we will put together a year long marketing plan that focuses on consistent, steady outreach to both current and potential customers.
Social media has quickly become one of the most important and influential types of online marketing that you can engage in. But it’s not enough to just BE on social media. As with any marketing, you need to have a clearly defined purpose and strategy, and you have to be engaging with your followers consistently and professionally.
Our work with you begins by helping brainstorm relevant and memorable handles to be used across your different accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram (as needed and appropriate for your business). We register these handles, add appropriate profile and cover photos, and get all of your settings arranged just right for your needs, including things like automated reports and privacy settings.
Next, we research other businesses in your industry to evaluate how they are using social media, and what types of content are proving to be successful. From this information, our previous social media experience, and your overall marketing strategy, we put together a detailed 6 month content calendar which outlines your posting schedule, what the topic of each post should be, and what the distribution between top of mind and sales posts should be. This calendar takes many things into consideration, including your busy or shoulder seasons, relevant holidays, local events, pop culture happenings, and more. This calendar will serve as your roadmap, so your entire social media presence is on brand, lively, unified on message, and meeting your business goals.
From here, you can consider your social media on auto pilot! We post to all of your accounts, following your content calendar, up to three times a week with unique graphics, interesting articles, questions aimed at promoting engagement, and more. We interact with your followers in a timely manner, responding to their comments or questions as they are posted. Our ongoing work frees you up to focus on your own business, while still knowing your social media is being carefully monitored and nurtured.
Research Handles
Register Accounts, Create Profile Graphics, Set Privacy Settings