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Marketing strategy built around where you’re headed

You have a goal. Maybe you’re pursuing more ambitious growth, entering a new market, repositioning the business, reaching a different audience, or preparing for a significant investment.

But your current marketing strategy isn’t built for what comes next.

We help you figure out what needs to change, what deserves your attention, and design a marketing strategy that moves your business in the right direction.

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What You Can Expect

Every engagement begins with a focused sprint. The scope is built around your business goal and the questions we need to answer to support it. A typical engagement combines research, analysis, strategy, and planning.

Strategy before tactics: You leave knowing what to focus on, what to do first, and how to spend your time or budget.

Evidence over assumptions: Customer input, business data, market context, competitive research, and the experience of your team all inform the strategy.

Practical recommendations: The plan has to work with your actual budget, people, capabilities, and constraints.

An outside perspective: We’ll ask the questions, challenge the assumptions, and help determine what deserves investment, and what doesn’t.

How We Work

We start with the business goal — not the marketing tactics. First, we understand where your organization is headed, what marketing is doing today, and what may be getting in the way. Then, we use research, data, and outside perspective to pinpoint the strategic choices that matter most.

1. Understand

Build an evidence-based picture of where things stand today. What’s working, what isn’t, and what that means for you.

This may include:

Leadership and stakeholder interviews
Customer, client, donor, or audience research
Marketing and content review
Competitive analysis
Website and sales-material review
Performance, pipeline, CRM, or fundraising data

2. Decide

Turn the evidence into clear strategic choices. This is where a long list of possible marketing activities becomes a shorter list of intentional decisions.

Depending on the organization, that may mean:

Defining priority audiences
Sharpening positioning and differentiation
Strengthening messaging
Identifying the strongest opportunities
Establishing content and channel priorities
Improving sales or fundraising support
Defining meaningful measures of success

3. Plan

Translate the strategy into action. You’ll know what to focus on, what to do first, and how to spend your time or budget.

That typically includes:

Prioritized marketing direction
Focused near-term priorities
Content and campaign strategy
Recommendations for systems, tools, or resources
Guidance for internal teams and outside partners
Clear next steps for execution

4. Move

Once the strategy is clear, we partner with you to move it forward. That work is scoped after the strategy sprint, when we know what your organization truly needs.

That includes:

Guiding execution
Ongoing planning
Sourcing and managing outside partners
Evaluating new opportunities
Reviewing performance
Keeping marketing aligned with the larger business goals.

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Katie’s ability to create messaging that is unique, attention grabbing, and impactful is unmatched, from social media posts, to emails, to blogs, to stories and more.

Katie took the time to really understand our vision and goals, and worked with us to clarify who we are and how we communicate that to the world.

We worked with Katie to plot a path to building brand awareness, and have now executed better branding, clearer positioning and messaging

Ready to Talk about What’s Next?

You don’t need to diagnose the marketing problem before you call us.

In fact, organizations frequently come to us because they know something needs to change but aren’t sure whether the problem is positioning, audience, messaging, content, lead generation, measurement, marketing operations — or some combination of them.

Start by telling us where you want to go. We’ll figure out how marketing can get you there.

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Explore Our Thinking

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from hiring a marketing agency?

Many marketing agencies do their best work when there is an in-house marketing director who can direct the strategy, navigate the key stakeholders, and make key decisions on behalf of the organization. If you do not have that role in place, then the agency will look to you for guidance — which will require your time and expertise in marketing that you may not have. I fill that gap for you — serving as the strategic marketing leader working in your interest. If agency services are needed down the road, I can help source the best partner and provide them with the right guidance that gets the best results for your investment.

Can’t I just hire a good copywriter to write content for our blog and emails?

You can, and that might be enough for you. But most copywriters are not strategists, which means you will need to provide the content plan and editorial direction. Copywriters are hired to write words. If the underlying clarity about who you’re for and what you actually solve isn’t there, better words on top of that won’t fix it.

I’m already working with a [social media, website, SEO, advertising] agency. Does this still make sense?

Often it makes more sense, not less. Agencies execute. They post the content, build the website, run the ads, optimize the SEO. What they don’t typically do is establish the underlying clarity about who you’re for and what you uniquely solve. When that’s missing, even excellent execution underperforms. Most of the agency relationships my clients are already in get sharper after the foundation work, because the agency finally has a strategic direction to execute against.

We worked with a marketing consultant before and the work never made it into anything. Why would this be different?

That’s the most common pattern I see in second-time engagements. The positioning work was technically correct and never made it out of the deck. That is why after we complete the strategy work, I stay engaged as your advisor and fractional CMO to ensure the work is executed consistently and delivers the results you need.

Who actually puts the new messaging into our website, sales deck, and LinkedIn?

You do, with my support. Strategy delivers the foundation. Story delivers the messaging itself: language for the website, language for sales conversations, talking points for your team, content prompts for whoever’s writing. I’ll review the final implementations and flag where the new messaging is getting diluted or quietly rewritten back into old habits. The actual updates live with your team. (For firms that want hands-on implementation help across the website, decks, and content, ongoing partnership covers that.)

How much of my time will this realistically take? I’m already maxed.

Most of the time investment goes into working sessions with me, where the goal is to get the thinking out of your head efficiently. Plan on roughly 1-2 hours per week, sometimes less. The biggest time cost isn’t the meetings. It’s the part you’d be doing anyway: thinking clearly about your organization and vision. The engagement just makes that thinking productive.

My partner/team/board has spent a lot of time on our current messaging. How do I bring this up without it feeling like criticism?

This is one of the harder internal conversations. The reframe that usually helps: the messaging worked. It got you here. The fact that it’s not working anymore isn’t a failure of the messaging or the people who built it. You’re not asking for a redo. You’re asking for what comes next.

Can I fund this using a capacity grant?

I can’t speak on specific grant criteria, but past clients have used capacity-building grant funds to pay for my work and the work of related marketing partners and agencies.