Strategy & consulting
Deciding what to spend on
Most marketing problems are not execution problems. They are decisions that were never properly made — which market to go after, whether the money belongs in ads or organic, what the brand actually sounds like, and which of the assets you already own are worth more than you think. This is the engagement for making those decisions.
Which one you need
How this differs from the audit
The audit diagnoses. It examines a website, establishes what is wrong with it, and says what that is costing you. It answers a question about your site.
Strategy decides direction. What you market, who you market it to, where the budget goes, and what the campaign should be. It answers a question about your business, and the website is only one of the things it looks at.
The two work well in sequence — a diagnosis makes for better decisions — but neither requires the other. If you already know your site is fine and the problem is that nobody has decided what the marketing is for, start here.
And if you already know your site has a specific technical fault and you want it fixed, this is not what you need. Buy the technical work instead.
Substance
What it covers
Channel and budget allocation
Paid, organic, social, content, email. Where the money goes, how the split should change, and which channels are worth leaving alone entirely.
Market priority
Which market, which segment, which one first. Most businesses spread themselves across more than they can serve well.
Brand and voice
What you sound like and why that has commercial consequences rather than aesthetic ones.
Campaign direction
What the campaign actually is — the idea and the argument, not just the schedule for running it.
Asset assessment
What you already own that is underused. Existing content, an email list nobody mails, a location page that ranks by accident.
Operations and delivery
How the work gets organised so the plan survives contact with a real team. Sixteen years in SEO and digital marketing, nearly nine of them running four teams and up to eight concurrent projects at an agency. A strategy nobody can execute is not a strategy.
Deliverable
What you get
A written set of recommendations, scoped to what the business actually needs. Usually that includes:
Channel plan
Where the effort goes, and why
Budget split
How the money divides, and what it buys
Campaign brief
Specific enough to hand to whoever executes it
Timeline
Sequence, dependencies, and what has to happen first
Operational recommendations
How the work should be organised to be deliverable
Specific enough to act on without me. If you take it to another agency or an in-house team, it should still work.
Engagement
How it works
Every engagement starts with a scoping call, because no two businesses need the same thing and I would rather find that out before quoting than after.
From there it runs through review, working sessions and a written set of recommendations. How long that takes depends on the size of the business and the breadth of the question — a single-market channel decision is not the same job as rebuilding how a multi-location business goes to market.
Scope and price are quoted per engagement after the scoping call. There is no package, because a package would mean selling everyone the same thing regardless of what they need.
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