Introduction

Every company needs a process in order to grow. In fact, a business is no more than a legal entity composed of processes to profitably provide a product or service. That’s why we emphasize our process—you need a system for marketing your business.

Start with the story. Build the system. Then send that story into the world.

Each element of your story, brand, tech stack, content, and more becomes a component in a larger, comprehensive process for your entire marketing operation, which allows you to market better and faster. That’s why we built the Story+System+Send℠ process: to beautifully present your brand to the world as efficiently as possible.

The process below is our strategy. In other words, instead of creating a custom playbook for each client depending on a wide variety of variables, we argue that every business needs a foundational system and process for any of its marketing efforts to be effective. To be clear, we listen to your needs and challenges and adapt our process accordingly. But once the system and process are working like a machine, which can take a few months or even a year, only then will other marketing operations—like paid media and advertising, PR, and lead generation—become necessary.

Here’s what each step in our process looks like.

Story

The first step is to create a clear, compelling story to present yourself to the market. Without this, no marketing will ever be effective no matter how much money you pour into it. We start with research, then build a message, and then craft a visual identity to communicate that message.

Research

Marketing audit: We want to help you get a sense of how your organization meets some of the basic criteria of modern content marketing. Our marketing audit offers insights including a path forward to optimize your marketing system. Once you hit submit, you’ll get a report analyzing time, scope, and budget to get your marketing system to its full potential.

Market monitoring: Market monitoring is a weekly report that curates industry news, events, publications, and articles from across the web to help you stay relevant in your marketing and media channels. These insights can inform your podcast topics, blogs, newsletters, and broader content marketing strategy.

#tools: As a senior, multidisciplinary team constantly scouring the web for new tech, news, and insights, we stay up to date on the latest research and software so you don’t have to. We collate our thinking as a team in our Slack channels, which often finds its way into new processes, tools, and marketing tactics for your business.

Apps: Slack, OpenAI, Perplexity

Message

We’ll interview the leading representative of your brand—perhaps the founder or owner or head of marketing—for about an hour to gather information related to five core questions:

1. Who is your ideal audience?

2. What market are you in?

3. Why would they buy?

4. Where are you competing?

5. What makes you different?

We’ll also better understand your brand by reviewing any of your existing websites, brand messaging guides, and style guides or other resources to fully “import” your brand.

Then we’ll draft a comprehensive messaging guide containing everything you need to message clearly, where we’ll work together to finalize a version for you and your team to make your mark in your market.

Apps: Figma Slides, Google Slides, Google Docs

Visual brand

Once we’ve defined your brand messaging, we will extract any visual terminology or ideas and shape it into a visual brand identity. We’ll work together to finalize these visual assets, in addition to any supporting gradients, meshes, or textures.

1. Logo. In building your logo, we will include a light and dark mode, as well as any horizontal, vertical, and emblem style variants.

2. Color. Our standard brand has 1 to 2 main colors with 1 to 2 accent colors. More colors can be accommodated by request.

3. Type. We typically do one font for display headings and another font for paragraph typography. We prefer using Google Fonts for the ubiquitous usage across the internet.

Apps: Figma

System

After we collaborate on a clear, compelling story, we’ll work toward systematizing that story visually through a design system, operationally through a website and marketing tech (martech) stack, and then quantitatively through an analytics dashboard with regular reporting.

Design system

Market smarter, not harder. We take that to heart by creating rigorous processes and thinking through the underlying variables for everything we make. This includes design templates, project management workflows, and tech stacks. By thinking in systems, your dollars can go farther, faster.

Apps: Figma

Website, martech system

The most important system in your marketing operation is your website. It’s the wellspring from which your brand lives and moves and has its being. With a modern website built on tools like Framer or Webflow, you can build a comprehensive system that forms the backbone of your marketing automation, lead capture, and content management.

We then connect the website to other tools like analytics dashboards, a podcast studio, a social media management platform, email software, no-code apps, and more. Modern platforms like these improve scalability and ease of use with design system variables and CMS collections to produce lots of content quickly.

Now that we’ve created a design system and integrated that with a marketing system, including publishing workflows and technical implementation, we can send that beautiful story to market.

Apps:

• Unsplash: Free, high-quality stock photos contributed by a global community of photographers. unsplash.com

• Figma: Collaborative web-based design tool for UI/UX, prototyping, and team brainstorming (includes FigJam whiteboard). figma.com

• Instagram: Social media platform for sharing photos, videos, and stories with a global audience. instagram.com

• LinkedIn: Professional networking platform for connecting with colleagues, job searching, and industry news. linkedin.com

• YouTube: The world’s largest video-sharing platform, hosting content from creators worldwide. youtube.com

• Spotify: Music and podcast streaming service offering millions of tracks and personalized playlists. spotify.com

• Loom: Video messaging tool for recording quick videos of your screen and camera for asynchronous communication. loom.com

• Linear: Project and issue tracking tool for software teams, focused on speed and streamlined workflows. linear.app

• Framer: Interactive design and prototyping platform for building high-fidelity websites and UI/UX prototypes. framer.com

• Webflow: Visual website builder and CMS for designing, building, and launching responsive websites without coding. webflow.com

• Google: Leading search engine and technology company offering a suite of online products and services. google.com

• Loops: Email for modern software companies. loops.so

• Transistor: Podcast syndication to get your podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and many more. transistor.fm

• Assembly: A powerful end-to-end platform to draft, plan, and schedule social media content. meetassembly.com

• Riverside: An online studio to record in high quality, edit in a flash, and go live. riverside.fm

• Descript: Audio and video editing tool with AI-powered transcription and collaborative editing features. descript.com

• OpenAI: AI research and deployment company, known for developing advanced AI models like GPT. openai.com

• Perplexity: An AI search platform and API for surfacing the world’s information. perplexity.ai

• AgencyAnalytics: All marketing data under one roof to create customizable dashboards and automated reports. agencyanalytics.com

Analytics

Partners receive an analytics dashboard with monthly reporting that integrates data from multiple sources to help you understand your marketing performance across all channels, measure KPIs, and learn how your audience interacts with your content.

Apps: AgencyAnalytics

Send

Finally, after we’ve created a story and a system to support marketing content, we can build the actual assets that will make their way across all your marketing channels, starting with a podcast.

Podcast

The core of the content marketing engine is a podcast.

Why a podcast? Because you’re the expert. And because a podcast is simply the best way to leverage AI. Talking about your business for a few minutes a week is way easier than building content from scratch, so let AI do the heavy lifting for you. In just 30 minutes, you can get many assets built on your own authentic voice and brand. We call this workflow Voice to Market℠.

1. 1 full episode in HD audio to syndicate on all your favorite podcast platforms

2. 1 full episode in HD video for YouTube and other video platforms

3. 1 blog based on the conversation

4. 1 newsletter to promote the episode or snippets from the conversation

5. 1 set of show notes for use on websites, podcast platforms, and more

6. 1 transcript to build other derivative assets

7. Social content and video clips for LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and all the others

Need a host? No problem. We can co-host your podcast for a natural conversation.

Don’t want to publish it? Some clients use our workflow to interview executives for their brand’s internal documentation, sales sheets, training, and more.

From this workflow, we can publish virtually anything—on brand, every time.

Apps: Riverside, Descript, Figma, Transistor, YouTube

Content

Beyond a podcast, great content marketing also includes other important media like email sequences, pitch decks, and promo videos. It also requires impactful print media assets like sales collateral, business cards and stationery, trade show and event material, annual reports, and more.

Apps: Unsplash, Lummi, Figma, Framer, Webflow, Google Slides, Google Docs, Word, PowerPoint

Publishing

Making content is one thing, but publishing it painlessly is quite another. The number of assets, variations, channels, authors, reviewers, and so on can make it challenging to keep the flow of content moving quickly. We take out the stress by keep track of all the feedback, comments, revisions, and tools required to go from concept to published content in no time.

Apps: Assembly (social media logos), Loops, Framer, Webflow, YouTube

Finally, your entire marketing operation has a system and process to help your business grow.

Interested? Let's talk.

If you're ready for a robust marketing philosophy, opinionated marketing strategy, and vetted marketing stack to grow your business, we might be a good fit. A great place to start is our free marketing audit to get the conversation going. You'll get a full report assessing your marketing as well as time, scope, and budget estimates so you can make the best choice.

As always, we're grateful to serve.