Established brands and startups need a fully customized marketing strategy.
The main goal of our strategic planning process is to ask questions that help us understand your company’s unique selling proposition. We use this information to guide our discussion and to create a customized marketing strategy that focuses on the things that make your company better than your competitors.
Next we evaluate the amount of resources you have available to ensure that we create a plan of action that fits within your budget. Once we have a budget, which includes time, talent and money, we help you set realistic goals. We also ask questions to understand the results of your past marketing activity.
Then we begin to formulate a plan of action to reach your goals. We can help you introduce new products, increase average basket size, increase conversions, cross merchandise, gain more leads and improve brand awareness. We use analytics to ensure that you get the best possible ROI on your investment in marketing.
Cyberlation offers new thinking on emerging technologies. We have the intellectual firepower to research, analyze, and refine business models and ideas. We’re eager to learn from you and to help you create a winning road-map for your digital future.
Finding New Marketing Opportunities
Digital transformation – and with it, digital disruption – is coming to practically every industry. Fundamentally, we’re optimists who believe that this transformation creates limitless marketing opportunities. But we know that committing to digital transformation, while still executing flawlessly on today’s business model, is an imposing challenge for any business.
Not all marketing opportunities are created equal. You may have opportunities to improve your existing business model incrementally (or make a leap) by executing better. You may have the chance to extend new products or services to your customers, or bring your existing offering to new markets.
But what we really love is the opportunity to shape new, digitally-enabled businesses. For some businesses, that may mean new forms of digital governance that align the business’s strategic objectives across departments and disciplines. For others, it may mean newer, more flexible technologies and processes, or a larger role for data. Still others may be creating business models that don’t exist today. That kind of exploration is what excites us the most.
Our Strategic Approach
In tackling these kinds of big questions, it’s good to get a new, outside perspective. It can help to have a partner who isn’t caught up in the day-to-day – who can ask the simple questions, and add a dose of imaginative thinking.
Why should that partner be us? One reason is that the future is in digital marketing, and digital marketing is all we do. We build and promote digital marketing experiences of all kinds, and customer experience is the number one competitive differentiator brands will have in the future – if it isn’t already.
Our strategic planning team and creative visionaries are ready to be the mental muscle behind your marketing efforts, providing deep research and analysis. And because we have a team of doers as well as thinkers – the UX experts, designers, copywriters and developers who build things – we’re thinkers with a strong bias for action.
Finally, we have the humility to understand we don’t know everything, and the collaborative processes in place to get the best out of your team as well as ours. We’re always excited to learn from your team and make our work a conversation all the way through.
How We Engage
Building a marketing strategy is a dynamic process. That’s because the deliverable depends on you – what you want to achieve and need in order to reach your goal. Ultimately, in any consulting engagement we’re guiding the client to a solution that works for them, which we can do in a number of ways.
For example, our main deliverable might be based around collaboration. We might conduct an innovation workshop that brings together our team and yours, gathering ideas, narrowing possibilities and perhaps building out a Business Model Canvas together.
Our deliverable might be based around research – we maintain formidable in-house research capabilities through our Advisory team, and our digital auditing capabilities can explore the market, target audiences, and business landscape of a potential new or digitally transformed business. If we think that deeper, in-depth market research might be needed to really test the waters for digital transformation, we can and will recommend a partner for that kind of work.
Finally, the deliverable might be based around advice – creating a road-map or laying out the options for business transformation. We might conduct research around the need for the transformed business, explore whether it’s viable, and help you understand what the business could or should be. This kind of work gets to the heart of what we do – ultimately, it’s about expanding what’s possible.
If you want different ideas, you need to be willing to do things differently. That’s exactly what a Marketing Strategy Workshop can offer you.
New or old, large or small, any business looking for reinvention faces a paradox. To find new ideas that stand a chance of transforming what you do, you need the expertise of your team. But the day-to-day effort that goes into running or starting a business can be the very thing that makes it hard to see new ways of doing things.
What you need is a way to shake ideas loose – which is where we come in. Marketing Strategy Workshops are a structured process which combines your talent with our open-minded facilitation. Together, we can find truly creative solutions to existing problems, and uncover entirely new opportunities.
A Marketing Strategy Workshops represent a great way to combine our brains with yours – merging new insights with experience, generating new ideas, and starting the process of getting those ideas implementation-ready.
What to Expect
Committing to an Marketing Strategy Workshop requires a cross-section of your team – or potentially your whole team – to give up a chunk of their time. We don’t take that time and collective effort lightly, and we prepare accordingly.
The first thing we want to clarify is the problem we’re solving, and what counts as a good solution to that problem – clarity here helps guide the development, refining, and nurturing of the ideas we generate. We can also help you decide which team members might be valuable, or needed, for a great workshop – we want the right expertise in the room to ensure ideas get properly evaluated, plus a diversity of expertise and thinking styles.
At the outset of the workshop, it’s important to frame the problems and opportunities we’re examining for the whole group, so we’re all tackling the same challenges, defined the same way. And then it’s time for ideas: the more ideas there are, and the weirder they get, the better we like it – and we have plenty of ways to nudge people out of old ways of thinking and into new approaches.
Next, we start taking the best ideas (again, we’ve already done the work to define “best”) and it’s time to start refining them. What’s the case for implementing the idea, and what would it actually take to do? Once we’ve started answering these questions, groups are ready to share and pitch what they’ve created and learned.
From Ideas to Innovation
One of the ways Cyberlation offers value is that we’re not just an ideas partner, we’re an innovation partner. Building and promoting is what we do, so there’s an inbuilt cultural bias towards the belief that once we have an idea, we’re going to do something about it – and the sooner the better.
So when you generate a lot of great ideas, we don’t forget the ultimate goal of any innovation-driven process is to actually innovate.
Fortunately, we have a structured process for making that happen. The first step is grouping related ideas and prioritizing them across two measures: value to the organization, and the organization’s readiness to complete. We aim to identify high-value, high-readiness projects.
Once we really understand which ideas and initiatives are going to move the needle, we can start defining what a minimum viable product for that initiative would look like and what it would take to build. Once we understand that, we’re into the business of project management: cost estimates, dependencies, and budget and resource constraints.
This all sounds very simple. But there’s a reason why change initiatives often generate many ideas but few outcomes. The chasm between ideas and implementation can be a daunting one to leap, which is why experience building digital marketing platforms and products counts for so much – it’s how our team’s skills can help you make the most of your own team’s ideas.
Ultimately, all marketing audits should answer one simple question: what’s really going on here?
Perhaps it’s an unexplained decline in sales, leads, or traffic. Or a need to understand the landscape before launching a new business, or expanding an old one. Whatever the reason, someone calls for a marketing audit to get to the heart of what’s happening.
It’s hard to get excited by an audit – even the word brings to mind accountants with green eyeshades, unearthing every last mistake. And an audit can easily become a dead end: a document that lives in a drawer or a long list of problems divorced from solutions.
At Cyberlation, we’re part of the weird minority that gets excited by a marketing audit. That’s because we understand the full scope of the possibilities they offer. In an audit, we can join the dots, grasp the situation, and – most important – start helping you prioritize and fix problems or exploit the opportunities we reveal.
Our strategic planning team combines intellectual heft and digital chops, so we have smart, relevant points of view, and the ability to get up to speed on a business fast. We’re flexible enough to work with careful deliberation or great urgency. And we don’t believe in paralysis by analysis, so our goal is always to produce insights and recommendations that leave you primed for action.
Exploring the Ecosystem
Because we have our own in-house strategy, production, and delivery capabilities, we can audit any aspect of your current digital ecosystem, be it a website, an app, your digital marketing, or all of them together.
We take a discipline-by-discipline approach to examining your efforts, with multiple expert teams weighing in. You might have UX designers looking at your site’s ease of use, SEO specialists looking at your on-site optimization, developers checking your code, or paid media specialists looking at your AdWords, depending on what your audit requires.
When we compile what we learn, we contextualize it for you and explain our findings with as much confidence as the data can justify. We report back to you in depth, prioritizing the issues that we find by business importance and resolution effort, so that you can tell the difference between mission-critical issues and minor fixes. And because our experts have already looked over everything, we have a head start on anything you’d like us to resolve for you.
Looking out at the Landscape
Many startups are just starting to work out who their competitors are, partly because their competitor list is in flux along with their own business model. More established businesses tend to know who their competitors are and keep a close watch on them (closer than feels healthy, some of the time).
But regardless of how far your business has developed, the fact you’re immersed in the landscape can sometime make it harder to see the landscape. Beyond what’s new – emerging competitors, new marketing tactics, evolving audiences – are the big, macro trends, the long-term shifts that you can sense in your day-to-day work more clearly than you can see them.
When we turn beyond your own channels and turn our gaze to the wider landscape, these are the kinds of issues we look to tackle. Our strategic planning team is stacked with formidable researchers, with the ability to bring new perspectives while quickly and obsessively absorbing what they need to know about the industry you’re in.
Our team can tell you what’s standard practice, what’s best in class, and what’s changing in the business models, branding, and marketing of your industry. But even importantly, they can reach into the information to extract the insights that show risks and opportunities – giving you a head start in preparing for what’s next.
