Strategic marketing for startups and SMBs

Marketing that thinks before acting.

Makeform is a strategic marketing consultancy in Fitzroy for businesses with 10 to 100 staff. We work out where your marketing stands, set the strategy, then run it.

The problem

Most marketing problems are not channel problems.

Businesses usually arrive asking for more leads, a new agency or a different channel. What sits underneath is usually upstream. More spend on that setup makes it louder, not better.

  1. 1No agreed audience
  2. 2Objectives nobody can measure
  3. 3No idea what is working
  4. 4No segmented view of market share

Shape Check™

Where your marketing sits decides what to do next.

Four pillars, five levels each. Scored at the start and again every quarter. The lowest column is where the work starts.

Engage

2 of 5

Lowest score. Next quarter's work starts here.

Earning attention and turning it into enquiries, through creators, the website and the pages campaigns land on.

Example scores for illustration, not a client result. Select a column to see its services.

How an engagement runs

Repeats every quarter

Four stages that repeat, not four stages that finish.

Each stage stands on the one before it. The fourth feeds straight back into the first, every quarter, for as long as the engagement runs.

  1. 1

    Diagnosis

    Customer interviews, an audit of what you run now, and a Shape Check score. No recommendation before this is done.

  2. 2

    Strategy

    Audiences, objectives and the role of each channel, each tied to a business outcome you already report on.

  3. 3

    Tactics

    The plan, executed. Every activity maps to an objective. The channel is a conclusion, not a starting point.

4

The loop back

Learning

This is not a wrap up. It runs every quarter, and every quarter it becomes the next Diagnosis.

Tracking and CRMSet up so results can be traced to what produced them.
A new Shape Check™ scoreThe four pillars scored again, against the baseline.
A reset planNext quarter's work follows the new scores, not last quarter's habits.

You should know where your marketing stands before you spend more on it.

A 30 minute call. You describe what is happening, we tell you what we would look at first.

Book a strategy call