A marketing plan with owners, budgets and dates.

Four things, in one document you can act on. First, evidence: what your market and customers really look like, from interviews and demand data rather than assumption. Second, decisions: which segments you are for and the positioning and messaging that follows. Third, a twelve-month plan with channel roles, budget by quarter, named owners and a stop-doing list. Fourth, a measurement framework and a capability plan, so the strategy is executable by the team you will actually have. It is a project, not a subscription.

An agency plan tends to start from the services the agency sells, which is reasonable but not neutral. A strategy engagement starts from your market and can conclude that the right move is to change the offer, fix retention, or stop two of the channels you are currently paying for. We keep the two apart on purpose: Web Tonic runs SEO, paid search and paid social for clients, but not inside this engagement and not as a condition of it.

Not as part of this. The engagement ends with a handover session and, if you want it, a review at ninety days. Afterwards you can execute in house, with your existing agencies, or with us under a separate agreement that you negotiate with the plan already in your possession. That order matters: it means you are never buying a strategy in order to unlock a retainer, and it is why we can write down that a channel we sell is not worth funding for you. Plenty of clients take the plan and never come back, which is a fine outcome.

No. Marketing strategy consulting is a defined project producing a plan; a fractional CMO is ongoing leadership that owns the plan, runs the team and reports monthly. If your team can execute once someone tells them what matters, buy the project. If the missing piece is judgement in the room every week, buy the leadership. If the constraint is commercial rather than marketing, offer, pricing or the sales process, then growth advisory is the right starting point instead.

A fixed project fee, quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. We do not publish rates because scope drives the number and a figure without scope helps nobody. For context on the envelope it has to fit inside, Gartner puts average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue. In most engagements the stop-doing list frees more money than the project costs, which is the test we would apply if we were buying it. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Roughly a day and a half each across six weeks, concentrated in three sessions: a two-hour kickoff, a half-day working session on segments and positioning, and a two-hour plan review. On top of that we need read access to analytics, the CRM and finance reporting, plus introductions to five to ten customers for interviews. The customer interviews are the part clients try to skip and the part that changes the strategy most, so we push back when they get cut.

Sometimes, and we will say so. If you are pre-product-market-fit or your revenue comes from a handful of relationships, a six-week strategy engagement is probably premature and a short advisory session would serve you better. Where it does pay for small companies is at the point where founder-led selling stops scaling and the next hire or the next budget is about to be committed on instinct. A wrong channel choice costs more than the engagement.

We settle positioning, messaging, proof points and tone, which is the part that has to be true before any creative work makes sense. We do not design the identity or produce the campaign inside this engagement. What your design partner or our own creative team receives afterwards is a brief with a claim, the evidence, the segments and the language customers actually used, which is a considerably better starting point than a mood board and a deadline.

Then we have done part of our job and the working sessions exist for exactly that. We bring options with trade-offs rather than a verdict, and where you have information we do not, you should win the argument. What we will not do is quietly drop a finding because it is unwelcome: if the evidence says the segment the founder loves is unprofitable, that stays in the document with the numbers next to it. You can decide to pursue it anyway, with the cost understood, which is a legitimate strategic choice.

B2B services and professional firms, manufacturing and industrial companies, multi-location and franchise operators, consumer products and ecommerce, healthcare and financial services where the compliance constraints are part of the strategy rather than an afterthought. The method is consistent because the failure modes are: unclear segmentation, undefended positioning, unmeasured acquisition. If your category needs regulatory expertise we do not have, we will tell you before you sign rather than learn on your budget.

For breadth, never for judgement. It helps us read thousands of reviews, support tickets and competitor pages quickly, cluster search demand, and draft faster. Interviews, the positioning decision and the plan are done by the named consultant, because a model will happily produce a confident strategy with no evidence underneath it. The AI question also belongs in your plan: 70% of CMOs call AI leadership a critical goal while only 30% report mature capability, so we cover where AI genuinely helps your marketing and where it is theatre, alongside AI search visibility.

Yes, and it is the normal starting condition. We work from the sources that are trustworthy, usually invoices, CRM records and bank data, flag which numbers cannot currently be relied on, and put the measurement fix into the first phase of the plan. Two things then become possible that were not before: a real cost per acquisition, and a marketing conversation with your finance lead that is not an argument. Our conversion tracking and analytics teams can do that repair as a separate project if you want it done properly.

That is one reason it is written down rather than presented. Average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 is 4.1 years, and consumer-company CMOs average 3.5 years, so the reasoning behind a decision usually leaves with the person who made it. Our document records the evidence, the options considered and why each call was made, which is what lets a new marketing leader adapt the plan instead of restarting from zero. It also makes onboarding a new agency a one-day job rather than a quarter.

The big consulting firms are genuinely good at enterprise transformation and they are priced for it, usually with a partner selling the work and consultants two years out of business school doing it. Our model is the inverse: one senior marketing consultant with operating experience, a six-week engagement, and a plan sized for a business that has to run it with the team it has. We also stay closer to delivery reality than a pure strategy firm, because our own specialists execute digital marketing every day for other clients, so the plan does not recommend things nobody can actually buy or staff. If your problem is a global operating model rather than a growth plan, the large firms are the better call and we will say so.

Yes, at the level of role, budget and sequence rather than campaign settings. For each channel that earns a place, search, paid media, content, email, partnerships, events, we write what job it does for which segment, what it should cost, what good looks like in the first two quarters, and what would make us cut it. Detailed keyword plans, creative testing plans and media buying structures belong to whoever executes, and our SEO, email marketing and marketing automation teams build those separately if you hire them. Keeping the strategy one level above execution is what makes it usable by any competent firm, including your current one.