about › How we work
Hard. Smart. Effectively.
Work with VisionPoint Marketing (and we hope that you do) and you’ll notice three areas in which we work very, very differently from other marketing agencies:
A structure built around clients
Our mantra: content is king.
Many of VisionPoint’s clients have relatively modest marketing budgets. But we’ve developed a way to make those budgets work harder, go farther and achieve the kind of marketing objectives that are usually funded with the really big bucks.
What we do is take the client’s story far beyond the normal self-congratulatory claims or hollow statements of superiority. Instead, we work to develop content that is truly valuable to members of the target audience – like educational information, or an analysis of recent trends in their industry. Once the content is judged to be both meaningful and desirable, we leverage it in multiple media executions.
An example will help clarify.
Let’s say we work with the client to develop a white paper on a subject that’s important and topical in that client’s industry. We may then take that white paper, modify it as appropriate and use it as:
- the primary content for a media pitch to a targeted editor
- motivation for target prospects to grant permission to email them (“get your free white paper by …”)
- the basis of a webinar
- a press release
- the topic for a keynote speaking pitch at a trade conference
- website content available in exchange for registration
- a landing page for a pay per click search marketing campaign
- a website section to drive leads via search engine optimization
- a giveaway at a booth at a tradeshow
- an article in the company newsletter
- information to be archived on the website to further establish the client as an expert and thought leader
Each medium is tested and tracked so that we can adjust the message to keep making it better and stronger.
The proof is in the numbers.
Ask most traditional marketing communications agencies about the results achieved for some of their campaigns or projects and you hear phrases like, “the marketing manager got all sorts of compliments,” or “the salesforce just loved it,” or even, “we won a bunch of awards for it.”
That’s not what you hear at VisionPoint.
Instead, we create and deliver to you an ROI report every month that details each program’s results in cold, hard numbers (the only kind that count), including progress made against specific marketing objectives and leads generated. You also get an executive summary and our best recommendations. We review these with you and work with you to establish action plans based upon the ROI report data and recommendations.
The reason we do all of this is simple. Marketing is an iterative process. Things that work should be retained, things that can be improved should be refined, and things that don’t work should be unceremoniously dumped.
And everything that generates results in one medium should be deployed in your website, in your marketing collateral, in your daily email communications, via the search engines, at trade shows and in your PR and media relations initiatives.
A structure built around clients.
At VisionPoint, we use a multidiscipline team approach in which different people lend different skills to different projects.
At the center of this structure are account managers dedicated to specific clients.
Our account managers are the client’s advocate within the agency, responsible for ensuring that our team completely understands a client’s needs, goals, opportunities and challenges and is doing its very best work toward those ends.
They are experienced project managers. They oversee all deliverables and create a Microsoft Project plan to establish interim deadlines and milestones and track and report the status of each deliverable. In addition, based on the scope of the work and the timing,
they facilitate weekly, monthly or quarterly review meetings to make sure clients are well versed in the status of each project.
They are mature marketing experts, consulting with clients, providing sound advice and recommendations for new approaches or new ways to take advantage of changing market conditions.
And finally, they are communications stewards. If a separate firm is handling their public relations or media relations, our clients often include their VisionPoint account manager in meetings to ensure that the message is kept consistent and the brand image intact.
