Creative and Strategic Thinking

What we are: We are an experienced group of talented, creative thinkers who can conceive innovative ways to represent your company in marketing and advertising. What we are not: We are not business consultants who promise to increase shareholder valuation and equity (what does that mean anyway?). If your marketing is unsettling, your brand is broken, or you just want a fresh image, we are the partner for you. If you’re looking to dive into social media, we can help you figure out what you’re missing on your Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter pages.

What We Can Do For You

Listen

By listening to how you currently market and advertise your business, we can bounce ideas around to get you thinking about alternative approaches. We hatched an entire brand strategy for a community in a meeting with just three people – no soul-searching, no tens-of-thousands of dollars spent on discovery, just a conversation that went in the right direction with the right questioning.

Evaluate

Does upper management not support your marketing ideas? Are they too stifling? Chances are, we can loosen the corporate clutches with some well-researched stats and styles from competitors. Are your in-house designers and producers not representing the results promised in their portfolios? In short, if you think your marketing and advertising is nowhere near the “edge” that it needs to be, we can help get you there with creative and strategic thinking.

Marketing Strategy

We are not fond of this term because it’s best left to agencies with media departments (we don’t research and buy media on a large scale). However, after listening to you, we can recommend where you need to be placing your message (a message we’ll help you craft). We can break up an ad budget for you into annual or seasonal chunks so you have some structure to your spending. We once had a client tell us they spent over $25,000 a year in ad buys but had no idea if the investment was effective. We realigned the spending into an organized, strategic manner so decisions were calculated and not sporadic based on who showed up at the door wanting a piece of their marketing budget.

Brand Audit

You know what your company brand is. Upper management knows what your brand is. Customers know what your brand is. But are they all the same? If they’re not, you may be wasting ad dollars on ineffective buys. We often conduct brand audits to determine exactly what your brand is (how people perceive your company and products) and report back on how to get everybody on the same page. Remember, having a broken brand can result in missed market opportunities (and maybe a bunch of unhappy people). Example: People should do business with you just because you’re a big local community supporter. Yet, a brand audit could reveal that your prices are simply too high, or you are not positioning your products or services with the appropriate value proposition to warrant the high prices.

Copy Writing and Public Relations

Public Relations or PR, is not one of the main services we advertise, however, we are very good at it. A story we recently wrote appeared in a regional magazine resulting in the walk-in sale of a $70,000 piece of equipment. Not bad for less than a $200 investment in our services. We are effective writers who use creative and strategic thinking. Our radio and TV scripts stand out among other local and regional producers; we write books, articles, ad copy, and headlines. We even publish a bi-monthly magazine for our community. Writing is the essence of the content. Content is the essence of connecting with customers. Basically, we’re good at writing engaging content.