Business marketing: Tell your story
Investing in your marketing and communications is an investment in your future
A marketing strategy aligns your customers, messages, and services
Marketing Strategy
We understand the challenges of running a business. We get how energizing yet exhausting it can be and how it feels like you’re taking two steps forward only to take one step back.
If only more people knew your story …
Mackenzie Walters
We get it because we’ve lived it. When you work with StoryStruck Marketing, you’ll work with Mackenzie Walters, a national award-winning journalist who owns and runs her own company.
Mackenzie’s experience working in a corporate environment as a journalist and partnering with different small and midsized businesses in the Des Moines, Iowa, area allows her to understand the unique challenges you face as a business owner and leader.
Why create a marketing strategy?
When you invest in your marketing strategy, you invest in your organization’s future — your ability to attract customers, make business connections, or grow through acquisitions. By investing in a marketing strategy, you’ll understand what is working, what isn’t, and what you can do to see results.
Our business clients say that our marketing strategy service creates:
Clear direction and priorities
Better alignment with your audience, services, and messaging
Improved understanding between leadership and marketing/communication team members. Some clients have said their team members have experienced greater job satisfaction!
How does a marketing strategy work?
You’ll work with national award-winning journalist, author, and strategist Mackenzie Walters through an intentional process specifically designed for nonprofit organizations. Our process includes the following:
Marketing research and review: We’ll look at your current communications and marketing collateral, as well as your marketing data and analytics. We offer options to include marketing research, including customer surveys and interviews.
Team assessment: Do you have the right people in the right place? We identify your team’s strengths and how to best engage in the iterative and creative process of marketing and communications
Customer journey: How do you move someone from first learning about your organization to wanting to connect, volunteer, or donate to your nonprofit? We’ll assess and make recommendations on how to improve your marketing funnel and your customer (donor) journey.
Marketing personas: Who are you speaking to through your marketing and communications? What are their pain points, their hopes and aspirations, and are you articulating what you do and why in a way they can understand?
Storytelling frameworks: Ever struggle with what to say or in what order? How do you stand out with personal, impactful, and moving communications in the era of AI (when everything sounds the same)? We’ll create storytelling frameworks you and your team can use to build your communications around .
Strategy day: Set a full day aside and bring your team around your strategy with a collaborative, teaching-oriented process. It’s one thing to come up with recommendations, it’s another to create buy-in, excitement, and team alignment.
Our business clients appreciate the data-oriented and research-focused approach we take, but we don’t stop there. It’s critical to remember that when you’re communicating, you’re speaking to people. That’s why we develop marketing personas as part of your marketing strategy: To keep the person you’re communicating with top of mind.
“StoryStruck created a comprehensive marketing plan for our organization that is repeatable and easy to understand for people like me who don’t have a marketing background. It’s transformed how we’re doing marketing.”
What do we get with a marketing strategy?
When you engage in a marketing strategy, you’ll receive specific strategy recommendations and tactical suggestions that you can implement over the next few years.
One of the reasons our marketing strategies are so successful is because we are for your business. We want you to succeed. Our strategy service is not a sales tool to sell other services because we do not offer many of the services we recommend.
When you work with StoryStruck Marketing, you can trust that you’ll receive a strategy that’s in the best interest of your organization. Our deliverables include:
Immediate recommendations: What you can do today to improve your marketing and communications. This is the “low hanging fruit” you can tackle immediately to see results.
Short-term recommendations: What to do to improve during the next 6-12 months. Our recommendations are specific to your organization and do not require ongoing engagement to execute.
Long-term recommendations: What to do in the next 3-5 years to continue to grow your business These long-term steps will help you stay focused on
We often see areas your organization needs to improve in order to reach your next phase of growth. If and when we run across this, we share them — these discoveries are part of the serendipity of taking a holistic, encompassing, and data-driven approach to marketing and communications.
“The suggestions StoryStruck offered based on the research they conducted gave us a lot of things we could implement immediately and also see immediate results from. ”
Can we execute our marketing strategy internally?
That’s the intention! At StoryStruck Marketing, we understand the challenges of growing a business and the uncertainty and risk it entails. That’s why we always:
Work with your budget. When you partner with StoryStruck Marketing, you’re engaging a storytelling strategist who understands the constraints you face. We offer three strategy price points for varying sizes and complexities of organizations.
Offer industry expertise. We work with both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, allowing us to understand what is working in the marketplace, what to invest more of your time and resources into, and what to pull back or even sunset to free up much-needed time and resources.
Encourage internal execution. Many of our clients sing our praises — and feel empowered to implement our recommendations themselves. That’s a good thing! The best “bang for your buck” is a strategy you execute yourselves.
Your role as a nonprofit executive is challenging enough — improving your marketing and communications doesn’t have to be. Invite StoryStruck Marketing to help.
How can I learn more about nonprofit marketing?
At StoryStruck Marketing, we offer a free, complementary consultation to learn about your nonprofit and to discern whether our marketing strategy services will work for you. Book your consultation today!
Let’s talk.