“Can we buy the results and skip the strategy and planning work?”
This has been a common statement from the small and medium-sized businesses I have talked with over the past few years.
My answer: You can if marketing results aren’t crucial to your business. But not with me, because without a strategy and plan, I’m not interested in doing work that won’t get the outcomes you desire.
In over ten years in business, the results come when we do strategy first, period.
When my clients abide, they typically see a 4x return in the first year.
I no longer provide base agency services like deliverables w/o strategy, but when we did projects without strategy first, my clients would maybe see a return the first year, then they would get frustrated (and we’d get annoyed), and they would move on.
Does this cycle of frustration sound familiar? If you’re like most other small/medium-sized businesses, it is painfully familiar.
But what is this strategy stuff I’m talking about, a lot of people and agencies talk about strategy, and it’s mostly fluff and BS.
About twelve years ago, I was the creative director of an agency working with a client on a 6 figure e-commerce website redesign. We progressed through research and UX, then met to present some concepts for the UI design. That’s when it collapsed.
During the design review, a new person showed up for the call, and they were contentious and combative with us during the presentation and discussion. After the call, the project manager and I looked at one another with “What the F just happened?” expressions on our faces.
A few seconds later, the firm’s president stomped into the room because the client called him after the presentation to fire us.
The wild part was that we did everything by the book. But the book was wrong. The new person on the call was the CEO on the client side’s wife. And she designed the site we were redesigning. And she was salty.
That’s when I dedicated myself to writing a new book on how to get the best results and do the best work by eliminating ego, whims, opinions, and BS from the process.
I set out to develop a process that would initially give me the ammunition to use the client’s words against them, so if they said, “I don’t like it…” I could reply with the information they gave me about their brand and ideal customers, effectively saying, in subtle terms, that your opinion doesn’t matter.
But I didn’t stop there.
During the experiments with my new strategy process, I realized the client side got a ton of value out of our deep dives. They got clarity, and confidence, and their teams became unified, and so did ours, on a clear common goal.
I was helping them solve one of the most stubborn problems small and medium-sized businesses face: having the confidence to ask and clarity to answer, “IS THIS WHAT IS BEST FOR THE BRAND AND OUR FUTURE CUSTOMERS?”
Are you and your team consistently making the best decisions for the brand and future customers? If you’re unsure or it’s a hard no, let’s talk.
