Did you know that 86% of people say they’d be more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them after they’ve bought? (Wyzowl) For many companies, a signature on the dotted line is the final step. At Rivergate Marketing, signing on with us as a partner is just the beginning. When taking on a new client, we start our partnership with an in-person kickoff meeting where we get to know our client and their team face to face. We have high-level discussions about the next steps and determine our combined strategy for success. 

Overall Goals of Partnership

In order for us to market your business strategically, we have to understand your goals! Are you hoping to hire new talent? Attract business in a new industry sector? Do you have a new product or service you are ready to launch? We need to know! We want to be on the same page so that we can focus our marketing efforts on the areas you want to see improvement.

Strategies or Approach

We don’t operate as a vendor or a third party with our clients; we are an extension of your team. We like to be as fully integrated as possible when it comes to our partnerships. That means we need to know your business from the inside out to develop a custom strategy that’s as unique as your organization to fuel your brand online. We will nail down Buyer Personas, understand the Buyer’s Journey, conduct a SWOT analysis, and do our research to ensure we know who your biggest competitors are, who your customers are, and how people end up finding your services. We use the Inbound methodology to market your business by offering content that meets the potential customer “where they are at” in the buying process, and we discuss your current strategies for gaining business so that we can replicate your successes and build off of them.

In order to best achieve this level of proficiency, we typically cultivate a keyword list, (also very useful for SEO purposes), brainstorm blog topics, define cornerstone content, key industries, partners, and set up a content calendar schedule.

Metrics for Success

Depending on availability, we use a combination of SEO tools, website analytics, social analytics, and other relative metrics to establish a baseline for the start of your program. From there, based on the specific goals and objectives, we establish a mix of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), goals, and/or other tactical ways we can measure our success. We do not set and forget it – we continually reassess our marketing and PR program performance by monitoring the analytics and metrics and collaborating with your team to adjust and make improvements to the strategy.

Roles and Expectation

We know that engineers are busy! At Rivergate Marketing, we believe our role is to do the “heavy lifting” with content creation. Our staff members have either worked as engineers, grown up in an engineering family, or learned the terminology and general technology for this niche market through years of first-hand marketing experience. All this to say, we don’t need anyone to simplify or mince words during customer interviews, writing blogs, or creating technical content. We will set up a weekly or biweekly meeting time to go over content, stay up to date on your most recent projects and keep the lines of communication open.

When it comes to confidentiality, our lips are sealed. Regardless of whether we have signed an NDA, we adhere to a strict confidentiality protocol with all of our clients, meaning that unless you specifically ask us to share something on your behalf, it won’t see the light of day. We know how to get valuable content published without sharing client names, and maintaining anonymity while still highlighting capabilities and letting your work shine.

Information Exchange

We do need some logistical information before we can get started. For example, we will need access to account logins for platforms like Google Analytics, social media accounts, and WordPress to name a few. If we will be assisting with email marketing, we need to be set up with a company email address.

HubSpot

We use a variety of tools to help you market your business, but one of our most useful platforms is called HubSpot. The benefits of HubSpot for our clients is a topic for a whole blog post on its own, but suffice to say that it saves both our clients and us a lot of time by providing a host of scheduling, tracking, and marketing tools in one place. If our clients will be joining us on Hubspot, we will get them set up and familiar with the many tools they will have access to as users.

Next Steps

Before the end of our kick-off meeting, we ensure that all parties are aware of the next steps. We maintain a “Marketing Dashboard” for each of our clients where we keep track of future content ideas, and actionable items, as well as content that has been put on hold or needs to be returned to at a later date.
Our in-depth onboarding process is one of the many ways we welcome clients to our business and set the stage for a productive relationship. We truly enjoy getting to know our new clients and learning the ins and outs of their business. Communication is key at the onset and throughout the partnership, and a great onboarding experience is crucial to start off on the right foot. We feel that when done well, our clients will be confident in our expertise and excited about their future working with Rivergate Marketing.