A Case Study Highlighting The Importance Of Marketing Strategy

A Case Study Highlighting The Importance Of Marketing Strategy

Sun Tzu said strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. You must have both, but strategy must come before tactics. And today I want to share a client case study that shows the benefits of focusing on marketing strategy first.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate growth and marketing shouldn't be difficult. Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. I am excited to dig into this with you.

Just here's the reality. Okay, most people do not like strategy, whether it's marketing strategy or any other strategy in your business. Most people do not care for strategy. They feel like when they're jumping into strategy, they're just wasting time that they could be taking action on something else. Here's the reality with strategy. You are taking a pause, taking time to lay the foundation so that you can go much faster, accelerate the speed to reach your goals later. You will get where you want to go much faster if you take the time to do strategy rather than just jumping into action. Just trust me. Please take my word for it. If you don't and you just jump right into tactics, you are going to go six months, nine months, 12 months or more down the road and you're going to hit a wall where you're like, This isn't working. I'll tell you right now why it's not working. It's not working because you freaking skipped strategy. Just don't do it. But listen to me or not, totally up to you.

Let's jump into this. I'm going to run through four aspects of this case study. One, just the general overview, the challenge they were having, the solution, and the results that they experienced.

Overview

Okay, so first off, just a quick overview. This is a client that we are still currently working with, maybe the company is called Early Learning Ventures. Early Learning Ventures was established in 2009 by the David and Laura Mirage Foundation to help children develop strong learning foundations through universal access to high-quality, early childhood education. So ELV early on recognized that most child care providers, they're small, independent businesses, they're passionate about being able to help children, but they needed more resources. And that's why ELV was formed. They really want to support the early childhood education market. And they offer child care providers nationwide much needed back-office support through their licensed and compliant online child care management system, Alliance Core. That is their main offering. They do a ton of other stuff to support child care providers in other ways, but their main offering is Alliance Core, which is their child care management software. When we started working with them, they were only working with providers in Colorado. They have since expanded and are working with providers in 14 states and growing. It is great to see. But when they initially approached us, they had a challenge.

The Challenge

I just gave you a brief overview of ELV. The challenge that they were having in early 2019, they approached us with the problem. They knew that there were more opportunities to grow the organization, but they needed to determine the next steps. They were not sure what their next steps were. They had some common unanswered questions. Where should we start? What marketing channels make the most sense for our business and our organization? How can we maximize our return on investment? These are common questions that come up. They are hurdles that people need to get through if they want to get where they want to go. They wanted to avoid a lot of the common mistakes that people make so that they could reach their revenue goals faster.

The Solution

So what was the solution? So in order to dig into the solution, I'm going to share my screen for those that are watching. If you are just listening, not a problem. I'll explain it. But if you want to go to our website, rialtomarketing.com, down at the bottom of the homepage, you'll see our revenue acceleration process. It's a five-step process. So when ELV approached us, we walked them through this entire process.

The first step in the process is the start line. At the start line, we need to identify where you're starting from. You cannot figure out how to get where you want to go until you know where you're starting from. It's like your GPS. Your GPS cannot tell you how to get to the airport until you tell where you're starting from because the directions are totally different if you're trying to get to and you're starting in Highlands Ranch or Colorado Springs. In this initial step, we are doing a deep dive assessment to get an idea of where you are and unlock the growth and profit opportunities that you have. That is the first step that we took them through.

Then we moved on to step two. We call this jump start. But to accelerate revenue growth, your marketing needs fuel. Needs fuel for the vehicles that you're going to use. So we need to focus on the fundamentals that fuel all your growth vehicles. What we did here was we took the time to really identify and understand who their ideal clients were. Early learning ventures had a good idea of who their ideal providers were, but we just wanted to dig a little bit deeper and confirm that their thoughts, their assumptions were as accurate as possible. Sometimes they are, a lot of times they're not. And so we can really hone in and make sure that you're super focused on who those ideal clients are.

And then from there, we want to dig in and create your marketing message. What message is going to engage and attract those, in the ELV's case, the ideal childcare providers that they wanted to work with? That's what we're doing in step two, in this jump-start phase, and that's exactly what we did with early learning ventures. We wanted to make sure that they understood who their ideal clients were and that they had a clear and engaging marketing message to attract that ideal client type.

Then in step three, we moved into creating a roadmap. What was that roadmap? We created... Once we've got a baseline, we got the fuel, then we can actually create a roadmap that outlines the marketing vehicles you're going to use. There is no one size fits all marketing plan. If somebody's giving you off the shelf marketing plan, probably not going to be the best fit for you. So we wanted to create a customized plan that was going to work well for ELV. So we outlined the marketing vehicles that made the most sense for their business based on their particular situation. And we outlined the initial priority... So as part of this roadmap, the outcome was that we had outlined that their initial priorities were a website redesign. They needed to focus on content marketing, and we were going to take advantage of Google Ads. Okay. So because Early Learning Ventures is a nonprofit, they were actually able to take advantage of the Google Grants program. The Google Grants Program enables them to access $10,000 a month in Google ad spend at no cost to them. So huge benefit for them that they were not taking advantage of prior to working with us. And so we wanted to make sure we could take advantage of that Google Grants Program. But one of the things that needs to happen to really fuel that ad spend through Google Grants is content. So that's why content marketing was in there. And initially, we were doing a couple of blog posts a month along with the Google Grants. So we did that.

Then we moved into step four, which is momentum, right? You have to take action if you want to experience consistent predictable results. So we made sure that we were taking action. We continued to work with ELV by providing ongoing marketing support and guidance so that they could move forward confidently with their marketing and make sure that the great plans go to die at implementation and execution. So you can have a great plan, but if you fail to implement and execute, you might as well not take the time. Okay? So that's what we were doing in step four, momentum.

And then step five, supercharge. This is where you're building momentum and we just want to supercharge those efforts. So with solid implementation and execution over time, the results started to supercharge. They started to build and compound upon themselves. Remember, marketing is a flywheel. You got to feed it, feed it, feed it, and it takes time to build momentum. But as it gains momentum, as long as you keep feeding it, then things start to really catch on and supercharge. And that's what happened. In the supercharge phase, your ROI continues to increase, and you and you want to be able to consistently increase top line revenue, and that is what happened with ELV.

Let's dig into... I've covered the overview, the challenge they were having. I walked through the solution and the process that we walked them through to get to that solution.

The Result

Now let's look at the results. Their average year-over-year revenue growth in 2020 through 2022 was 38 % a year. Average year-over-year provider increase created the number of new clients that they started working with from 2020 to 2022, 35% a year. Their average return on marketing spend over that period of time was 5X. They put in a dollar, they got five back. Okay? This is not stratosphereic. It's not like they've grown 100 % every year, but dang, 38 % year-over-year revenue growth, 35 % year-over-year client growth, 5X return on marketing spend, many businesses would kill to be in that position. It is an enviable position to be in. And because they took the time to go through strategy first, they were able to experience those results. That's just a quick, fine case study of why it's so important to focus on marketing strategy first.

Conclusion

I hope you found it helpful. If you have, you've got additional questions, please reach out to us over at rialtomarketing.com. It's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com. The other free tool we've got for you, which is super helpful, is over RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com. One of the things that we do in our process, our big focus is removing your revenue roadblocks. That's what we did as we took ELV through our revenue acceleration process. We slowly removed the revenue roadblocks that were in their way. When the roadblocks disappear, you can accelerate growth and get where you want to go faster. So if you want to find out which of the nine revenue roadblocks is slowing down your growth, go check out RevenueRoadblockScorecard. com. It takes less than five minutes to get your customized report. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you found this helpful. Until next time, take care.