📣Marketing

If you only choose one, choose this one

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Introduction

If you are even a slightly serious about making a living at, well anything, as a small company, then your really should select a marketing partner. Doing so sooner is much better than later. This can be accomplished on an indie friendly budget believe it or not, but it will require a budget.

Odds are you have little or no knowledge when it comes to marketing, or even if you do, you have little or no time you can allocate to it properly. A marketing partner can help here, either by acting as your fully outsourced marketing department or simply as experienced staff that can work at scale where you cannot.... and everything in between.

What to expect

Heathen can be contracted to provide Managed Services, this means we can help you research, select and manage professional partnerships like Marketing firms. You can of course manage this on your own.

Pricing will obviously vary from place to place, project to project and month to month so any figures given here are simply to paint a picture of the costs involved and what you might get for it.

As with any partner, engagement discovery and strategy are the first steps. Before you jump in though, look for a partner who is willing to work with you throughout your journey. This is very important, shop around and don't be afraid to say "no thanks"

Discovery

This is just that initial meeting and the result of filling out any of those "contact us forms" for any given consultant. The first contact your likely to be chatting with is a salesman first and foremost, so keep that in mind. Firms that deal with partnerships like this want your business so they are likely to say "yes" a lot even though they probably don't fully understand the question or have the skills to deliver on it if they did.

During this initial meeting you should be leading the conversation. Your objective is to "vet" the prospective partner, that means getting a feel for rather or not this company can even meet your needs. Next you need to understand if this partner can meet your budget and timeline, they will be resistant to answering this line of questioning understandably since they cant really "quote" work they haven't designed, let them know your looking for an understanding on the "order of magnitude" this will cost you in both time and money to make sure it suits your budget and project.

Strategy

Engaging a professional marketing firm up front to help you define a sound marketing strategy is a no brainer, and the single most important first step. Before you jump in though, look for a partner who is willing to work with you throughout your journey. This is a bit like marriage, you know a 3 to 5 year commitment 😂 take it seriously, shop around and don't be afraid to say "no thanks"

In our experience, this typically costs between €3,000 and €7,000 and results in a few key bits of information delivered to you.

1. Market Research Perhaps the most valuable thing to get a hold of as early in the development process as you can while still being far enough along to inform your partner of what it is exactly you plan to build. This paints a picture for you of who your typical customers are going to be, what they like, what they respond to and what they don't. This can really help you in the later phases of design and development and is key to all marketing efforts.

2. Positioning Plan A strategy or approach to position your product in the target market in such a way as to maximize your chances of obtaining your goals. It can help you understand the customer's needs, product price points, quality demands as well as competitors or cooperation opportunities. These factors will likely impact aspects of your release and post release plans.

3. Campaign Plan This is more about execution and layout goals, objectives and ways of measuring performance. This can help you work out your project budget with regards to your marketing efforts. Here is where you will dial in what and how much you will do marketing wise and what you might expect from it.

Campaigns

If this term is new to you, a campaign is simply a marketing effort. It typically involves the creation of marketing materials, sometimes called "collateral" and the execution of ads of course. It often involves the engagement of influencers, interviews and or other media (videos, news articles, etc.) depending on the specifics of your strategy.

One off, social media based marketing campaigns cost the same if not more yet basically never yield positive results. Why? Just like visual scripting doesn't make programming easier, it just removes the need to type words. DIY marketing tools don't make the professional requirements of a sound marketing strategy more layman obtainable it just reduces the technical barriers of distributing content.

The same goes for fire and forget marketing partners, you don't need help running a Twitter ad, you need a professional partner to help devise a valid strategy and execute on it.

The base price for a well ran campaign will be around €3,000 to €5,000;

that is the base e.g. the cost of engaging the marketing team to set up the chips so to speak. The price will go up from that depending on the reach you want to achieve and the length you want to run it. All of this of course should be planned for well in advance with very sound practical reasons for the decisions made in your Marketing Strategy plan.