I help businesses decide what to do before they decide what to spend. A strategy engagement gives you an honest read on where growth is actually available, which channels are worth committing to, and a roadmap your team can execute without guessing.
Strategy is the part that tends to get skipped, mostly because it is the only part that does not produce something visible in the first week.
Most businesses I speak to are not short of marketing activity. They are running ads, publishing posts, sending emails and paying for a stack of tools. What they are short of is a clear reason why each of those things is happening, and a way to tell whether any of it is working. The team is busy, output is steady, and nobody in the room can say which activity would hurt most if it stopped tomorrow.
None of that is an execution problem. You can hire a very good media buyer and still lose money if the offer, the audience and the measurement are wrong underneath them. That is the reason I start with strategy rather than with a channel: getting the direction right costs a few weeks, and getting it wrong costs quarters.
Underneath almost every stalled marketing programme I look at, the same four faults are doing the damage. They are rarely dramatic on their own, which is exactly why they survive review after review.
Everything on the list looks important, so everything gets a little attention and nothing gets enough. When priorities are not ranked, they get decided by whoever asked most recently.
Paid chases one goal, content another, email speaks in a third voice. Each looks reasonable on its own dashboard while the customer meets three versions of the same company.
Splitting a modest budget across six channels feels safe and is usually the most expensive option. Nothing gets enough investment or time to prove itself, so the data stays inconclusive.
Ask three people what a good month looks like and you get reach, leads and revenue. Without one definition, reporting becomes a negotiation and any result can be argued either way.
A plan is only worth writing if the people who have to run it can read it, argue with it and act on it without me in the room.
Strategy work here is not a deck of frameworks. It is a sequence of decisions, each one made with a reason attached, written down where anyone can check it later. That matters more than it sounds: most marketing plans fail quietly because nobody can reconstruct why a channel was chosen, so nobody can tell whether the original reasoning still holds six months on.
I also try to keep the plan smaller than you expect. A shorter list of commitments, funded properly and given enough time to produce a real signal, beats a broad plan that hedges across everything. The hard part of strategy is rarely finding another opportunity — it is deciding, out loud and in writing, which opportunities you are going to leave alone this year.
Before any channel is discussed I want to understand how you make money: what you sell, at what margin, how long the sales cycle runs, whether customers return, and what an acquired customer is worth over time. A channel that works beautifully for a subscription product can be unaffordable for a one-off high-consideration purchase. The economics decide which channels are even eligible, so they come first.
Adding a new channel is the most common recommendation in this industry and often the least useful. Businesses usually have unfinished work in what they already own: a list nobody segments, pages that rank but do not convert, tracking that quietly stopped reporting, ad accounts nobody has revisited. Fixing those is faster and cheaper than starting something new.
I would rather see two channels funded properly and given time than six kept on life support. Concentration produces clear signals: enough volume to learn from, enough consistency to judge, and enough budget for a channel to behave the way it is supposed to. Part of the deliverable is an explicit list of what we are choosing not to do, so the decision holds when something shiny appears.
Metrics chosen after a campaign runs tend to flatter whoever chose them. So the measurement plan is agreed first: which numbers matter, where each is sourced, who owns the report, how often it is reviewed, and what result would make us change course. It is a short document and it prevents most of the arguments that happen three months later.
A strategy only its author can interpret has failed. The roadmap is written against the resources you really have, not an imaginary team, and every item has an owner, a sequence position and a timeframe. If your coordinator, your developer and an external freelancer can each read it and know their next task, it has done its job.
The measurement layer underneath all of this is the same one I use on every channel: which numbers define success, and where each one is sourced, is agreed before the work starts rather than afterwards. How an engagement actually runs — cadence, access, ownership of the accounts — is set out in about.
A strategy engagement is the wrong purchase for some businesses, and it is cheaper to establish that in a first conversation than in week three.
If you already know which channel you need, skip the strategy engagement and go straight to the delivery service: SEO, performance marketing, content marketing or email marketing. Paying for a plan to confirm a decision you have already made is a poor use of the budget, and I would rather say so early.
Every engagement covers the eight components below. Depth varies with the size of the business and the number of channels already running.
The scope is confirmed in writing before we begin, so you know which of these will be examined in detail and which will be reviewed at a lighter level. A single-market business with two live channels needs a narrower audit than a group running several brands, and pretending otherwise only inflates the fee.
A full review of current activity, spend, tooling, tracking and reporting, written up as findings rather than as a list of complaints.
Where your competitors are visible, what they are claiming, how they price and position, and which gaps are genuinely open to you.
The specific places where demand exists and you are not capturing it, ranked by how much effort each one takes to reach.
A short list of channels to commit to, with the reasoning for each, plus an explicit list of what we are deliberately not doing.
What you currently say about yourself, whether it separates you from anyone else, and what the offer needs to sound like to convert.
The numbers that define success, where each one comes from, who reports it, and how often — agreed before any budget moves.
Sequenced actions with owners and timeframes, written to be executed by your team, your agency, or by me through the delivery services.
An optional monthly review cycle for as long as it is useful, so the plan gets corrected against real results instead of drifting.
Five phases, run in order. The weeks below are indicative rather than contractual.
A single-market business with two channels moves faster than a group with several brands, and I will tell you which one you are at the start rather than letting a timeline slip quietly. Whatever the pace, you will always know which phase the work is in and what comes next.
I go through what already exists before proposing anything new. Analytics and tag setup, ad accounts, search visibility, the website, the email list and its flows, social channels, past campaign records, and whatever reporting the team currently relies on. The goal is an accurate inventory of what is running, what it costs, and what can be trusted about the numbers behind it.
Next I look outward. Who else is competing for the same demand, what they are saying, where they are visible, and which parts of the market they have left uncontested. Combined with the audit, this is where the real opportunities separate themselves from the ones that only look attractive on a slide.
Decisions get made here. Which channels earn a place in the plan and which get switched off, how budget is split between them, what the messaging and positioning need to say, and which numbers we will use to judge all of it. I bring the reasoning to you rather than presenting a finished verdict, because a plan the team disagrees with quietly is a plan that dies quietly.
The plan becomes a sequence. Every recommendation is broken into tasks, ordered by dependency and impact, and assigned an owner and a timeframe. You end up with something a marketing manager, a freelancer or an agency can open on a Monday morning and act on without needing me to interpret it.
Plans meet reality and reality wins some of the arguments. Ongoing consultation is optional and usually takes the shape of a monthly review: what moved, what did not, what the numbers are actually saying, and what should change in the next cycle. Some businesses take the roadmap and never need this. Others prefer a second opinion in the room while they execute.
Indicative ranges rather than a package. Every scope is priced after the discovery conversation.
Strategy and consulting work typically sits between $2,000 and $5,000 per month, depending on the size of the business, how many channels and markets are in scope, and how much of the audit has to be reconstructed from scratch. The same work can be quoted as a fixed-price project instead of a monthly fee if that suits your finance process better.
A strategy engagement can be entirely one-off. If what you need is direction rather than an ongoing relationship, that is a complete outcome on its own: you get the audit, the analysis, the plan and the roadmap, and then you execute with your own team. There is no requirement to continue into a retainer, and nothing in the roadmap is written in a way that makes me necessary to it.
If you do want implementation afterwards, it is scoped and priced separately under the relevant delivery service, and the strategy work is not repeated or re-billed. Every figure above is indicative — the actual quote follows a conversation about scope, not a package page.
See packages and pricingStrategy decides what should happen. These are the services that make it happen — the full list is on services.
The route to take when the roadmap identifies durable search demand you are not yet capturing. Slower to compound than paid, and it keeps working after the invoice stops.
Explore SEOWhere the KPI and measurement plan gets built for real: tracking architecture, attribution and unit economics, so the numbers in the strategy can be trusted.
Explore performance marketingTurns the positioning and messaging decisions into the pages, articles and ad copy that carry them. Usually the first execution step after a roadmap.
Explore content marketingMost roadmaps end up pointing at two or three of these, never all of them at once. Email marketing is often the fastest item on the list, because the audience already exists and the work is structuring what you own rather than buying reach you do not.